With football season once again upon us, we figured users that have been away from the sites in the offseason could use a refresher on some changes/updates. We remained hard at work in the offseason rolling out a series of new features & improvements for users to enjoy this season:

• We now have line scores for every game in NFL/AAFC history all the way back to the 1920 APFA (as the NFL was known at the time).
• Thanks to these line scores, we've been able to flesh out stadium histories, as well. We now have an index of every stadium in league history, with leaderboards for venues since 1960. We have also integrated these stadiums into the Player Game Finder and Team Game Finder. So you can now search for the most rushing yards in a game at Lambeau Field since 1960 and the most points scored in a game at Lambeau. This addition has also allowed us to make the Player Touchdown Finder searchable for every season in NFL history.
• We've also enhanced our coverage of more recent history. Our Game Play Finder now allows you to create custom searches through every play since 1998. We now have over 725,000 plays searchable through this tool, including every pass play in Peyton Manning's career.
• Many of you likely noticed that we added the Player Streak Finder late last season. This tool allowed for searches like most consecutive 100-yard rushing games since 1960 and most consecutive seasons with 1,000 receiving yards. Well, we've now rolled out a similar tool for teams, the Team Streak Finder. With this feature, you can find the longest regular-season win streaks since 1940 and the most consecutive 10-win seasons since the merger.
• Wondering how your favorite (or least favorite?) head coach has fared on challenges? You can now find a list of challenges and results on the bottom of coaching pages.
• We have also added trades since 2000 to team pages and player pages (at the bottom).
• Finally, we have added high schools to players' biographical info, creating listings for high schools in the process. If you see any bugs in this data, please let us know.

We hope everyone finds these new features useful this season.

We've added play-by-play data for the entire 1998 season to the play finder play index tool, another 41,000+ plays worth of data (bringing us up to over 725,000 total plays, including every play from every Super Bowl). Data-wise, this means we have Peyton Manning's entire career covered (as well as Ryan Leaf's if that's what you're into). All plays (and expected points, pass targets, and tackles) should now show up on 1998 boxscores as well.

Just a quick note that the NBA released 2014-15 schedules this week and we've added them to our team pages.

Some interesting games this year include the Christmas matchup of Cleveland and Miami, and also the December 23rd Cleveland at Minnesota meeting (that is, given trade speculation between those two teams).

Also, the Hornets play their first game since 2002 when they open October 29 vs. the Bucks.

The two international games this year are the Nov. 12th T'Wolves/Rockets game in Mexico City, and the Jan. 15th Knicks/Bucks meeting in London.

We're excited to introduce our European Basketball site today. The new site features player and team statistics for four of Europe's most competitive leagues, Spain's Liga ACB, Italy's Lega Serie A, France's LNB Pro A, and the Greek Basket League. Europe hosts two annual transnational competitions each year, the Euroleague and the Eurocup, and we have stats for those as well.

Our database spans over 10 years for each of the featured leagues, with Euroleague and Eurocup stats spanning the life of those respective competitions (2000-01 and 2002-03, respectively).

First things first: The site is found at http://www.basketball-reference.com/euro. Otherwise, you can reach the site through the promotional blurb on our homepage, the quick links along the bottom left of the homepage, or by mousing over the links along the top of the site, e.g. 'Teams', and clicking on the Europe links...

We have player stats, team totals, standings and schedules, and we've marked some important things like playoff teams, league champions and relegated teams. The only awards that we have are MVPs, but we'll be sure to add more of those soon.

The team pages have views for each league or competition that a club played in during the season. If you want to see team and player stats across all leagues then click on 'All Leagues'. On the other hand, if you want to see statistics for club competition, or just transnational (Euroleague, e.g.) play, then click to view totals for just those seasons:

The player page shows all of the player's stats. For a 2013-14 Real Madrid player, for example, you'll see three stat tables, one for club competition, one for transnational, and one spanning both of those leagues. The former will show the teams that the player played for in those leagues, and the aggregated table will show the leagues that the player competed in:

Even tough we've just launched the site today, we're already thinking of improvements. Initially, we'd like to distinguish player stats between regular and postseason - once we've done that, we plan to add some more advanced stats. In the meantime, enjoy the 7,000 new player pages and over 1,500 new team season pages and be sure to point out any mistakes that you find.

