Sports Reference Blog

We're excited to announce another update to Stathead, this time on the Basketball side. As we've done with Baseball, Football, and Hockey, we've made a number of improvements to the Basketball Season Finder, bringing in new features and an overall smoother performance to one of the most popular Stathead tools.

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As the 2022 season begins, we have made some updates to our Wins Above Replacement calculations. You may notice some small changes to figures as you browse the site. As always, you can find full details on how we calculate WAR here. Read the rest of this entry

Since the start of the year, Sports Reference has promoted three team members into director roles.

Jaclyn Mahoney, Director of Operations and Strategic Planning, leads our work on internal operations including our policies, procedures and our strategic planning. She started with SR as a data developer in early 2018.

Adam Darowski, Product Director, will lead Sports Reference's product development and product team. Adam was previously our Head of User Experience joining SR in late 2020.

Mike Lynch, Data Director, will lead Sports Reference's data work. He will lead both our internal data team and also independent contractors and our data vendors. Mike was previously our Stathead product manager. He joined SR in 2014.

Thanks to our partnership with the Seamheads Negro League database, we recently released the first update of Negro League data since the project first launched in June of 2021. This update includes many incremental improvements to player biographical information, including:

-Full names (For example, Mike Woolridge was corrected to Eddie Woolridge)

-Height/weight (For example, Perry Hall now has his height and weight listed)

-Handedness (For example, Curtis Hollingsworth was changed from a right-handed pitcher to left-handed)

-Birth information (For example. Ameal Brooks’ birth year was changed to 1907)

-Death/burial information (For example, added death date and burial information for Willie Nixon)

We’ll also be making additional biographical updates to player school (high school and college), photos, and nicknames).

Along with the biographical updates, many new box scores were uncovered and recorded with some players having significant additions to their player records. Some notable cases include:

-Kansas City Monarchs All-Star Herb Souell saw 186 plate appearances added to his record, the most of any player. Souell did quite well in the newly discovered games, raising his career slash line from .287/.334/.360 (102 OPS+) to .294/.341/.368 (106 OPS+).

-Hall of Famer Willard Brown had 119 plate appearances added, the second most after Souell. His career batting average rose from .347 to .350.

-New Hall of Famer Buck O’Neil was next with 114 new plate appearances. He added two points in batting average and three home runs to his career totals.

-Hilton Smith and Verdell Mathis tied for the most innings added to their records with 69⅓. Smith added four wins and four losses, but saw his ERA drop three points. Mathis, meanwhile, went 6-3 in the new games and shaved 0.13 off his ERA. The vast majority of Mathis’ new innings came from his 1944 All-Star campaign. Now instead of a 1-1 record and 3.78 ERA, he is listed as 7-2 with a 2.85 ERA.

-Jim LaMarque didn’t have as much success in his 65 newly discovered innings. He went 3-6 and saw his ERA climb from 3.17 to 3.37.

Perhaps no player better illustrates the evolution of Negro Leagues data quite like Neil Robinson. Robinson was a long-time outfielder for the Memphis Red Sox for the last dozen years of the Negro American League. Robinson was an All-Star in eight of those seasons. Memphis is one of the teams missing the most box scores, so Robinson’s career record has had relatively few games for someone with so many All-Star appearances.

Robinson was previously credited with 1,164 plate appearances. As part of this update, 243 of those were discovered to not actually be his. The first three years of his career (1930-32) have now been reassigned to Johnny Robinson. Several of Neil’s games were also found, however. 80 plate appearances were added to his record and his OPS+ shot up from 133 to 140 (as a result of both removing Johnny’s games and adding his own).

This update illustrates how we’re very much in the midst of the Golden Age of Negro Leagues research. If you’d like to learn more about the Negro Leagues, we recently published a Resource for Educators (but it’s really for anyone!) to share the incredible story of the Negro Leagues—from the pioneers of Black Baseball in the late 19th century through the formation of the Negro Major Leagues and into the impact of integration on the American and National Leagues. 

