Today Baseball Reference is excited to announce the debut of most powerful set of publicly available research tools in the game. We're calling it Stathead and you can sign up for a free month of access here. These tools may be familiar to some of our users from the Play Index. If you're a current Play Index subscriber, your Play Index login will also work on Stathead. You can try it out here. For some background on this project, please see this blog post from Sports Reference president Sean Forman.

Stathead subscriptions provide access to a suite of tools that allow users to run customized searches through 100+ years of career statistics, season statistics, game statistics, splits and play-by-play. These tools are omnipresent in every press box, broadcast booth, agency and front office in Major League Baseball. We're happy to offer access to these professional tools for the low cost of $8/month. Even better, for a limited time we're offering the first month FREE. For more info on Stathead subscriptions, please click here.

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On the Sports Reference sites that cover professional leagues, we have tables that track team averages in various statistics over the league's history so people can get a sense of how stats have gradually changed as their respective sports evolved. You can see examples of this on Basketball Reference and Pro Football Reference.

We've added this feature to College Basketball Reference so you can see the averages for all Division I schools since 1947-48. The Teams column shows the growth of Division I from less than 150 teams in 1950 to 350 teams in 2020. You can also see the gradual rise in teams' usage of the three-pointer, mirroring its growth in the NBA, as well as the gradual decline in turnovers committed over the past three decades.

Please check out the new game averages table at College Basketball Reference, accessible from the site's Seasons Index. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.

Last August Basketball Reference extended its coverage of play-by-play all the way back to 1996-97 (the earliest season for which comprehensive, digitized NBA play-by-play data is available). As we teased at the time, we hoped to use the play-by-play to build out other features. In October we added the ability to break down our box scores since '96-97 by the quarter or half. Today we're happy to announce that many features that we've had available back to 2000-01 for many years have now been extended back to 1996-97.

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The 2020 WNBA Draft will take place tonight, with the New York Liberty owning the first overall pick. Basketball Reference continues to gradually expand its WNBA coverage, and in honor of the occasion we've added the league's draft history. In addition to the rookie draft held yearly, we also have the various dispersal, allocation and expansion drafts performed over the league's history, as well as the Elite draft of 1997. As you can see in the 2019 rookie draft table, we also include college or former international team, as well as their career WNBA stats.

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.

FBref carries a wide array of advanced stats powered by Statsbomb to help give you all the needed context and analyze a player's performance from as many angles as possible. You can look through our blog's FBref tag for a look at the most recent additions we've made to the site, and today we have another mass addition of advanced stats you can now access on player pages. Here's the list:

Passing

- Total distance of completed passes
- Progressive distance of completed passes (distance toward goal)
- Progressive Passes

Pass Types

- live-ball, dead-ball, under pressure
- corner kick types (in-swinging, out-swinging, straight)
- pass height (ground, low, high)
- by body part (left/right foot, head, throw-ins, other)
- pass outcomes (completed, offsides, out of bounds, intercepted, blocked)

Goal and Shot Creation

- Goal Creating Actions (GCA) and Shot Creating Actions (SCA), meaning the two offensive leading to a shot or goal. This includes live-ball passes, dead-ball passes, successful dribbles, shots which lead to another shot, and being fouled

Defensive Actions

- tackles by location on pitch
- pressures, successful pressures, pressures by location on pitch
- blocks (shots, shots saved, and passes)
- clearances
- errors leading to an opponent's shot

Possession

- touches, touches by location on pitch
- carries (total and progressive distance)
- pass receiving (targets and completions)
- miscontrols and dispossessions

Miscellaneous

- Aerials won/lost

From league pages, these stats can be accessed by using the Squad & Player Stats tab between Scores/Fixtures and Nationalities. Of course, you can also see this on player pages if they've played in competitions we have xG data for.

We're excited to see what analysis people can derive from this new information, which is available thanks to the hard work of Statsbomb. You can keep up with the latest additions of statistical coverage and new features here on the Sports Reference Blog, or by signing up for the This Week in Sports Reference mailing list. Feel free to send us any questions or suggestions through our feedback form or FBref's official Twitter account.

With the current state of sports being mostly halted due to coronavirus concerns, the Chinese Professional Baseball League is in a rare position as they had their Opening Day and are planning to fill a regular schedule, albeit without spectators. Baseball Reference tracks various foreign leagues already, and we're happy to report that we will be receiving 2020 CPBL statistics as the season moves along.

The first game of the season was a win for the Uni-President 7-Eleven Lions over the Chinatrust Brothers. The Lions' Opening Day starter on the mound was Ryan Feierabend, who pitched for the Toronto Blue Jays in 2019. Former Seattle Mariner Ariel Miranda was the Brothers' starting pitcher. The only homer of the game was launched by Kai-Wen Zheng, who's been with the Lions since 2016.

We've also filled in CPBL history so now we have player stats for the league since 1990. For example, on Manny Ramirez's page we finally show his .352/.422/.555 campaign in 2013 with the EDA Rhinos (at age 41, no less).

2020 CPBL statistics will be updating daily so keep up with the league on Baseball-Reference! Please let us know if you have any comments, questions or concerns.

