Sports Reference Blog

Archive for March, 2015

Get a Free Baseball-Reference Play Index Trial Through April 15

27th March 2015

We're offering free access to the Baseball-Reference Play Index through April 15. Just sign up here and use this coupon code: Analytics

The Play Index is the most thorough and powerful publicly available baseball research tool. Subscriptions are normally $36/year. Below is a sampling of some of the search tools:

The Batting or Pitching Season Finder. This tool allows you to search full-season or multi-year totals to find your own custom leaderboards. You can look at the entire history of baseball from 1871-2014 with every year, team, and position available, or you can filter the results in a vast number of ways: by specific years, by age, by first six seasons or last ten seasons, by American League only, by Cubs only, by switch-hitters, by catchers, by outfielder or infielder, by year of debut, but active or retired, by Hall of Famer, by height and weight, by living or deceased, or by a range of common statistical categories. Then you can sort the results by any common statistic, by the teams with the most players matching that category, by players with the most seasons matching that category, or by most recent, youngest, oldest, final year, or year of debut, and others.

The Batting or Pitching Game Finder. This tool allows you to search player game totals (think 4 for 5 with 3 RBI, or 10-SO shutouts) filtering on any of a dozen or more choices. This can be done either on a single player level or on any batter from nearly one hundred years or on any pitcher. The same can be done for Team Batting or Team Pitching Totals.

The Batting or Pitching Split Finder. This tool allows you to search player splits (think most road home runs, biggest lefty/righty splits or most hits in Yankee Stadium) filtering on any of a dozen or more choices. This can be done either on a single player level or on any batter from nearly 100 years or on any pitcher. The same can be done for Team Batting or Team Pitching Splits.

The Batting or Pitching Streak Finder. This tool allows you to search player games looking for the most consecutive games matching a particular set of criteria. This can be done either on a single player level or on any batter from nearly sixty years or on any pitcher. The same can be done for Team Batting or Team Pitching Streaks. Note that when searching for batters, you should limit your searches to 20-25 years when searching through all games.

The Batting or Pitching Event Finder. This tool is player specific and will out put a detailed summary and play-by-play list of all events of a specific type from a single year or an entire career. For example, you can see all of Harmon Killebrew's triples or even his outs to the second baseman.

The Batter vs. Pitcher Tool. This tool presents a complete sortable list of batter or pitcher with totals for every opponent they faced by career or by year. Clicking on the player's name will lead you to a detailed output of their head-to-head plate appearances.

Posted in Announcement, Baseball-Reference.com, expire21d, Features, Play Index | 19 Comments »

MLB Games are Lower Scoring and Longer Than Ever

25th March 2015

It's been reported in numerous locations, and now we've added an additional page to our League Encyclopedias that confirms it: games have reached scoring lows not seen regularly since the 1960's (8.13 R/G) and are longer, on average, than they have ever been (3 hours and 7 minutes per game in 2014). Additionally, 9-inning games were over three hours long, on average, for the first time in MLB history last year (3 hours and 2 minutes).

This new page also includes historical averages for extra-innings games, pitches/PA, pitchers/game and season, batters/game and season, pinch runners/game, and pinch hitters/game.

To find these pages, click on the menu Seasons > All Seasons, then click on Misc on the right side of the page for any of the leagues.

Screenshot 2015-03-25 11.54.01

 

Posted in Announcement, Baseball-Reference.com, Features | 2 Comments »

Comparison Tool Shortcut Added to Player Pages

25th March 2015

Regular visitors to the site have likely noticed a small tweak we recently made to the layout of player pages. The change is the addition of a shortcut to our Player Comparison Finder tool. For instance, from Stephen Curry's page, someone might decide that they want to compare him to James Harden. This can now be done very simply by typing Harden's name into the "compare to" box shown in the image below:

Steff Curry Compare

 

Once you type in Harden's name and click on it, this career comparison page is generated:

Curry-Harden Comp

This is the default comparison search, but you can easily edit it to just compare 2014-15 (or any other season(s)). Just click the red "Show/Hide Search Form" link on top of the stat tables to bring up the search form. From there, edit your search to compare "single seasons" in the yellow part of the search form. Then select 2014-15 for both players and click "get results." This will take you to this page, comparing two leading 2014-15 MVP candidates in a variety of statistical categories, from basic to advanced.

As an added bonus, if you go back to the search form, you'll notice there's room for up to 6 players in a comparison. You can go ahead and populate any players you'd like there. For instance, here's 6 leading 2014-15 MVP candidates compared:

MVP Comp

We should note to longtime fans of this tool that it is still accessible from the main Play Index page, but we've added this search to player pages as an added convenience.

Posted in Announcement, Basketball-Reference.com, Data, Features, HowTo, Play Index, Tips and Tricks | 1 Comment »

ABA Box Scores & Splits Added

23rd March 2015

We're excited to announce that we have added nearly every box score in ABA history to basketball-reference.com. The ABA ran from 1967-68 to 1975-76, and we now have the boxes for every season except for 1967-68 thanks to the efforts of Michael Hamel, who researched the box scores and has allowed us to use them.

