Sports Reference Blog

The Greg Spira Baseball Research Award Committee is seeking nominations for the third annual Greg Spira Baseball Research Award. The nomination period opened on January 16 and will remain open through February 15. For more information, please visit www.spiraaward.org

Just wanted to quickly note that we have added Punts, Punting Yards & Yards per Punt to the Team Game Finder in the Play Index. The data is complete back to 1950, but is spotty before that. We apologize to Doug Drinen for adding more punting stats, but encourage users to enjoy the new queries.

Just a note that we've added 3-Point Attempt Rate (3PAr) and Free Throw Attempt Rate (FTr) to our Player Season Finder.

In addition, we've expanded the group of shooting stats that we show by default, now including both eFG% and TS%.

This should help you keep tabs on Kyle Korver's historic sharpshooting...

With the announcement of the 2015 Baseball Hall of Fame class this afternoon, here are some useful links from around the site:

• A complete list of players on the 2015 BBWAA ballot, along with their career WAR and conventional stats
• The ability to isolate 2015 candidates in Play Index Batting and Pitching Season Finder searches (under "Hall of Fame", "on ballot", etc.)
• B-R's Hall of Fame section, featuring historical inductees with career batting and pitching stats
• Voting results for past elections, and a description of the HoF induction process
• HoF ballot history
• Projected future ballots for 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019
• Information on the Hall of Fame from the SABR/Baseball-Reference Encyclopedia
• Special Hall of Fame leaderboards
• Jay Jaffe's WAR-based JAWS Hall of Fame system

Please enjoy these features as you debate with your friends today.

The holiday travel season is a time when many of us revisit our roots and return to our hometowns and home states. With that in mind, we thought now would be a good time to remind folks of a data-rich, but perhaps rarely seen portion of our site: Bio Data

This corner of baseball-reference features various totals by place of birth, place of death and place of burial.

For instance, it's probably no surprise that California leads all states with 47,958 home runs (more than 3 times more than any other state). But did you know that the 28 players born in New Mexico have the best cumulative OPS? Or that managers born in Florida are the most games over .500?

You can also compare various statistics across birth countries.

And our most recent addition is the ability to sort by age at time of death. Virgil Trucks, for instance, was the oldest former player to pass in the state of Alabama.

There's a lot of interesting data to play around with in this section. Next time your team hires a manager, perhaps they should look in the United Kingdom and avoid Australia, for instance. And, above all else, never scout for pitching help in North Dakota.

Happy Holidays, from Sports Reference.

If you've poked around our Draft section recently, you might have a noticed a new link for 'Draft Rights'. We've compiled a list of all held draft rights for players that are currently playing abroad.

The easiest way to view this is to mouse over the 'draft' item in the navigation bar and look for the link:

The selections are sorted by the retaining team, then by the year of selection. We have current year stats for all players that participate in one of the Liga ACB (Spain), LNB Pro A (France), Lega Serie A (Italy), or Greek Basket League, as well as the Euroleague or Eurocup. In these cases, the Current Team column will link to those team's pages and you can view the player's season stats there.

Finally, if that's not enough, on our team pages we've included the current year stats for all players whose draft rights are retained by that team. In some cases, the player will play in a league for which we don't have stats or might not currently be under contract with a team, but most players whose rights are currently held are active and playing in Europe...

The 2014 playoff standings, this may give you some hope. We list the average weighted career AV of a player picked at that spot as of the 2007 draft (so that it's not brought down by recent draft picks who haven't had time to amass career numbers). For instance the #7 overall pick has an average weighted career AV of 39, which is about equivalent to LeRoy Hill. You'll also find a link to all of the seventh overall picks so you can hope your team picks more towards the Champ Bailey end of the spectrum and less towards the Troy Williamson end.

We've added four new measures to goalies on Hockey-Reference.com, Games Started, Quality Starts, Quality Start Percentage, Really Bad Starts. These should be available anywhere you see goalie stats on the site currently, including the Play Indexes.

Games Started (GS) should be fairly obvious, this is the number of games that a goalie started (i.e. did not come in for another pulled goalie).