When the National League was founded in 1876, one of the inaugural teams was the Cincinnati Reds. They folded a couple of years later, and the team we know as the Reds today would be founded in 1882. Previously, we had the inaugural Reds franchise as lasting to the 1880 season before folding. However, after research presented by Jim Farmer and consultation with John Thorn and Retrosheet, we've decided to mark 1880 Cincinnati as a different franchise named the Stars, with the inaugural Reds having ended after the 1879 season.

Putting it another way:

BEFORE

Cincinnati Reds (old): 1876-1880
Cincinnati Reds (new): 1882-present

NOW

Cincinnati Reds (old): 1876-1879
Cincinnati Stars: 1880
Cinncinati Reds (new): 1882-present

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.

In 2019 Pro-Football-Reference added advanced statistics provided by Sportradar such as air yards, yards after contact, drops, and passer rating allowed among others. We have those available at the season level on player pages, as well as on the game level within box scores. We have now added advanced game logs, accessible from player pages, so you can see an individual's advanced stats at the single-game level.

Here are links to some examples:

Aaron Rodgers

Christian McCaffrey

Richard Sherman

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form or Pro Football Reference's official Twitter account. Thanks for following us!

Today would have been Opening Day across Major League Baseball, with all 30 teams scheduled to start their seasons.  With the season on hold, we don’t get to find out how those games would have turned out. Or do we?

To help our users get their fix of new baseball, we are simulating the 2020 season using Out of the Park Baseball 21 and posting the results on Baseball-Reference.com.  Starting today, we’ll update the site each day around noon ET with the results of that day’s games. Check out player pages across the site to see their simulated stats update as the season progresses.  Additionally, we’ve set up a daily digest page where you can see each day’s scores and the current standings, as well as team and league pages with all the simulated statistics pulled together into one place.

OOTP is a full-featured simulation with a lot of settings, and we asked for your help on Twitter with a few decisions we needed to make.  Your feedback was overwhelming that you wanted to see free agents like Yasiel Puig sign with teams and that you want to see the game’s AI make trades throughout the season.  We have disabled injuries in the simulation, though, since no one wants to risk having a superstar player suffer a major injury and end up missing from the simulation.

FBref already covers a wide variety of competitions around the globe, and continues to expand with its latest addition of senior national team competitions. There's a lot involved in that, but the headline is the FIFA Men's World Cup, which we now have data for from its first incarnation in 1930 to the most recent competition in 2018. That means we finally have pages for classic footballing legends Diego Maradona and Pele, while also filling out modern players who've made their mark on the global stage such as Miroslav Klose and Ronaldo. Peruse through the histories of countries that have a nicely stocked trophy case as well as some nations that have struggled historically. In addition to the World Cup, several major continental competitions such as the European Championship, Copa America and the Asian Cup are covered for recent years. International friendlies data will also be available on FBref.

The full Men's World Cup addition of course complements our existing collection of FIFA Women's World Cup history. One of the competitions included in this national team addition is the SheBelieves Cup, which we now have data for since its inaugural 2016 edition. Other continental women's national team competitions are included in this addition as well.

Here is the full list of competitions now available on FBref with this announcement:

World Cup - 1930-2018 (entire history)
European Championship - 2000-2020
AFC Asian Cup - 2000-2019
FIFA Confederations Cup - 2001-2017
UEFA Women's Championship - 2001-2017
OFC Nations Cup - 2007-2008-2016
Africa Cup of Nations - 2010-2019
CONCACAF Women's Championship - 2014-2018
AFC Women's Asian Cup - 2014-2018
International Friendlies (Men) - 2014-2020
CONCACAF Gold Cup - 2015-2019
Copa America - 2015-2020
SheBelieves Cup - 2016-2020
Africa Women Cup of Nations - 2016-2018
Copa América Femenina - 2018
OFC Women's Nations Cup - 2018
UEFA Nations League - 2018-2019
Algarve Cup - 2019-2020
International Friendlies (Women) - 2019-2020

Qualifiers
FIFA World Cup Qualification — CONCACAF - 1998-2018
FIFA World Cup Qualification — UEFA - 1998-2018
FIFA World Cup Qualification — CAF - 2002-2022
FIFA World Cup Qualification — CONMEBOL - 2002-2018
FIFA World Cup Qualification — AFC - 2002-2022
FIFA World Cup Qualification — OFC - 2014-2018
WCQ — UEFA (W) - 2019

AFC Asian Cup qualification - 2000-2019
UEFA Euro Qualification - 2008-2020
Africa Cup of Nations qualification - 2015-2021
UEFA Women's EURO Qualification - 2017-2021
AFC Women's Asian Cup Qualification - 2018

Player statistics from national team competitions can be viewed in the statistics tables of player pages by selecting the National Team tab, which will show their stats for every competition we currently cover. We are excited about this addition and hope to get to a place where we can also further fill out the statistics of the myriad of historical players we now have pages for. You can keep up with the latest additions of competitions coverage and new features here on the Sports Reference Blog, or by signing up for the This Week in Sports Reference mailing list. Feel free to send us any questions or suggestions through our feedback form or FBref's official Twitter account.