Sports Reference Blog

Today is one of the greatest days of the sports year: the return of the NBA! As you get ready to watch the Philadelphia 76ers look for revenge against the healthy and improved Boston Celtics, or the latest round of Kevin Durant vs Russell Westbrook, we wanted to remind you of everything we've been up to this offseason.

It's been a very productive summer at Basketball-Reference, and we've rolled out a whole host of new features and stat updates. Since it can be easy to miss during the offseason, we wanted to take this opportunity to update you on all the new stuff you'll find on our site. Read the rest of this entry

Kenny Jackelen has joined Sports Reference as a web developer. Kenny will be working on our baseball site and elsewhere. He brings a long history of software development to Sports Reference. He previously worked as a software developer at Epic, and lives with his family in Minnesota where he cheers on the Twins and will be leading the Joe Mauer for Hall of Fame election bandwagon. He's on twitter at @kennyjackelen.

This brings us to eleven full-time employees. We don't have any open positions at this moment, but any future opportunities will be advertised both here and on social media accounts.

On Baseball-Reference, we include a statistic called WPA (Win Probability Added) in our boxscores. The basic definition of this statistic is the "sum of the differences in win expectancies for each play the player is credited with". You can find a deeper explanation on our Win Expectancy glossary page.

Given we're entering the 2018 postseason, we've decided to add postseason WPA calculations to player pages, postseason series summaries and postseason leaderboards. For an individual player, you will find this in the final column of the player's Postseason Batting and/or Postseason Pitching table. For example, here's a link to Mariano Rivera's table, breaking down his career 11.69 WPA in the postseason. If you go to our MLB Playoffs section, all series summaries will now include WPA in the series stats tables.

Our playoffs section also has career and single-season leaderboards which now have sections for WPA. The aforementioned Mariano Rivera leads all pitchers in career postseason WPA, while David Ortiz occupies the top of the career leaderboard for batting WPA in the postseason.

As a reminder, you can also find more detailed regular season win expectancy and win probability stats for players in their Advanced Stats pages, accessible from the Finders & Advanced Stats tab on player pages. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.

On Basketball-Reference, we have a feature that shows players' peak rankings in the Recruiting Services Consensus Index (RSCI) back to the high school class of 1998. We have now gone ahead and added this feature to our College Basketball Reference site as well. This will be available in a yearly format in the Awards section, and they will also appear where applicable on player pages under their bio section. Team pages will display RSCI rankings in the roster section so it's easier to see which teams had more highly-touted prospects to work with.

To recap, the RSCI service is based on gathering several national recruiting lists and calculating a consensus ranking from there. The rankings found on Basketball-Reference and College Basketball Reference are the final rankings for each year. If you want more information on how the process works, as well as additional data like in-season rankings (fall, pre-summer, etc.), you can refer to RSCIhoops.com.

If you have any questions or suggestions concerning our site's features, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.

This season, the Boston Red Sox have been on quite a tear, with a .683 winning percentage after their September 11th win over Toronto. Now you can compare them with other teams through September 11 using our new Records Through Calendar Day tool in the Play Index. Since 1969 (the beginning of the Divisional Era), the 2018 Red Sox have the fifth-best winning percentage of any team through September 11. Here's a look at the top 10:

Another storyline earlier in the season was how impressive the Angels' 12 wins and the Mets' 11 wins through April 13 were. Of course, since then those two teams have fallen out of the playoff race, but searching for the other teams in recent memory that have racked up wins early in the calendar show that April success is very hit or miss in informing rest-of-season performance. Here's a look at teams in past seasons with double-digit wins through April 13:

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.

Another addition we've made to Pro-Football-Reference's Team Game Finder tool are searches for combined accepted penalties in a game, as well as combined accepted penalty yards in a game. Previously, you could already search penalties on either side, but now you can have a fuller look at games by searching for those combined figures.

This addition comes just as the first game of the 2018 season finished with a combined 26 penalties. While it's a common refrain that Week 1 is particularly penalty-happy due to teams shaking off rust, here's a look at how high Thursday's matchup finished among Week 1 games in the post-merger era (since 1970).

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.

Dan Hirsch joins Sports Reference today as a web developer. If you are a baseball fan, you likely know Dan's name from his work as the creator of The Baseball Gauge. At the Baseball Gauge, he's done a great deal to promote Negro League History, the History of Ballparks, and also the comparison of various sabermetric uber-stats. We are excited to have him on board. Dan lives in Omaha with his family and follows the Tampa Bay Rays and Florida Gators. He's on Twitter at @DanHirsch.

Baseball-Reference is happy to introduce a new Today's Batter vs. Pitcher Matchups page, which will display the top hitting matchups to look out for with the day's projected starting pitchers. You can find this right now by looking at the bottom of the Previews section on Baseball-Reference's front page.

Our default sorting uses an internal weighting so that favorable hitting matchups with a larger sample size rise to the top, such as today's top matchup of Victor Martinez with a .400/.460/.644 line against Danny Duffy over 50 plate appearances, or a dominant .438/.550/1.063 line by Matt Carpenter versus Trevor Williams in just 20 plate appearances. However, if you're interested in raw numbers, like most home runs or lowest OPS and the like, all of the columns are sortable. We also have links to each matchup's individual plate appearances if you want to dive into more specifics, perhaps taking a look at just the most recent games a pitcher and batter have faced off.

This feature was added thanks to a suggestion made during the making of our Stathead newsletter, which is in its first week of release. You can subscribe to our newsletter here. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.

With Pro-Football-Reference's Team Game Finder, you can search for various scoring breakdowns such as most points scored in the first quarter, or scoring margins through a given number of quarters. We have now gotten the Team Game Finder to also search for scoring margins concentrated to a single quarter, as well as second half scoring margins.

One example of a search that's now possible with the Team Game Finder is scoring margin in the third quarter over the course of a full season. Doing that for 2017, it stands out that the 2017 Tennessee Titans were fifth-best in the league in third quarter scoring margin at +42, especially when juxtaposed with a terrible -53 fourth quarter margin.

One example of a newly possible second half scoring margin search involves the 2017 Seattle Seahawks, who were well-known for starting off slow and turning it on after halftime, to the tune of a -53 first half margin and a +87 second half margin. Looking for other -50/+50 combos in NFL history, you can see even more disparate offenses such as the 1989 Green Bay Packers who finished 10-6 thanks to a +92 second half scoring margin, in spite of their -89 margin in the first half of games.

If you have any questions or suggestions about Pro-Football-Reference's Team Game Finder or other parts of the site, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.

Baseball-Reference keeps track of the birthdays of every active MLB player as well as the majority of historical ballplayers on our site. You can access today's birthdays by clicking on the Happy Birthday/Born On This Day link on Baseball-Reference's front page. You could already sort birthdays by birth year, years played in MLB, All-Star Game selections and other basic statistics. But now, we've added our Wins Above Replacement metric as an additional stat to sort by.

Since today's August 24th, let's give a spotlight to the top 10 players born on this day, ranked by WAR:

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.