With San Francisco currently in the basement of the NL West, a Giants fan wrote to us this week wondering how many times a World Series win was followed with a last-place finish. I ran the query in our database:

As it turns out, if the Giants "hang on" to the bottom spot in the West, it will mark only the second time in the World Series era (1903-present) that a champion went on to finish last the following season. The only other team to do that were the 1998 Florida Marlins, who infamously jettisoned all of their talent a year after winning it all.

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Sports Reference has an immediate opening for a web developer. Please see our job advertisement for all of the details. We will begin reviewing applications on August 26th.

With the season getting down to the home stretch, it's time to check out the Baseball-Reference Play Index if you haven't already signed up. What's the Play Index? 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. Using the PI, you can:

• Search full-season or multi-year totals to find your own custom leaderboards - Look at the entire history of baseball from 1871-2012 with every year, team, and position available, or 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 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.
• Search player game totals - Filtering on any of a dozen or more choices, search for games on a single player level, or on any batter from 1916-2012, or on any pitcher. The same can be done for Team Batting or Team Pitching Totals.
• 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 in the last 97 years or on any pitcher. The same can be done for Team Batting or Team Pitching Streaks.
• Search the records of a specific player - Output 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.
• Search Batter vs. Pitcher Matchups - 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.
• ...And more!

Personal Subscriptions to the Play Index still cost just $36 for a year, $6 for a month, or $2 for 24 hours. Subscriptions may only be used by a single user, and there are discounts for users sponsoring at least $35 in pages.

Organizational Subscriptions can be set up for either an unlimited number of users ($600/year), or for up to five users ($125/year).

There are Two Steps to Subscribe to the Play Index:

1. Login to or create a Sports-Reference.com account (the same account used to sponsor pages).
2. Already logged in (or just created an account)? Go to our subscription page to sign up.

Our Always-Available Free Trial: Non-subscribers can use the PI's features as much as you like. However, your outputs will be restricted to a limited number of results.

The Play Index comes with a money back guarantee. We will gladly return the unused portion of any Play Index Subscription should you be dissatisfied with the Play Index.

So go ahead, give the Play Index a try -- we're confident that once you start using it, you'll wonder how you ever got along without it.

Prepare for tonight's 2013 All-Star Game at Citi Field with Baseball-Reference's All-Star features:

• In-depth Game Preview
• All-Star Game History with boxscores and game 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

For every game of the regular season and playoffs, we generate a preview containing player and team stats pertaining to the matchup. The All-Star Game is no exception, so please enjoy our 2013 MLB All-Star Game Preview as you prepare for the game tomorrow.

By the nature of our update process these will take a week or two to roll out to the site, but they'll get there eventually. This note below is from one of our data producers and represent a set of updates we'll be incorporating into the site.

One of the great aspects of the baseball research community is their dogged determination to get things right even it is a mixup between Tom Maher and Frank Mahar in 1902.
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Baseball-Reference.com - MLB Stats, Standings, Scores, History.

Nothing too big, but our man on PFR, Mike Kania has put together a nice simple carousel for us that will show the major leaderboards on the front page of B-R each day. As of this writing it's just got WAR stuff on it, but I'm going to expand it out to more material.

Carousel is caught in mid-motion below in the left column of the front page.

I got a couple of questions about this today, so I thought it would be valuable to highlight this feature in blog-post form.

Essentially, the question was regarding what kind of batting production a specific team has gotten from a given defensive position this season. For example, a user wanted the combined season stats for Yankees players this season, only while playing 3B.

Veteran B-R users will know that to get this information, you need to go to the team's main 2013 stats page, then mouse over the menu option marked "Batting ?", and choose "Splits". Scroll down until you find the table marked "Defensive Positions", and you'll get a list of every position along with the batting stats from players while they were in the game at that position:

You can even click on the red text for each position, and get a table of the individuals who contributed to those team-wide totals at the position:

One final note -- if you want to know where the team ranks among others at the position, you can go to league splits and find the same table -- clicking the position tooltip will give you a list of every team's production from that position, which you can then sort:

An alternate way of getting this would be to go through the brand-new Split Finder, recreating a similar table using the options in the form:

Here's a video I made discussing all the semi-hidden things you can do on B-R player pages:

Sponsoring a page is fun, fast, and easy way to support what we're doing here at Baseball-Reference. With a sponsorship, you can:

• Show your support for your favorite player or team.
• Drum up traffic for your own site & draw in fans with a common interest.
• Get some well-deserved recognition for your support of B-R.
• Make your voice heard by the tens of thousands of people who visit Baseball-Reference every day.

Here's all you have to do to get involved:

1. Create a membership account.
2. Find the page(s) you'd like to support, and click "sponsor" (available pages).
3. If the page you want is already sponsored, click "Alert Me!" to be informed when the current sponsorship expires.
4. Follow the instructions to create your message and make your payment.
5. Your message and links will be visible on the page after we approve them (usually in less than 24 hours).

And who knows, if you're clever enough, your message might end up on lists like these (or podcasts like this).