Quality Starts and Quality Start Percentage were developed by Rob Vollman, and are described in his Hockey Abstract. Here is a brief description, but we encourage you to pick up a copy of his book for additional discussion of this statistic (and many others):

A Quality Start (QS) is when the goalie achieves at least the mean save percentage (for the season) in a game. For the 2013-2014 season that percentage is 91.5%. So, if Tuukka Rask allows only 2 goals on 28 shots (a 92.9% save percentage), that is considered a Quality Start. There is an additional criteria for low shooting games: if a goalie faces 20 or fewer shots, he only needs to get an 88.5% save percentage. The relationship between save percentage and winning percentage (and hence the definition of Quality Start) is shown here (prior to 2009-2010):

Quality Start Percentage (QS%) is simply the number of Quality Starts / Games Started. This gives you a sense of how often the goalie has a Quality Start. A good rule of thumb for this stat is that anything less than 50% is bad, anything over 60% is among the league leaders, and the league average for an NHL regular is about 53.4%. Also, according to Vollman: "Based on the average of every goalie with fewer than ten starts in a season, the average for replacement -level goalies is 42.8% but, in fairness, there is some selectino bias involved in this since playing that poorly will generally limit you to ten start in the first place."¹

Really Bad Starts (RBS) is another stat coined by Vollman that is "awarded" whenever a goalie has a save percentage in a game less than 85%. A team only has a 10% chance of winning when the goalie has save percentage that low.

Where to find these new stats

"So," you are asking, "where do I find these new stats?" They are available anywhere goalie stats have been listed on the site. Due to a limitation of our data source, they are only available going back to the 2007-08 season. So, if you go to a goalie page, you'll see the stats listed in the NHL Standard and NHL Playoffs sections.

Additionally, you can see the league-wide stats on the yearly page for a league. For instance, the 2015 stats are available here.

Finally, the stats are available on the Player Season Finder for goalies and the Player Playoff Finder for goalies.

As always, we welcome any feedback.

We just wanted to quickly note that we have added First Downs (for & against) as a search criteria in the Team Game Finder. Additionally, we have added breakdowns for First Downs by rushing, passing & penalties since 1999 (total First Downs are complete back to 1940). Here's a few examples of these new searches:

• Most First Downs in a game since 1940
• Most First Downs allowed via penalty in a season since 1999
• Most First Downs allowed in a 20+ point win since 1940
• Teams with at least as many turnovers as first downs since 1940
• NFL teams are a combined 76-10 since 1999 when gaining 15+ First Downs via rushes

These searches are just the tip of the iceberg here and we encourage users to dig in.

Users of our Play Index have likely grown accustomed to searching through the Team Game Finder to find things like highest-scoring games or best shooting performances. However, over the years basketball fans (and our users) have grown more statistically savvy and often crave a deeper perspective beyond the raw numbers. For that reason, we have included an advanced box score within our games boxes for some time. Now, we have taken the next step by allowing users to search through these advanced statistics via the Team Game Finder.

To use these tools, you can simply go to the link above and set the parameters you would like for your search. Please note that these advanced stat searches are limited to the era for which we have complete box scores (since 1985-86). Here are some examples:

• Instead of searching for most points in a game, you can now search for most points per 100 possessions in a game. Yes, we find it incredible that the most efficient offensive performance of the last 30 years was authored by the 1997-98 Clippers.
• Instead of searching for the largest point differentials, you can now search for the largest net rating differentials.
• Perhaps you would have felt better about sitting through this beauty pageant if you knew you were witnessing shot-blocking history.
• You can even use the cumulative season games feature to discover that the 1991-92 Nets, led by Chris Dudley, Derrick Coleman & Sam Bowie, had the best offensive rebounding percentage by any team since 1985.
• And that the 2011-12 Thunder had the best block percentage of that era.

Please note that cumulative searches utilizing possession-based metrics will differ slightly from some season totals found on team pages and in the team season finder because our box scores have player turnovers, but not team turnovers, which causes slight variations.