The boxes are accessible from season pages, team schedule pages and team game logs. These box scores have also allowed us to calculate a limited number of team splits.

Perhaps most significantly, we now have game logs and splits from the ABA days of some of the greatest players in basketball history, like Julius Erving and Rick Barry.

This data has also allowed us to create series stats pages for ABA Playoff series. Like this one, in which Dr. J averaged 37.7 PPG in an ABA Finals series win over David Thompson's Denver Nuggets.

This data has not yet been incorporated into player game finder searches or other play index tools, but that's something we'll be looking into in the future.

We hope everyone enjoys this new addition and thanks again to Michael Hamel for his permission to use this data and for his excellent research.

Posted in Announcement, Basketball-Reference.com, Data, History | Comments Off on ABA Box Scores & Splits Added

New Trade Finder Tool

17th March 2015

You may have noticed that we've added trades to the bottom of player pages (which also reflects if the player's draft pick was traded). Since we have now gotten that data populated to 1994, I figured I would commemorate 20 years worth of trade data by building a trade finder tool. You can use this to find:

As I said, this data is complete back to 1994 with more years to come as I feel like digging out the NFL Record and Fact Books and entering them. Let us know in the comments or via the feedback form if you have any other suggestions for this tool.

Posted in Announcement, Pro-Football-Reference.com | Comments Off on New Trade Finder Tool

Organizational Depth Charts Added Back to 2010

17th March 2015

We have added historical snapshots of franchises with the creation of organizational pitching and batting depth charts back to 2010. These pages are accessible from the team's page. For instance, if you wanted to see the 2010 Phillies, first go to their team page. From there, to see the pitching depth chart, hover over "Pitching" on the gray bar and then choose "Org. Depth Chart."

Phillies screen shot

 

This will then lead you to a page where you can look at a breakdown of the various pitchers (LH starters, RH relievers, etc) throughout different levels of the organization with their stats and levels played at for that season.

The same thing can be done for batting and these pages are available for all franchises back to 2010.

Please note that the formatting on these pages may appear a bit wonky at times, as these are mainly there as historical artifacts.

Posted in Announcement, Baseball-Reference.com, Data, Features, History | Comments Off on Organizational Depth Charts Added Back to 2010

2015 Spring Training Stats on Baseball Reference

12th March 2015

2015 Spring Training statistics are now up and running on Baseball Reference. You can see all player statistics on one page with our batting register and pitching register. Additionally, spring training stats can be found on top of the Standard Batting table on player pages and on Spring team pages, which can be accessed via the home page.

You may notice that the Opponent Quality column has not yet been filled in, but we're working on that and will have it updated soon.

Posted in Announcement, Baseball-Reference.com, Data | 1 Comment »

College Basketball Player Game Finder Added

11th March 2015

We have rolled out a Player Game Finder on our College Basketball site. Fans of our other sites are likely familiar with this tool, but for the uninitiated, this tool allows users to make custom searches through player box score lines since 2010-11. These searches can be for single games, cumulative season games, cumulative multi-season games, season games or total games.

Queries can be made using filters such as season, school, opponent, month, location, result, position, etc. One filter not currently available is class, but we may add that in the future. To give a better idea of what this tool is capable of, here are a few sample queries:

As you can see, there's a variety of different search combinations available. Like the rest of our Play Index tools, this finder is available via the Play Index menu. We encourage you to play around with this new tool and hope you enjoy it!

 

 

Posted in Announcement, CBB at Sports Reference, Data, Features, Play Index | Comments Off on College Basketball Player Game Finder Added

Most hockey teams played for in 1 year?

10th March 2015

We've added a page on Hockey-Reference.com that shows the most teams played for in one season, and the most in one career. This table is available via our frivolities section, which can be accessed via the "more" tab towards the top right of the page underneath the search bar.

This list was inspired by Marc Arcobello's "accomplishment" this season. Arcobello recently became just the third player in NHL history to play for four teams in one season. Arcobello, who is a Yale graduate, got off to a hot start with his fourth team, Arizona, with 5 goals in his first 7 games.

He does have some work to do, however, in getting on the other "most played for" list. Mike Sillinger leads that with 12 different teams played for in his career.

Posted in Announcement, Data, Features, Hockey-Reference.com | Comments Off on Most hockey teams played for in 1 year?

Get Hockey Player Stats for any Range of Games

9th March 2015

Hockey Reference has added a feature popular with some of the other sites in the Sports Reference family.

Now, if you go to a player's Game Logs page, you can click two different rows and get cumulative statistics for that player just within that range.

For example, from any player's page, click the "Game Logs" tab. That will show the player's game-by-game statistics for the given season. Click on one game, then click on another. A window will pop up showing the player's cumulative statistics in that span.

This is handy for all sorts of purposes. Please let us know if you have any questions or additional feedback about this tool.

Posted in Announcement, Features, Hockey-Reference.com, Tips and Tricks | 2 Comments »