We're very excited to announce some updates to the Batting and Pitching Player Season Finders on Baseball Stathead, including a new feature that ranks as one of the most requested ones we've received over the years.

Watch this video to see these amazing new updates in action, or keep reading to learn what's new.

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Thanks to the research of John Turney, we have made a big addition in our coverage of historical awards given to the NFL's top players. With this addition, more context can be given to which players were considered the best in various categories. Here follows a list of the latest additions we have made:

• Associated Press (AP) NFL Comeback Player of the Year vote breakdowns (1963-1966, 1998-present)
• United Press International (UPI) NFL Most Valuable Player vote breakdowns (1951-1969)
• UPI AFL Player of the Year vote breakdowns (1960-1969)
• UPI NFL Rookie of the Year winners (1954-1969 NFL, 1970-1996 NFC/AFC) and vote breakdowns (1954-1969)
• UPI AFL Rookie of the Year winners and vote breakdowns (1960-1969)
• AP AFL Rookie of the Year winners and vote breakdowns (1961-1966)
• AP AFL Offensive Rookie of the Year winners and vote breakdowns (1967-1969)
• AP AFL Defensive Rookie of the Year winners and vote breakdowns (1967-1969)
• AP AFL Coach of the Year winners and vote breakdowns (1961-1969)
• UPI AFL Coach of the Year winners and vote breakdowns (1960-1969)
• AP Assistant Coach of the Year (2014-present)
• NFLPA Alan Page Community Award (formerly known as the Whizzer White Man of the Year) (1966-present)
• AAFC Most Valuable Player (1946-1948)
• Pro Football Writers of America (PFWA) Offensive Player of the Year (1992-present)
• PFWA Defensive Player of the Year (1992-present)
• PFWA Most Improved Player (2000-present)
• PFWA Rookie of the Year (1966, 1975-1991, 2013-present)
• PFWA Offensive Rookie of the Year (1992-present)
• PFWA Defensive Rookie of the Year (1992-present)
• PFWA Coach of the Year (1966-present)
• PFWA Assistant Coach of the Year (1993-present)
• PFWA Executive of the Year (1993-present)
• Sporting News (SN) Player of the Year (1954-2008)
• SN Offensive Player of the Year (2008-present)
• SN Defensive Player of the Year (2008-present)
• SN Rookie of the Year (1955-present)
• SN Coach of the Year (1947-present)
• UPI NFL Coach of the Year (1953-1969 NFL, 1970-1996 NFC/AFC)
• UPI Offensive Player of the Year (1983-1996 NFC/AFC)
• UPI Defensive Player of the Year (1975-1996 NFC/AFC)
• Pro Football Weekly's Player of the Week (1976-2012)

Again, a big thanks to John Turney for collecting and providing this data. Turney's name may be familiar as we have also credited him in our addition of AP award voting breakdown data as well as pre-1982 sacks. If you have any suggestions or feedback, feel free to contact us directly via our feedback form.

As we did with Hockey Stathead a couple weeks ago, our team has rolled out some improvements to the Player Season Finder on Football Stathead. Whereas before, there were three search types, we've now doubled the number of options available to six!

The original options are still there on the top, allowing you to search for single season stats, multiple season or career stats, and players who achieved the search criteria in multiple seasons. However, there's also three new options

Find most players in a season matching criteria

This option shows the number of players in a given season who match the criteria you're searching. So, for example, say you're looking up players who threw for 4,000 passing yards in a season. With this criteria, you could see which season had the most players posting 4,000 or more yards.

Find most players on a team in a season matching criteria

This option will allow you to search for teams that had multiple players accomplish the same statistical feat in a single season. For example, this will let you see the seven teams that had multiple 1,000 yard rushers in the same season. Or you could utilize our historic sack data to see all the teams since 1960 with multiple 10-sack players in a season.

