Archive for the 'Stats' Category

This is the first of ten features we are adding for our 10th anniversary.

A month or so ago, I changed the underlying database for the statistics on the site. The site now relies on Pete Palmer's database for full season stats and team totals. Pete is a giant in the sabermetric community and was recently honored by inclusion in the inaugural class of SABR's Chadwick Award. His work is the basis for Total Baseball and the ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia. I am certain that his numbers are the most accurate representation of baseball history.

The site also is now updated with the Biographical and Minor League dataset from SABR much more regularly. On a weekly basis, the latest version of the SABR Biographical Committee's work (so our necrology data will be updated much more regularly), and SABR Minor League Committee's DB are incorporated into the site. You can follow the improvements to the minor league database on SABR's website. I generally incorporate these changes 3-6 days after the notes are posted there.

I'll soon be adding a split that shows how pitchers do when their teams score 0-2, 3-5, or 6+ runs in a game.

Here is a little taste.

This is almost the perfect example of Simpson's Paradox. Blyleven was (very nearly) had the better winning percentage in each category of run support, but has the worse overall winning percentage due to the weighting of the various categories.

Rich Lederer feel free to use this.

I've been working on getting the latest and greatest data from RetroSheet onto the site and will be making a few additions to the affected pages as well, which I'll go into more later when they launch.

Building all of this stuff is a five day process where our server runs continuously for five days building the 120,000 box scores, the 9m rows of play-by-play, the 5m rows of gamelogs, and 10m rows of splits. So adding a little thing here and there just isn't worth it. I've got about two windows a year to get things added and this is one of them. So if you want to suggest a split, gamelog, or boxscore feature, now would be a good time to do so.

One idea I've had since we'll be adding a lot of data from 1920-1939 (no pbp, just boxes) is to add a split for vs. RHstarter and vs. LHstarter. We won't know Lou Gehrig's exact splits, but we'll know what he did when a lefty started the game and when a righty started the game.

Others you would like to see?

Note: We also had a twitter outage after our blog update, but things are back up and running now.

Pete Palmer is the godfather of baseball statistics. His old Total Baseball database (via the Baseball Archive) long formed the backbone of our site. We are now very honored to have his latest and greatest database on the site. The Batting, Pitching and Fielding stats now follow Palmer's data. The changes are subtle (a strikeout or two here, some RBI's there), but we believe the Palmer/Gillette database represents the most accurate view of baseball's history which we are always striving to present.

The site's birth and death data which was woefully (and embarassingly) out of date has now been synced (and will continue to be) with the SABR Biographical Committee Database which is the gold standard for biographical information for ballplayers. In addition, we have now added information on the player's burial following their death. This can be found on the player pages and in the bio directory.

One last update, we've added a number of tweaks and improvements to the minor league data as well. We now show appearances on Baseball America's top 100 list on player and affiliate pages.

With an update this massive it is very hard to check every possible contingency, so please let us know if you come across something that doesn't quite add up.

These are the first in a long line of changes and improvements coming down the pike. As always, thank you for supporting the site.

One of the projects that I've wanted to do since I started to work with the PI was to break down every starting pitcher's line and see how often pitchers with various innings pitched and runs allowed stats won their starts. The recent addition of the CSV option in the PI results has made it particularly easy to grab the information and import it into a spreadsheet. Therefore, the time has come to address the issue. I am going to present the info for the 2009 season and if there is enough interest (please let me know in the comments), future posts will contain information for a larger sampling of years. To do this, I simply used the PI pitching game finder and searched for all starts sorted by IP and (when I reached the results limit) just kept changing the IP requirements until I had a copy of all 4860 starts from 2009. Here is the information in couple of tables:

Read the rest of this entry »

I ran the numbers through our park factor calculator today. Basically, the new parks come out as neutral. Citi get a 98/99 (batting/pitching) park factor and New Yankee gets a (98/97) park factor. Hyperventilation aside they are both very slight pitcher's parks. Whenever possible we use 3-year park factor which are an average of year N-1 and year N+1. When only two years are available we use year N-1 and year N and in the case of New Yankee and Citi we just use the current year. I also only use intra-league games since there is a home and home with every team in the league. Interestingly, if we include the inter-league games in our totals, we have only a percentage point change here or there.

I think we need to seriously rethink park factors and I've done a little bit of that, but don't have anything ready to use.

For now, I'm not going to tweak the park factors in the db. You should assume that Yankees and Mets hitters are slightly better than shown and the pitchers slightly worse, since I've been using 100/100 for the two parks.

