Archive for the 'Tutorials' Category

Among the wealth of information we have here at Baseball-Reference, some of the coolest can be found at our splits pages -- in fact, there's so much data to be had that I get the feeling many users don't even know the extent of what they can find. So over the next week or so, I'm going to be taking you through a guided tour of the splits pages to show you exactly how many awesome factoids there are to be uncovered there.

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Ever wanted to make a statistical point on a blog, to a friend via e-mail, on twitter or in an internet forum? The data you need appears on this site, but we've got twenty columns of additional data and then you would have to cut and paste, delete what you don't need and then maybe add some html or bbcode to get it to look just right? So only the really crazy statheads even bother. We've now made that process much, much (maybe one more much) easier.

Stats tables on Baseball-Reference.com now have the option to modify and easily share nearly all of the data found on the site. Clicking on the SHARE tooltip found above most stat tables (see image), now calls up a dialog box that allows you to delete columns and/or rows and then get the stat table to cut and paste in any of eight useful formats.

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Babe Ruth, Share Demo

One of the underlying principles for the site has been to make it easy to share data. We've done that by supporting the baseball-databank.org and retrosheet and we've done that by providing options like CSV and PRE above each of the tables on the site.

These options are helpful to power users who understand excel and don't mind taking a little time to learn new things, but for users who just want a quick and dirty table, it has always been a little too
hard to copy and paste what's on the site. We've solved that problem and dramatically increased the ways and means you can share data on the site.

The sharing feature appears only on Babe Ruth's pages (main, batting, fielding, pitching) right now, but after we are confident all of the bugs are worked out it will appear on every page and above every table on the site (sadly I have to rewrite much of the play index to get this to work there) and on our other sites as well.

Here is how you do it.

• Find the data you want to share. For now just on the Babe's Page
• Click on the SHARE link just above the stats next to the header (javascript required).
• 
• A sharing toolbox appears and buttons to delete columns and rows appear allowing you to pare the data down to just want you want.
• Please note that any sorting should occur before you delete rows or columns.
• Next select the output option from html, to iframes, to pre-formatted (good for most internet forums) and more. We've created a Demo Page for all of the options
• If we don't have the format you want, let us know.

Please give this a try and use it to post something at your favorite websites or a website you write for. You will be free to use this data anywhere, we would just ask that you include the citation at the bottom of the table as a courtesy to us for providing this service.

Also, once we are confident all of the bugs are worked out, we will release this site-wide, so give us all of the feedback you can.

Sometimes it can be easy to miss some of the coolest features on our site because there's just so much information assaulting your senses (in a good way, that is). One of the best tools on the site, in my opinion, is one of the most underrated for this very reason.

I'm talking, of course, about the team batting order and lineup pages that you can access from each team's main page under the "Other [+]" tab. I'm sure more than a few of you have seen these pages and are acutely aware of them, but a surprising number of users don't know they exist. Personally, I love them because they can represent in a very visual way how a team's personnel tendencies have changed as the year goes by. For instance, at the beginning of the year, the Red Sox were batting David Ortiz third; then, as Ortiz's play became more and more excruciating to watch, the team put Kevin Youkilis in the 3-spot and slotted Big Papi either 5th or 6th. Now they're batting newcomer Victor Martinez 3rd most often and having Youk bat cleanup.

I like being able to see these kinds of patterns in teams, especially as the season goes on, because in concert with the team's schedule page, it lets you get a feel for why a team's record had certain ebbs and flows. The same goes for the lineup pages, which shows who's injured or who has fallen out of favor with the manager. All of these aspects of the pages can be valuable tools when researching a team for an upcoming regular-season matchup, and especially for the playoffs or at the beginning of a new season.

Have you ever played the old "6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon" game? If not, the basic premise is that any actor can be linked through his or her film roles to Kevin Bacon within six steps -- it's sort of an exercise in social network analysis for the acting community, with Bacon at the center. And why Bacon? Well, he's somewhat unique in that he takes on starring roles in some movies and small parts in a variety of other films, giving him many chances to connect with wide range of fellow actors. Hence, he's become the "center of the network", the link that connects every other part in the fewest number of steps.

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