Also! Thanks are due to Aaron Nielsen who was our source for these statistics. You can follow Aaron @ENBSports

If you have spent an extended amount of time on Baseball-Reference, you have likely noticed that some of our RBI totals do not match what you will see on some other sites. A notable example would be none other than George Herman Ruth. We list him with 2,214 career RBI, with a career high of 168 in 1921. Many sources, however, credit him with 2,213 career RBI and a season high of 171 in 1921.

How can there be any dispute over how many runs the most iconic player in the history of baseball drove in?

We're glad you asked.

It might come as a surprise to some, but RBI was not an official statistic until 1920, which was Ruth's first season with the Yankees. And even then, Rule 86, Section 8 was remarkably vague from 1920-30, instructing official scorers only that:

"The summary shall contain: The number of runs batted in by each batsman."

That left plenty of room for interpretation of the scoring rule. In the absence of a strict definition, official scorers across the league were inconsistent in what they considered an RBI. This inconsistency polluted numbers for a decade, despite the fact that the statistic was finally "official."

It wasn't until 1931, when Rule 70, Section 13 made the definition more explicit, that a uniform policy for counting RBI existed:

"Runs Batted In are runs scored on safe hits (including home runs), sacrifice hits, outfield put-outs, infield put-outs, and when the run is forced over by reason of the batsman becoming a base-runner. With less than two outs, if an error is made on a play on which a runner from third would ordinarily score, credit the batsman with a Run Batted In."

While this definition has seen some tweaks over time, for the first time official scorers had a clear definition of what should count as an RBI (though tabulation errors were still an issue in a pre-computerized era).

With RBI not tracked by official scorers, where do the pre-1920 RBI numbers come from? Here is a breakdown of the history of various RBI sources.

• 1920-Present: RBI tracked by official scorers and tabulated by the official statistician (please note that official does not mean that these numbers are without error)
• 1907-1919: Unofficial compilations by Ernie Lanigan
• 1876-1890: Unofficial compilations by John Tattersall
• 1891-1919: Unofficial compilations by David Neft

These RBI numbers have been used in various encyclopedias over the years and have served as the basis for further research done by SABR members. This research, where 5-7 newspaper accounts are looked at for each game in order to deduce RBI, often proves earlier reconstructions (and official totals) wrong. This leads to the volatile nature of early RBI numbers. A well-detailed account of this process by SABR's Herm Krabbenhoft can be found here, showing how he meticulously worked through Ruth's career RBI totals.

These thoroughly researched corrections eventually make their way to Baseball-Reference via Pete Palmer's data after they have been sufficiently vetted, which is why you will see discrepancies between our numbers and what you see in some other places. We have full confidence that when such alterations are made, that we are putting forward the best possible data generated by countless hours of expert research.

As Derek Jeter continues his climb up baseball's all-time hits list, we have received several inquiries about Honus Wagner's career hit total. We list 3,420, while MLB lists him with 3,430 career hits. While the similarity of the numbers may imply a simple typo, it turns out that the reasons for the one-digit difference are not simple at all.

For an explanation of the history of this deviation, we spoke with Pete Palmer (the source for many of the statistics appearing on this site). Palmer explained that the 1969 Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia was the genesis of the difference. At the time, official NL statistics only went back to 1903. The encyclopedia created new statistics for years prior to that and the changes were approved by an MLB committee set up to rule on various statistics for inclusion in the encyclopedia. However, the Elias Sports Bureau, which is the official statistician for Major League Baseball, never accepted the committee ruling, which leads to some differing numbers between what you see on Baseball-Reference and what you see in official MLB records. Elias, instead, has always used data from the old Spalding Guides.

