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Only 20 days to opening day. Happy Baseball!

We've never included Spring Training stats on the site before, but decided to add our own take this year, so we now have spring training stats on the player and team pages and on a league register page, so you can see every player in camp on one page.

One hard thing about spring training is that you've got a very wide variety of players in camp. Veteran major leaguers, AAA, AA, and even low-A ball players. A player hitting .400/.500/.600 against A-ball competition is a lot different than one who does that against MLBers (though truth be told the sample sizes are so small as to not tell us much definitively). To give you a feel for the level of competition we've provided an OppQual column that is 1-10. Each opponent for each PA for that batter or pitcher is graded between 1 and 10 based on the level or average level (weighted by IP or PA) they played at last year.

• 10 - MLB
• 8 - AAA
• 7 - AA
• 5 - High A (Cali or Carolina)
• 4 - Full-Season A (Midwest and SALLY)
• 1.5 to 3 - Rookie or Short-season
• 1 - for pitchers if the opposing batter is a pitcher

So a player over 9 is facing mostly MLB guys while someone under 9 is facing mostly minor leaguers. Players like John Lackey in 2012 or Yu Darvish in 2011 who did not play in an MLB affiliated league are simply excluded from the rating.

Player Pages - Spring Training Stats appear at the top of major and minor league player pages.

Team Stats: 2013 Atlanta Braves Spring Training, these are all linked from the site front page.

League-wide Stats: Batting Register and Pitching Register. These tables are sortable, so you can look up current leaders if you like.

2012 Major League Baseball Baserunning/Misc.

To the baserunning pages for teams, players, leagues (currently rebuilding non-league pages), I've added columns for OOB1, OOB2, OOB3, OOBHm or rather outs on base at 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and Home.

See the screenshot below for the location of this data. It's available in the league nav bar which is on any of league yearly pages just below the top ad.

Bill Mazeroski Statistics and History - Baseball-Reference.com.

It's been a long-time coming, but I added player fielding gamelogs yesterday. Nothing too fancy, but basic fielding stats game-by-game for each player since 1916. Here is Mazeroski's 1960 game log and Cobb for 1916. We have the overall gamelog (irrespective of position) followed by position specific logs.

You can get to the gamelogs by clicking the gamelog selection over the top of the standard fielding stats on the player pages. See the screen shot below.

2012 Team Scoring and Leads Summary - Baseball-Reference.com

This tool has been around for awhile, but I just updated the look to use tables rather than pre-formatted text (I think there is only one tool left that is pre-formatted) which adds the embed, share and sorting tools into the mix.

Event Finders with Batted Ball Types

Did you know that the Pirates gave up the most ground ball bunt singles last year (30) and the Rangers and Brewers the fewest (10)? Or that Matt Cain gave up 10 all by himself.

You can now find information like that on the Play Index Event Finders as we've added the type of batted ball in our DB to the event finder outputs.

All 579 bunt ground ball singles in the MLB last year

Greg Spira Award now Accepting Nominations

New Honor To Recognize Up-and-Coming Talent

A group of distinguished baseball writers and researchers have collaborated to create a new award as a memorial to the late baseball researcher Greg Spira. The new Greg Spira Baseball Research Award (www.SpiraAward.org) will be given annually in recognition of the best published article or paper containing original baseball research by a person 30 years old or younger. The winning entry must display innovative analysis or reasoning.

Thanks to the great folks at RetroSheet we are now able to launch box scores and game logs for 1916 and 1917 and additional play-by-play for 1945-1947 along with additional games found here and there for 1948-1973.

For a full list of our data coverage, check out our Data Coverage page.

I have yet to re-run the full site, so the 1916 A's and 1917 retirees will not yet have links to splits or gamelogs, but that should happen later today or tomorrow.

Box Score Directory (1916-2012)

Note: RetroSheet also has 1915 AL and NL box scores, but not yet Federal League boxes. Given our setup we require a full set to be available before we can publish a year's worth of box scores.

With the 2012-13 regular season in full swing, you might want to check out the Basketball-Reference Play Index. In case you don't already know about the PI, it's a set of research tools that allow you to create customizable queries on our database, save the results, and share them with others. With the PI, you can:

• Use the Player Season Finder to search through all NBA, ABA, & BAA players' regular season and playoff statistics for performances that match your criteria.
• Use the Player Game Finder to search through NBA players' regular season and playoff game logs (since 1985-86) for games matching your criteria.
• Use the Head-to-Head Finder to search for games in which two selected players played against each other.
• Search for player and team consecutive-game streaks that match your criteria using the Streak Finders.
• Search for team performances that meet your criteria with the Team Season Finder and Team Game Finder.
• Use the Draft Finder to search through every NBA/BAA draft for picks that match your criteria.
• Use the Player Comparison Finder to compare the stats of up to four players through (or in) a given season.

Also, take a look at the Play Index Plus for even more data-searching goodness. The PI+ lets you sift through the play-by-play data of every game since 2001, making it possible to look for specific events, lineup data, and shooting stats (including clutch shots and shot breakdowns by distance).

Best of all, these features are 100% free to use! So go ahead, give them a try, and you'll wonder how you ever got along without them.

Jaffe WAR Score system (JAWS) - Baseball-Reference.com.

Baseball-Reference.com has added Jay Jaffe's JAWS system to our suite of Hall of Fame evaluation tools.