Sports Reference Blog

Today we released an update to how we calculate one-year park factors for 2020 and three-year park factors that include 2020. In short, we are giving the observed effects of ballparks in 2020 less weight, impacting context-adjusted stats like ERA+, OPS+, Rbat+, and WAR for 2019 through 2021.

There are two reasons for this change. First, the shortened 60-game season decreases the sample of games we have data from, which naturally reduces the significance of the data collected. Second, since teams only played within their own divisions in 2020, comparing scoring in home games vs. scoring in away games does not tell an accurate story of how a park impacted scoring relative to league average, since most of the parks in the league are not included in either set of games (e.g. when computing the park factor for Wrigley Field, games played at Coors Field or Citizens Bank Park are not included in the calculation anywhere, since the Cubs did not play away games at those parks in 2020).

The issue with the way we had been handling 2020 park factors became more apparent as the 2021 season went on, particularly because the Cincinnati Reds’ 2020 park factor of 119 was raising the 2021 three-year park factor, resulting in worse-than-expected adjusted stats for hitters like Joey Votto, and better-than-expected adjusted stats for pitchers like Wade Miley.

Now, when you look at a 2020 team page, the one-year park factors have been diluted so that they include an average of 60 games’ worth of 2020 data, and 51 games each of 2019 and 2021 data. If there is no corresponding 2019 or 2021 data (e.g. new ballpark in Texas, different mix of parks for Toronto), those parts are replaced with a league-average park factor of 100. These new one-year park factors are used in the three-year averages like usual, so the effect is reflected there as well.

With this change, here are some of the most notable movers in Wins Above Replacement:

Zack Wheeler (+0.5) and Aaron Nola (+0.3) each saw a bump up in their 2021 pitching WAR as the 3-year park factor for Philadelphia rose from 96 to 98 (frequent opponent Washington also had their 3-year park factor increase from 93 to 96). Wheeler’s 0.5 is the largest change resulting from this update.

Wade Miley, Tyler Mahle, and Luis Castillo (-0.4 each) saw their 2021 pitching WAR fall. As mentioned above, Cincinnati saw some of the most anomalous park factors in 2020, and mitigating their impact here lowers the expected run environment for these and other Reds pitchers.

On the hitting side, the changes are more modest. Justin Upton and Isiah Kiner-Falefa each saw their 2021 batting WAR rise by 0.3, while Maikel Franco and J.T. Realmuto lost -0.3 from their 2021 WAR.

In 2021, Shohei Ohtani is notably untouched by this update, with changes to his batting WAR and pitching WAR canceling each other out and his 7.9 total WAR remaining the same.

Here is a full list of changes to park factors, rate stats, and Wins Above Replacement from before and after this change.

At the beginning of the WNBA's 25th season, we detailed a huge expansion of the advanced stats and features available in our WNBA coverage on Basketball Reference. This week we are proud to announce two new additions to our suite of Basketball Stathead search tools available for the WNBA, the Player Game Finder and Player Comparison Finder.

The Player Game Finder allows you to search through our entire database of regular season and playoff game logs for every player in every game in WNBA history. You can search by statistical criteria (i.e. points, rebounds, etc.), player characteristics (age, team, etc.) and game filters (location, result, etc).

Here's a few examples to get you started:

Most games with at least 10 assists in a season
All regular season and playoff triple-doubles in WNBA history
Most career 25-point games

The Player Comparison Finder allows you to compare the regular season and playoff statistics of up to six WNBA players for a single season or combined seasons. You can view statistical totals, per game, per 100 possessions and per 36 minutes; you can also view advanced stats (PER, Win Shares, etc.) for each of the players.

For example, here’s a comparison of Breanna Stewart and Diana Taurasi in their first WNBA season.

We hope you enjoy this addition to our WNBA coverage and Stathead. If you're interested in a subscription to the product, you can sign up for a free trial here!

Sports Reference is pleased to announce the hiring of three web developers, Zoe Surma, Frankie Ottomanelli, and Chris Wong.

Zoe is a recent graduate of Notre Dame with a degree in computer engineering. She is a Cubs, Fighting Irish and Formula One fan.

Frankie joins Sports Reference from Rockstar Games. He was the creator of the sunsetted Baseball Reference Alexa app. He is a Mets, Jets, and Knicks fan.

Chris is a recent graduate from Brown University with multiple degrees in computer science. He is a St. Louis native and a Blues and Cardinals fan.

Ryan Passmore has joined Sports Reference as VP of Engineering. Ryan was previously the Sr. Director of Product Development at Cleo. He will manage the engineering team at Sports Reference. A Chicago-area native Ryan cheers for the Cubs, Bulls and Bears.

In a huge addition, we at Hockey-Reference are glad to announce that we now have all NHL regular season box scores available back to the beginning of the NHL, the 1917-18 season. With this, we can now fill out the gamelogs section of many great players' careers. For example, you could now find Bobby Orr and Phil Esposito's excellent 1970-71 seasons when Orr finished with a career high 139 points and Esposito set the then-record of 76 goals in one season. Bernie Parent's 1973-74 season of 12 shutouts can now be examined easily. Gordie Howe's extensive NHL career, beginning with his rookie season in 1946-47, has game logs now.

All of these game logs are also searchable on Stathead now, which is also a great new asset to have. Looking for most goals by a player in a game will now lead you to Joe Malone's record day in 1920, when he scored seven for Quebec in what ended up being a 10-6 victory over the Toronto St. Patricks. While the top of the list of most saves in a shutout doesn't change, Jacques Plante's 52-save shutout in 1955 now properly appears in the top 5 thanks to this addition. We should put a reminder that there are some categories, such as saves and shots against, that were not recorded in the earlier days of the league.