Here are the 2009 3-year park factors if the season ended last night.

team_ID BPF_tot PPF_tot
ARI     109.000 109.000
COL     109.000 109.000
CHC     108.000 106.000
BOS     106.000 104.000
SFG     104.000 104.000
TEX     104.000 104.000
DET     103.000 104.000
PHI     103.000 101.000
CHW     103.000 103.000
CIN     102.000 103.000
TBR     102.000 102.000
LAA     101.000 100.000
FLA     101.000 101.000
BAL     99.000  101.000
HOU     99.000  99.000
MIN     99.000  98.000
ATL     99.000  99.000
STL     98.000  97.000
TOR     98.000  98.000
OAK     98.000  98.000
NYY     98.000  97.000
KCR     98.000  99.000
WSN     98.000  99.000
NYM     98.000  99.000
MIL     97.000  97.000
SEA     96.000  97.000
LAD     96.000  94.000
PIT     96.000  97.000
CLE     94.000  95.000
SDP     88.000  89.000

1970 Minor League Batting Leaders - Baseball-Reference.com

Got a little bit of time today to add league pitching leaders and yearly leaders (across all levels). To get to a year, go to the front page of the minors select a year and then select the leaders. To get a league leader, go to the league page and then select the leaders. Here is a pitching leaderboard.

A couple things are still missing.
1) Leaderboards by level (A, AA, etc.)
2) Speed, this is really slow, so I may have to cache results or something

BTW, a 20-year old SS in AAA with a .340/.389/.522 line?! We'd be going crazy over that now.

Longest Streak to start career with multi-hit games - Baseball-Reference PI

Ian Desmond has gotten off to a fine start for his career with three multi-hit games, but he'll need to be better to be the best of recent memory.

To generate this list I used the batting streak finder. I made the decision to only consider games with 2 or more AB's. This causes us to include Oliva's streak. In 1962 and 1963 he pinch hit a bunch of games, but actually had only one multi-AB game in that stretch. He then started 1964 with five multi-hit games. Salazar pinch ran in his debut and then rattled off his streak. The caveat that this is only for the retrosheet-era 1954 on applies. If you want to push the retrosheet era back earlier, volunteer here.

                   StreakStart  Streak End Games    AB    R    H   2B  3B  HR  RBI  SO   BB   SB   CS   BA   OBP   SLG   OPS  Teams
+-----------------+-----------+-----------+-----+---------
 Tony Oliva         1962-09-14  1964-04-19     6     27    6   13   3   2   1    9    3    3    0   1  .481  .533  .852 1.385 MIN

 Luis Salazar       1980-08-17  1980-08-21     5     19    3   11   0   1   0    3    4    1    0   0  .579  .600  .684 1.284 SDP 

 Josh Anderson      2007-09-14  2007-09-17     4     18    3   11   2   0   0    5    2    1    0   0  .611  .650  .722 1.372 HOU 
 Willy Taveras      2005-04-05  2005-04-09     4     15    3    9   1   0   0    1    2    1    1   0  .600  .625  .667 1.292 HOU
 Morgan Burkhart    2000-06-27  2000-06-30     4     15    3    8   1   0   0    4    1    4    0   0  .533  .632  .600 1.232 BOS
 Pete Coachman      1990-08-18  1990-08-21     4     18    1    8   1   0   0    4    4    1    0   0  .444  .474  .500  .974 CAL
 Doug Dascenzo      1988-09-02  1988-09-05     4     19    3   10   3   0   0    4    0    1    0   0  .526  .550  .684 1.234 CHC 
 Nyls Nyman         1974-09-10  1974-09-13     4     14    5    9   2   1   0    4    1    0    1   0  .643  .667  .929 1.596 CHW 
 Ken Griffey        1973-08-25  1973-08-29     4     17    3    9   2   0   0    0    1    0    1   0  .529  .529  .647 1.176 CIN   
 Rich Coggins       1972-08-29  1972-09-05     4     16    2    9   3   0   0    0    4    0    0   0  .563  .563  .750 1.313 BAL
 Tommy Helms        1965-09-01  1965-09-04     4     16    2    9   2   1   0    2    2    2    1   0  .563  .611  .813 1.424 CIN 
 Gene Baker         1954-04-13  1954-04-18     4     17    7    9   3   0   2    7    0    3    0   0  .529  .600 1.059 1.659 CHC 

 Ian Desmond        2009-09-10  2009-09-13     3     13    2    8   3   0   1    4    2    1    0   0  .615  .643 1.077 1.720 WSN 
plus many more with three

Keeping Score - Numbers Indicate Rodriguez Didn’t’ Tip Pitches With Rangers - NYTimes.com

We did a little work for Dan Rosenheck who wanted to look into the pitch tipping allegations around A-Rod. I looked at it as per his requests and sent him what I found. I've seen many comments that said something to the effect that this doesn't prove anything as the nefarious behavior may have taken place with only one or two other players and therefore it wouldn't show up in the overall numbers.

So that said, here are the 30 at bats I've found where the score differential was six or higher, 6th inning or later, and A-Rod had either an extra-base hit or a line drive. I'm offering these without comment.

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Change in Baseball Attendance 2008 to 2009 - Baseball-Reference.com

I've gotten a lot of requests for this type of data, so I've decided to make it available to all.