Find most players for a team in combined seasons or careers matching criteria

The final new option gives you the ability to look up which franchises had the most players achieve your given statistical thresholds. Unlike the other two new searches, which involve single seasons, this searches a span of years, whether you want that to encompass the entirety of NFL history or just a decade or era. For example, the Packers had the most 50-TD scorers of any NFL franchise with 15, while the Ravens have had the most Pro Bowlers since 2010, with 32.

If you're not a Stathead Football subscriber, you can have access these new improvements and all the other amazing tools for a month totally free by signing up for a free trial! Or check out our All Sports package to see the great tools available for Baseball, Basketball, and Hockey as well.

Rajeev Lekhwar, SEO Specialist, joined Sports Reference this week. Having worked for almost 2.5 years in the SEO Industry with brands like VWO, he moved to Sports Reference with a goal of keeping the upward trend moving. He is an avid cricket fan. You can find him on Twitter at @panditrajeev22.

We have been hard at work on making structural improvements to our databases so that Stathead will run even more smoothly for our users and we will be able to add many of the most requested new features in the years ahead. Late last year, we kicked off the product improvements from this process with the addition of player filters to many tools and some standardization of filters. Today we’re thrilled to begin the process of standardizing the search types available in our Player Season Finders by rolling out an enhancement to our Hockey Player Season Finder. Read the rest of this entry

Over the past three months the Sports Reference team has grown significantly. We have made seven new hires in a variety of roles.

​​Nicolas Westin, DevOps Engineer, joined Sports Reference towards the end of 2021. He previously worked at Redhorse Corporation as a front-end engineer. He graduated from Northeastern University in Boston. He is a big Wizards fan, and a casual Cubs fan.

Aidan Jackson-Evans, Customer Success, joined Sports Reference at the start of 2022. Originally from the UK, Aidan now lives in New England. He enjoys baseball history and trivia, and has written biographies for the SABR BioProject. He is a fan of the San Francisco Giants and the England national football team. Follow him on Twitter at @ajacksonevans.

Adela Armstrong-Spielberg, Engineering Support Coordinator, joined Sports Reference at the start of 2022. She was born and raised in the DC area, and now lives in Los Angeles after attending UCLA. She's growing into a Dodgers and Rams fan, but she would like to reassure her friends and family back east that she will always root for the Nats and Ravens first.

Ryan Walsh, Social Media Coordinator, joined Sports Reference at the start of 2022. Hailing from the great state of New Jersey, Ryan previously managed social media for Temple University and the Cape May-Lewes Ferry, among others. He remains an ardent defender of the 76ers Process, and is also a fan of NASCAR and the WNBA. You can find him on Twitter at @RyanLWalsh.

Sara Halloran, Test Engineer, joined Sports Reference at the start of 2022. She attended Northwestern University and previously worked as a data scientist for the Milwaukee Brewers, during which time she became a casual Bucks and Brewers fan. Now Philadelphia-based, she is originally from New Jersey and also supports the Mets and NY/NJ Gotham FC, as well as Tottenham Hotspur and the United States women’s national soccer team.

Connor Zielinski, Social Media Coordinator, joined Sports Reference at the start of 2022. Growing up never more than 10 miles away from a Wawa, Connor grew up on the baseball fields with Taney Little League and Philly sports fandom. Connor previously worked for the Tampa Bay Lightning and Red Bull while down in Tampa for school. Catch up with him on Twitter: CTZee_.

Sam Nipatnantaporn, Digital Marketing Manager, joined Sports Reference at the start of 2022. She previously worked as a marketing manager at the Boston Red Sox and Worcester Red Sox. Originally from Nantucket Island, she now resides in Cambridge, MA and is a fan of all things Boston sports and mascots. Follow her on Instagram at @wsamnipat.

Join us in welcoming Nicolas, Aidan, Adela, Ryan, Sara, Connor, and Sam!