So now there's a lot more history to dig through, and we hope you enjoy our presentation of the "new" box scores! Please let us know if you have any questions or comments.

One important piece to interpreting a sport's history is looking at who the media of the time selected as the top players to award, but you can also get some important context by looking at the other players who were in serious consideration for those awards. With that in mind, we're happy to announce the addition of voting breakdown data for the Associated Press' Most Valuable Player, Offensive and Defensive Player of the Year, Offensive and Defensive Rookie of the Year and Coach of the Year awards. You can find this information in the Football Award Voting Summaries section of our Awards index. Just taking a random example of 1982, you can see Mark Moseley's narrow win over Dan Fouts in the MVP race, as well as Marcus Allen's unanimous OROY win and the runners-up to Lawrence Taylor in the DPOY race.

Having this data also allows us to calculate career Award Shares. For those unfamiliar with the concept, this is the sum of the percentage of maximum votes they received over the course of their career. For example, a unanimous MVP like Lamar Jackson in 2019 gets 1.0 Award Share for that award, while 2016 Matt Ryan got 25 out of the possible 50 votes, so that's 0.5 Award Shares for that win. We have links to the career MVP, OPOY and DPOY award shares leaderboards on our Leaders index. Award shares and rank for each season they received votes will also be available in the Awards and Honors table on player pages, so you can more quickly see that in addition to Aaron Donald's 3 DPOY awards so far, he's also received at least a vote in every DPOY ballot since his sophomore season.

Some coverage notes:

• MVP voting breakdowns available since 1957. 100% complete back to 1986. 1961 and 1975 MVP vote totals still missing. AP did not give out awards in 1960.
• OPOY voting breakdowns available since 1972. 100% complete back to 1986. 1975 and 1985 OPOY vote totals still missing.
• DPOY voting breakdowns available since 1971. 100% complete back to 1988. 1985 DPOY vote totals still missing.

We want to give a big thanks to John Turney who compiled this historical voting data. Turney was also a contributor on the pre-1982 sacks data we announced recently.

If you have any questions, suggestions or even a lead on some of the still-waiting-to-be-discovered vote totals, feel free to contact us via our feedback form.

The NFL has only officially counted player sacks since 1982, which means sack records and leaderboards present an incomplete history of pass rushing. In many cases we accept these holes in the official record and move on. After all, we don't know how many rushing yards Jim Thorpe had, passing yards Paddy Driscoll had or even how many blocked shots Wilt Chamberlain had. Heck, we don't even "officially" know how many tackles anyone had in 2020 (or any other season). However, thanks to Official Gamebooks, 'unofficial' tackle totals get published in many places (including here). In the case of sacks, thanks to decades of research by John Turney and Nick Webster, we have a very thorough accounting of the statistic all the way back to 1960. Given that accounting for these 'unofficial' statistics allows us to paint a richer picture of the history of the game, we think it is a no-brainer to present them on Pro Football Reference, allowing fans to gain a deeper appreciation of some of football's biggest stars in the 1960s and 1970s. This isn't terribly different from presenting RBI totals for baseball players from before 1920 (the first season the statistic was "official"). These additions allow us to print year-by-year and career sacks totals for not just legends such as Deacon Jones (173.5), Jack Youngblood (151.5), Alan Page (148.5), Carl Eller (133.5) and Joe Greene (77.5), but also for less recognized stars like Coy Bacon (130.5), Cedrick Hardman (122.5) and Jack Gregory (106.0) whose greatness and impact can now be more readily quantified.
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We are thrilled to announce that we have added thousands of data points to our collection of historical NBA box scores (which includes at least a partial box score for every game in NBA history). The new data is courtesy web developer and statistician Justin Kubatko, who once upon a time built Basketball Reference.

For an overview of how complete our box score data now is, please visit our Data Coverage Summaries for the regular season and postseason.
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We've always had Home Run Derby and Futures Game information on the Bullpen, Baseball-Reference's user-managed wiki, but we have now added participation data for those events to the main Baseball-Reference site.

Home Run Derby champions, as evidenced by 3-time winner Ken Griffey Jr., now have that marked among their accomplishment "bling" at the top of their player page. In addition, if you scroll down to the Appearances on Leaderboards, Awards and Honors table, Home Run Derby participation is included as its own section now, with wins bolded. Because this is just participation data, you still have to go to the Bullpen if you want to see the actual scores of the Derbies.

Similarly, if a player participated in a Futures Game, using Joey Gallo as an example, that appears now in a new section of the Appearances on Leaderboards, Awards and Honors table. This data also appears on their minor league page in a column of the Prospect Rankings table. Each Futures Game is linked to the relevant Bullpen page if you want to see the full roster that year as well as the score and relevant events.

We thank intern Jeremy Frank for his work in collecting and preparing this data for this project. If you want to share any feedback or suggestions, please send us your thoughts via our feedback form.

The wait is over!

We've been listening to requests for new features from our users and we're happy to announce that we have launched two new tools for Stathead Baseball: The Team Pitching and Batting Span Finders.

The Team Span Finder is a powerful research tool that allows you to search and compare team stats based on spans of games. You can further refine the search and specify the span to be either from the start or end of a season.

Here's a few examples of each type of search to get you started:

The biggest run differential in any 162-game span is +446, done by the 1901-02 Pirates and 1938-39 Yankees.

The most shutouts thrown by a team in its first 50 games of a season is 14, by the 1969 Cubs.

Did you know? Since 1901, 137 teams have lost at least 15 of their final 20 games of a season. Only one of them made the postseason: 2000 Yankees (and they won the World Series, too!).

We hope you really enjoy this addition to Stathead. If you're interested in a subscription to the service, you can sign up for a free trial here!