The Player Season/Career Finders are a great starting place for a first-time Baseball Stathead user. Learning to use these tools will also provide invaluable indoctrination, as the search fundamentals you will utilize are applicable to our other tools, which drill down a little deeper, as well. The basic gist of these tools is that they’re the place to go when you’re looking to place a player’s season or career stats in perspective.
Here are some sample searches you can run using these tools. If you click "See how this search was built" after following the link, you can see how the search form was manipulated in order to achieve the desired results:
Stathead is a powerful suite of tools that allow you to use our websites's massive database of statistics to research and answer questions. With a Stathead subscription, you can run customized searches through 100+ years of career statistics, season statistics, game statistics, splits and play-by-play.
You can try Stathead for free for a month, and we want to make sure that you get the most out of both your trial and your subscription. So we've created a video series that will explain what each research tool is and how you can get the most out of it! This is Stathead Tutorials!
There's been much debate about the greatest players in NBA history of late. One of the most difficult things about ranking players in a league with 70+ years of history is that the game has changed a lot over the years. Sure, some of it has to do with the skill and quality of the players. But some of it also has to do with the quality of the balls, the floors, the rims, the training, the travel, the accommodations, available nutrition and pretty much any other variable you can think of. For a better idea of how the league has changed over time, please see this table of league averages for each season in the history of the NBA. As you can see, 2019-20 is the fifth straight season in which a new league-wide eFG% record has been set. There are clearly things at play here beyond just player improvement. Though today's players are certainly more skilled than the ones that produced a league-wide 27.9 FG% in 1946-47 (the first year of the NBA's 'official' forerunner the BAA, which was objectively worse than the league it eventually merged with, the NBL).
To help bring a bit of objectivity to cross-era comparisons, we have added an Adjusted Shooting table to all player, team and season pages. These tables will show a player's shooting percentages and tendencies, as well as league-wide percentages and tendencies, and then scale them. Like OPS+ on our baseball site it will be scaled so that 100 represents a league-average shooter. 125 is 25% better than average and 75 is 25% worse than average. These figures are obtained by taking the player's shooting percentage, dividing it by the league-wide shooting percentages and then multiplying it by 100. So 125 doesn't mean a player was 25 percentage points above average, but 25 percent above average. We are also publishing adjusted versions of 3-point Attempt Rate and Free Throw Rate to give a better idea of how often the player shot 3s or got to the line relative to their era.
Additionally, we have calculated Field Goal Points Added and True Shooting Points Added to show how many points each player scored above or below what a league average player would have scored given an equal number of field goal attempts or true shot attempts, respectively. This is to show which players combined volume and efficiency (or those that combined volume with inefficiency, for that matter).
In February, our pro basketball site incorporated Daniel Myers' BPM 2.0, the update to the classic Box Plus Minus measurement. We have now completed that update for College Basketball Reference as well. BPM 2.0 aims to estimate a player's performance relative to league average by using a player's box score information and his team's overall performance.
BPM 2.0 will appear on College Basketball Reference in the same places you found old BPM, and is available back to the 2010-11 season. Leaderboards have been updated to reflect the new measurement. BPM 2.0 also allows for game-level calculations, which means that our box scores since the 2010-11 season will now include BPM 2.0 in the Advanced table.
FBref covers basic and advanced statistics for dozens of domestic leagues around the world, with the English Premier League, Spanish La Liga, German Bundesliga, Italian Serie A and French Ligue 1, commonly referred to as the "Big 5", being the most visited league stat pages. Up to this point, if you wanted to compare statistics between the leagues, you'd need to have a tab open for each one.
That will no longer be as necessary now that FBref has added combined Big 5 stat pages, with a combined league table, leaderboards across the 5 leagues and stat registers that include players who've played in any of the leagues. In the Player Standard Stats section, sorting by G+A-PK per 90 minutes gives you Jadon Sancho (Bundesliga), Kylian Mbappé (Ligue 1) and Lionel Messi (La Liga) at the top this season. In the Squad Goal and Shot Creation section, you can see Bayern Munich and Dortmund are leading all Big 5 teams in Goal Creating Actions per 90 minutes.
Baseball-Reference's Awards index covers all the major awards MLB has established over the years. In the past, we had some awards combined, such as MVP and Cy Young, on the same page. We've recently made a change to our Awards page so that each award is now given its own table, which allows for providing more statistical context than we previously did in these sections. For example, here's a link to our updated Cy Young Award page; you'll notice that you can now sort by the different basic pitching stats, if you wanted to take a quick glance at highest ERA (LaMarr Hoyt in 1983) or most innings pitched (Steve Carlton in 1972).
Stathead is a powerful suite of tools that allow you to use our websites's massive database of statistics to research and answer questions. With a Stathead subscription, you can run customized searches through 100+ years of career statistics, season statistics, game statistics, splits and play-by-play.