Pete Palmer (and by extension Baseball-Reference) has preferred to use the Macmillan data*, because daily figures exist to back the numbers up, which allows for the statistics to be proofed for greater accuracy. Here is a year-by-year look at the difference between our totals and the Spalding totals. These are all from Wagner's pre-1903 seasons (Baseball-Reference total listed first):

• 1897: 81, 83
• 1898: 176, 180
• 1899: 196, 197
• 1900: 201, 201
• 1901: 194, 196
• 1902: 176, 177

Another discrepancy that some of you may notice soon is that Baseball-Reference has Cap Anson with 3,435 career hits, while MLB has him with 3,011. While many discrepancies exist with that data, the bulk of the difference is the fact that we count Anson's 423 hits in the National Association, which we believe was clearly a major league.

TL;DR version: Our hit total for Honus Wagner is not a typo. We recognize it does not align with the official total, but we believe it is the most accurate number.

For further reading on some of the issues with official totals in baseball statistics, please read this excellent 2011 post by Retrosheet's Dave Smith.

*The Macmillan data excluded a few games that were protested and replayed in the 1890s. These statistics were included in the NL stats of the day (save for the wins and losses) and Palmer has added these statistics back into the Macmillan data to reflect this.

We have rolled out a couple of new additions to our Awards Page:

The Edgar Martinez Award, recognizing the AL's top DH since 1973 & the Delivery Man of the Year, which recognized MLB's top reliever from 2005-13.

Beginning in 2014, the Delivery Man of the Year will be replaced by a pair of honors named for Mariano Rivera (AL) & Trevor Hoffman (NL).

Baseball-Reference has made the move to dissociate the New York Yankees franchise from the 1901 & 1902 Baltimore Orioles (not connected to the current Baltimore Orioles franchise). This adjustment allows us to fall in line with the Yankees franchise itself and most references including Total Baseball, edited by MLB's official historian, John Thorn, who authored an interesting history of the move. Additionally, Pete Palmer & Gary Gillette, the men behind the ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia, consider them separate franchises. A few years back, Gillette kindly shared his reasoning with us:

"We discussed this at length when we did the first edition of our new encyclopedia in 2004. IIRC, the deciding factor was that the Baltimore franchise went bust during the season and was turned over to the league. After the season, the league then sold a new franchise to investors in New York City. We felt that wasn't really a relocation or a transfer; it was simply filling the gap in the league that was opened when the Orioles' franchise disintegrated.

Of the 39 players who appeared for Baltimore in 1902, only five appeared for New York in 1903. Jimmy Williams was the regular second baseman for both clubs. Herm McFarland, a utility player in '02, became a regular outfielder in '03. Ernie Courtney played one game for Balto. in 1902, then 25 for NY in 1903. Harry Howell was the only pitcher of consequence to make the transition. Snake Wiltse (4 G in '03) also appeared for both."

This move was precipitated by the BAL/NYY joint record approaching the milestone of 10,000 wins, which caused a reassessment of how we approach this move. Some of the results in the play index may still reflect the two franchises as being one, but we will be working to fix that in the near future.

The addition of box score data back to 1922 has also helped us fill in our game location data back to 1922, so we have created an index of NFL/AAFC stadiums, from the Alamo Dome to Yankee Stadium. The stadium pages have links to first and last game box scores, as well as career, game, and playoff game leaders for a given stadium (since 1960, the first year for which we have player game stats). This covers nearly the entire history of Lambeau Field and every game played at every other stadium that's currently home to an NFL team (plus Wembley Stadium and the Rogers Centre). And it's fitting that with the park celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, we now have a record of every Bears and Cardinals game at Wrigley Field.

The stadium data has also been added to the player game finder and the team game finder, which will let you search for things like all players to throw 4 or more passing TDs at Gillette Stadium or all Chiefs' Monday night games at Arrowhead Stadium.

Prepare for Tuesday's 2014 All-Star Game at Target Field with Baseball-Reference's All-Star features:

• In-depth Game Preview
• All-Star Game History with box scores and play-by-play
• Home Run Derby History
• Every Home Run in All-Star Game History
• Franchise All-Star Batters & Pitchers
• All-Time Batter & Pitcher registers