Sports Reference Blog

With the NHL starting back up after the lockout, here's a reminder that we offer our familiar Play Index tools for hockey, too:

Player Game Finder
Search through NHL regular season and playoff game logs spanning from 1987-88 to today for games that match your criteria.

Player Season Finder
Search through NHL regular season statistics spanning from 1917-18 to today for single seasons or combined seasons that match your criteria.

Player Playoff Finder
Search through NHL playoff statistics spanning from 1918 to today for single years or combined years that match your criteria.

It was almost one year ago that we announced that we had posted copies of every box score in NBA history. However, since these box scores were scans we could not create player game logs, compute player splits, etc. As we said in that post, it is our goal to one day have all of these games in a database-friendly format.

On that note, I'm happy to announce that the work for the 1980-81 regular season has been completed. Please take some time to check out the box scores, player and team game logs, and player and team splits for the 1980-81 NBA season. Keep in mind that almost all of the scanned box scores are abbreviated (i.e., they only contain field goals, free throws, and points for the players), so there will be many missing values for each game.

Relative information is something we've had on Baseball-Reference and Basketball-Reference for a while, but we haven't had the data for football... until now, that is.

Yesterday we added some rudimentary relative data to PFR player pages (check out the Matthewses if you want a great example). It's by no means complete, but we'll be adding more in the coming weeks and months. And we'd like your help -- if you know of players or coaches who are related but aren't listed on the site, email us and we'll get the info added. Thanks!

Batting Season Finder -- - Baseball-Reference.com

I've added search options to the pitching and batting season finders which apply the at bat and innings pitched minimums for rookie status. This leaves out the "less than 45 days service time prior to Sept. 1" requirement which I simply can not compute at this time (nor do I ever expect to).

I've retroactively applied these standards back to the 1871 seasons, so some simple searches are now possible.

With the Hall of Fame finalists being named last week, here's a reminder to check out our Hall of Fame Section at PFR, as well as the 2013 ballot (with a list of finalists, and semifinalists who didn't make the cut).

2012 Team Scoring and Leads Summary - Baseball-Reference.com

This tool has been around for awhile, but I just updated the look to use tables rather than pre-formatted text (I think there is only one tool left that is pre-formatted) which adds the embed, share and sorting tools into the mix.

Event Finders with Batted Ball Types

Did you know that the Pirates gave up the most ground ball bunt singles last year (30) and the Rangers and Brewers the fewest (10)? Or that Matt Cain gave up 10 all by himself.

You can now find information like that on the Play Index Event Finders as we've added the type of batted ball in our DB to the event finder outputs.

All 579 bunt ground ball singles in the MLB last year

Greg Spira Award now Accepting Nominations

New Honor To Recognize Up-and-Coming Talent

A group of distinguished baseball writers and researchers have collaborated to create a new award as a memorial to the late baseball researcher Greg Spira. The new Greg Spira Baseball Research Award (www.SpiraAward.org) will be given annually in recognition of the best published article or paper containing original baseball research by a person 30 years old or younger. The winning entry must display innovative analysis or reasoning.

Happy birthday to Drew Brees, Matt Holliday, Randy White, Ricky Sobers, Adam Burt, and all the other athletes born today -- and a friendly reminder that you can look up player birthdays at all of our pro sites:

Birthdays at Baseball Reference

Birthdays at Basketball Reference

Birthdays at Pro Football Reference

Birthdays at Hockey Reference

With the release of the 2012 NFL All-Pro teams, we've run our annual AV calculations (What's AV? Check out how AV is calculated for a refresher) and updated the player pages and 2012 leaders page with the year's results.