You can try Stathead for free for a month, and we want to make sure that you get the most out of both your trial and your subscription. So we've created a video series that will explain what each research tool is and how you can get the most out of it! This is Stathead Tutorials!
Stathead is a powerful suite of tools that allow you to use our websites' massive database of statistics to research and answer questions. With a Stathead subscription, you can run customized searches through 100+ years of career statistics, season statistics, game statistics, splits and play-by-play.
You can try Stathead for free for a month, and we want to make sure that you get the most out of both your trial and your subscription. So we've created a video series that will explain what each research tool is and how you can get the most out of it! This is Stathead Tutorials!
The Play Index first launched on Baseball-Reference.com over thirteen years ago and has been one of the most used research tools for baseball ever since. Many of these tools have been recreated on our Basketball, Football, Hockey and College sites over the last twelve years, and, likewise, they have earned a dedicated user base of their own. Our Baseball Play Index was always a subscription product, but we never applied that model to the other sports' tools. It was always our intention to charge for these products, but for a variety of reasons that never happened.
The Sports Reference sites have continued to grow in traffic and advertising revenue over that time to the extent that the Play Index and our ad-free options are a very, very small portion of our revenue. Most of that is on us, as we have not done a great job of promoting and marketing tools that are highly valued by a dedicated group of users. The Basketball, Football, Hockey, and College Play Indexes represent well under 1% of our revenue. In addition, the Play Index tools are complicated to maintain and manage, and quite frankly are a money-loser for us at this time. It's well past time for us to re-think how these tools are positioned within our constellation of sites.
While Sports Reference is doing well overall, I'm not comfortable with having so much of our revenue dependent on advertising. We are very beholden to search engines continuing to send us traffic, and likewise the ad market can be fickle and difficult for a small to medium size operator to navigate. With the economic downturn currently taking place, our ad revenue is down significantly as well.
In addition, advertising on the sites does not make it easier for you to answer the questions you have. This is our primary mission. We maintain a relatively low level of advertising on the sites (at least compared to your regional newspaper), and we are loathe to add additional advertising units or more intrusive units. Some of you may use an ad blocker, in which case we are making no money from your use of the site at all, and the audience for our ad-free product has proven to be very small as well.
A subscription model aligns our interests much better with our users' interests as well. I realize that users are being asked to sign up for lots of subscriptions these days, but we feel the tools within the Play Index are so specialized and useful that they warrant a paywall.
So we are making some changes. The Play Index for each site will be moving to Stathead.com. Stathead.com will become the center for all of our subscription products. We expect these products to include tools and information beyond just a redesigned set of Play Index tools. This won't happen all at once, but we've started with baseball and are proceeding through the remainder of our sports over the next two months. Also, we have ended our dedicated ad-free product and instead Stathead memberships will have ad-free built-in. There just aren't enough users to justify a separate ad-free product. These changes will began in April for baseball and will be followed by Hockey in May, Basketball and probably Football in June and then College over the summer.
You can try out Stathead Baseball now. If you do a little digging, you will see that we are charging $8/month for a single sport and subscribing to all sports will cost $16/month. We realize moving from free to $8/month is a big ask, but we feel the tools provide a great deal of value and also believe that we can't continue to support the products without a viable revenue stream.
During the deployment of these changes, the existing Play Indexes will remain free.
The Pro Football Hall of Fame 2010s All-Decade Team was announced a while back, and Pro Football Reference now lists the team in its Awards section, as well as in the Awards table on player pages for those who were selected. This year's All-Decade team had the peculiarity of being released without a first-team/second-team distinction, the first time that's happened since the 1960s All-Decade team. With that, our Hall of Fame Monitor also made a small change to its methodology to accommodate this; you can read the formula used for that here.
Here's a look at some of the more interesting impacts All-Decade selections might have on Hall of Fame cases:
Running Backs: Adrian Peterson and Frank Gore were already on their way to Canton, but All-Decade selections greatly help LeSean McCoy, Marshawn Lynch and Darren Sproles' future cases. McCoy's HOFm score is now at 80.76, moving him ahead of current top eligible RB Roger Craig. Lynch's score is now 68.94, which puts him just below the lowest-scoring HOFers who played in the 1980s or later. Sproles took a major jump to 64.4 thanks to making the All-Decade team on offense and special teams, and now finds himself in the range of borderliners Ricky Watters and Shaun Alexander.
Wide Receiver: This position is a little more scattered in terms of predicting who ends up making it in, but Calvin Johnson, Julio Jones and Antonio Brown will appreciate having their names in here. Considering his off-the-field meltdown, Brown is the strangest HOF case, but on paper his HOFm score is now at 89.12, which puts him right next to HOFer Art Monk and within sniffing distance of Michael Irvin.
Defensive Line: Calais Campbell gets some help for his HOF case with this selection, putting himself in the range of the highest borderline defensive ends like L.C. Greenwood and Neil Smith.
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