It's been a long cold winter here in Philadelphia. In honor of Sunday and Monday, the greatest days of the year, here are some Opening Day features we have here at B-R:

• Franchise Opening-Day Starters (1916-2012)
• Batting and pitching game finders can be set to search "In team's first x games":
  • Example 1: Most HR in team's 1st game of the season (1919-2010)
  • Example 2: Highest Game Score in team's 1st game of the season (1919-2010)
• Use streak finders to look for the longest streaks to open the season:
  • Example 1: Most consecutive games with a hit to start the season (2000-09)
  • Example 2: Most consecutive wins by a pitcher to start the season (1980-89)
• Game Previews
• Our Mobile Site is perfect for looking up stats at the game, in a restaurant, or on your couch. We even have every box score since 1916 available in an easy to use mobile format.

Give them a try, and enjoy baseball's return.

Opening Night is Sunday, so be sure to make the Baseball-Reference Play Index a part of your baseball experience for the 2013 season!

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.

In a move to 1) reduce the number of negative WAR long-time players and 2) create a bit more consistency between our version of WAR and that on FanGraphs.com, we have agreed with them (their article about this change) to move the replacement level to .294 or 1,000 Wins for current seasons (30 teams * 162 games * (.500 - .294) = 1000). Pre-30 teams leagues will likewise be adjusted. Our previous Replacement Level was .320 or 875 wins, so we are now giving out 125 more wins than we were before. FanGraphs previously had a .260 replacement level, so they are going from 1,166 wins to 1,000. The net result is that these adjustments are given to players in a manner proportional to their playing time regardless of their quality of play.
Read the rest of this entry

Some of the common critiques of the Wins Above Replacement framework include: 1) Why do FanGraphs and Baseball-Reference.com have such different numbers, 2) How can we trust it when the numbers change, and 3) How can we trust it when I can't calculate it?

For the first question, our announcement today of a consistent replacement level between FanGraphs and Baseball-Reference.com has done a considerable amount to bring our two methodologies into alignment at least on the question of how big of a basket of WAR to hand out to players each year. Previously, FanGraphs allotted nearly 300 additional WAR due to a much lower replacement level. Our meeting in the middle has erased this difference to zero.

For the next two questions, I would point to a very widely quoted and very widely used statistic from economics, Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Here is the Wikipedia article on Gross Domestic Product. I'm going to argue that WAR is essentially GDP for baseball.

Read the rest of this entry

With Opening Day quickly approaching, here's a reminder that you can view the historical progression of any team's Opening Day lineups by going to their franchise page and clicking on Opening Day Starters.

Baseball-Reference.com Search Box.

This is a very basic box, but if you like our player pages and our happy to direct your users here, we'd love to welcome them.

Automatic Player Linker / Add your site to our newsfeeds

With Spring Training getting into gear, here's a reminder that you can request for your site to be added to our player newsfeeds. To get started, all you have to do is write a post as you normally would and use our linker tool, causing baseball-reference player links to be automatically added. Then let us know you want to be included by sending us the following information:

• The name of your site to appear in the feed (at most 25 characters)
• The url for your rss feed (must be a full feed)
• A contact e-mail address
• The url of an example page with our links in place

We'll review your request, and try to get your content added as soon as we can. It's a great way to get your content out there, and it gives your readers quick access to player stats and information.

In case you want more info, here are two videos about how it works:

Here's a 2-minute tutorial on how to embed professional-looking stat tables on your own blog:

Get ready for the baseball season with a free trial for the Baseball-Reference.com Play Index.

Visit the Play Index Subscription Page to create an account (if needed) and use the coupon code "Analytics" to get your free trial.

Only 20 days to opening day. Happy Baseball!

With March Madness coming up soon, here's a quick reminder to check out S-R/College Basketball, our college hoops site. It has all of the team ratings and player stats you need to help fill out your bracket this season, plus historical data (including scanned stat sheets going back to the 1940s) and a Play Index just for college basketball. Give it a try today!