Just a quick post to announce that we've rolled out an enhancement to the Play Index Game Finders (comprised of Player Batting, Playing Pitching, Team Batting & Team Pitching Game Finders).

Previously, subscribers could customize their searches by a team's first "x" games. Now, you can also select a player's first "x" career games or a span of career games from "x" to "y." Additionally, team games can also be searched using any span from "x" to "y" within a season.

If the above made little sense, here's a few concrete examples of searches that can now be completed:

• Ichiro played for the winning team in 114 of his first 162 games (most by a non-pitcher since 1914).
• Rudy York's 55 HR in his first 162 career games played are the most by any player since 1914.
• Jorge Soler is just the third player since 1914 with an extra-base hit in each of his first five career games.
• Since 1914, only Dwight Gooden had more double-digit K games in his first 83 games than Yu Darvish.
• The most wins by a non-playoff team in the Wild Card Era from Games 82-162 is 52 by the 2006 Angels.
• Phil Niekro won 148 games after his 500th game. That's the most by any pitcher since 1914.

We hope you enjoy these new tools as much as we do. If you're not already a subscriber, but are interested in the Play Index, you can subscribe here for less than a dime per day.

As we enter the final weeks of the MLB regular season, we've made a small (but useful) addition to the Play Index Team Batting & Team Pitching Split Finders. You can now refine your searches to include only non-playoff teams, playoff teams, division winners, Pennant winners or World Series winners.

With this feature, you can now find:

• The World Series winner with the worst OPS in Late & Close situations since 1955.
• The best record at the All-Star Break for a non-playoff team in the Wild Card Era (please note all 2014 teams currently show up in this search).
• The worst record at the All-Star Break for a division winner in the Divisional Era (excluding strike seasons).
• The Pennant winner with the worst winning percentage in September/October regular season games since 1914.
• The World Series winner with the best record vs. .500 or better opposition during the regular season since 1914.
• The non-playoff team with the best record vs. .500 or better opposition during the Wild Card Era (please note all 2014 teams currently show up in this search).

The above represents just a small fraction of what this new search is capable of doing. We encourage current Play Index subscribers to play around with this feature and share any interesting information.

If you're not a Play Index subscriber, but are interested in generating this sort of information, please read more about the Play Index or subscribe.

Player Season Finder

Player Game Finder

Player Touchdown Finder

Team Game Finder

Super Bowl Play Finder

Draft Finder

Find head-to-head results and also find games matching a particular score.

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.

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

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, we continue to work on our possession and play-by-play stats, and we have released the next enhancement, additional situations.

As a brief primer on what the new situations mean:

• All Situations, Even Strength, Power Play, and Short-Handed are the traditional situations and mean what you expect them to.
• 5-on-5 is situations where there were five skaters on the ice for both teams. It is similar to Even Strength, but doesn't include 4-on-4.
• 5-on-5 Close is situations where there were five skaters on the ice for both teams and:
  - The score is within 1 point in the 1st or 2nd Period, or
  - The score is tied in the 3rd Period.
• 5-on-5 Tied is situations where there were five skaters on the ice for both teams and the score was tied.

When you click on a situational tab, all of the stats on that page are for that situation (Blocks, Hits, Corsi For, etc.).

Where are they?

To find these stats, go to a player's page (one who's played in a game since the 2007-08 season) and you will see a link to "Additional Stats":

Clicking on that will take you to the Additional Stats pages where you can see these new enhancements.

We welcome any feedback or questions you have about these new features.

We've added a feature to the league and team year pages that allow you to see the average age of team. It is weighted by time on ice, since we feel that is the most accurate representation of the team's "age."

To see this, simply go to either a league or team year page and scroll down to the stats section.

On a league year page it will look like this:

On a team year page, it will look like this:

As always, we welcome any feedback.

Positional differences and performance by position are interesting ways to look at team performance. For instance as Phillies fan I know that CF and LF are hurting the Phillies, but just how much are they hurting relative to the league. This tool answers that question and many many more. (answer: a whole lot of hurt)

You select a year, the league and a stat, and we rank every team at each position by that stat and in some cases a summary of positions. This uses our positional splits to allot stats to positions or in some cases a prorated assignment of WAR and related stats by time played at each position. Now in one table you can see the worst or best team-positions in baseball.

There are some additional tools that allow you to highlight a particular team and mousing over a table cell informs you the players involved in producing that value.

I like this output so much I've also added it to our base league pages just below the pitching stats.

2014 AL League page

Team Comparison Tool - Baseball-Reference.com.

We have added hat trick leaderboards to Hockey Reference. While we only have game logs going back to the 1987-88 season, we are able to do some magic to also include the career hat trick leaders. To see this functionality, you can go to the menu item Leaders > All NHL & WHA Leaders & Records:

Then, scroll down to the Hat Tricks line:

You can also see the hat tricks on the individual player leaderboards:

Let us know if you have any comments or questions.

A minor, but useful addition to the team pages today are the player totals for the teams that they played on. This is a feature on the other Sports Reference sites, and it finally found its way to Hockey Reference.

(Hat tip to the @TheWrage for bringing up this suggestion.)

As always, your feedback and suggestions are appreciated.

UPDATE (2014-04-14):

We have added this feature to the coaches' pages as well: