You may have heard that the AL MVP is between a player who may win the Triple Crown and a player who most (if not all) of the stathead-friendly sites say is the best player in the league this year. There have been a number of articles being written by veteran writers about how stupid WAR is--complaining it's incomprehensible, stupid, meaningless, dumb, formulas are different, etc. etc.
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PI Player Streak Finder

As you might have noticed, NFL officials have been in the news a bit lately. Because of this, we've just put up NFL officials pages from 2000 through the current season, featuring everyone from the most popular man in Green Bay to a certain workout enthusiast. On each page you'll find season totals which include a breakdown of how his crews tended to call games vs. league averages and below that, complete game logs dating back through the 2000 season.

PFR Draft Finder

Player Similarity Scores

I admit I'm not a big fan of the decision to withdraw Cabrera from the batting title consideration. He has the highest average based on the rules and regardless of what he was using those hits occurred on the field. Since Baseball-Reference.com is pretty much all about what happens on the field, it puts us in a bit of a bind as Cabrera irrefutably (at least as it stands now) has the highest batting average in the league, but the league will not recognize him as the batting champion.

Looking to historical precedent, it's clear to me that we should now and should continue to list Cabrera with the highest batting average in the 2012. However, it shouldn't surprise you that there have been many other cases, though none recently, where the batting titleist at the time and person we currently recognize with the highest batting average don't match up.

The most "recent" case is 1910 where Lajoie had a higher batting average than Cobb, but due to various shenanigans Cobb was given the batting title (though both got the winner's promised automobile).

Likewise in 1902, we list Lajoie ahead of Ed Delahanty. The issues are even larger on the pitching side as the requirements have shifted around before settling on 1 IP per scheduled game (I've seen books citing minimum 10 complete games or 45 innings pitched). Even the 1IP/Gm can cause issues as in 1981 Steve McCatty was the recognized ERA Champion, even though in our opinion Sammy Stewart and Dave Righetti had better ERA's.

To handle this, we've decided to list ERA Leaders and BA leaders as they currently are in the leaderboard pages. These will be updated and change as new data becomes available and we will be apolitical as much as possible in how we draw these leaderboards. This is essentially the status quo.

In addition, though, we will add as awards the Batting Champion and Pitching Champion which will represent the player recognized at the end of the year as the top hitter and top pitcher. And we will strive to denote on each when the winners of the two do not match up.

This way folks can see who was best on the field and who was recognized as such at the time when the season ended.

Minor-League Section

As the NFL's refereeing has been under the microscope lately, we've just added penalty tables for the 2000 through 2012 seasons. Each page lists every penalty that was called each week (and not declined or offset by another penalty) in a chart that includes total yards and the average weekly penalty count, so you can see that we've gone from roughly 168 penalties per week in 2008 to nearly 210 per week in 2012 -- more than 4 extra flags per game.

This is a re-posting of an entry I made back in May, but it seems useful to dredge up again now that we're in the early stages of the NFL season. To quote myself:

Tangotiger asked me to do some research for him with regard to predicting end-of-season records from a team's current record. Since it took a little time to put together, I figured I'd post the complete findings here.

The table below is based on every NFL season from 1988-2011 -- it lists every "season start" that a team had over that span (i.e., 4-1 through 5 games, etc.), and the average end-of-season winning percentage (counting ties as half-wins) for teams that started that way. I also showed the number of wins per 16 games to make it a little more understandable than a raw winning percentage.

As an added bonus this time around, I also included the number of instances of each record to start a season since 1988. Many of these will have more predictive power than others, since the sample sizes for some of the more unique late-season combinations can be quite small.

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PFR Player Name Linker / Add your Site to our Player Newsfeeds

As you may have seen, we have newsfeeds on the PFR player pages, showing the latest player news from KFFL, injury reports and links to relevant PFR blog posts. If you have a blog or website with an RSS feed you can add your site to relevant player pages as well. Our Player Linker Tool will take your blog posts as you've written them and run them through a program and add links to PFR player pages where appropriate. So while you don't have the resource to create your own player pages for your site, you can treat us as your site's statistics partner, linking Eli Manning's name to our stats or any player all the way back to Y.A. Tittle and Otto Graham.

If the links then appear in your rss feed and you let us know to look for them, we'll pull them out of your feed and then link back to you from Eli's page, or Otto Graham's or whomever you link to.

If you help your users find our great content, we'll help our users find yours. And best of all it is all automated except for one click of an easy-to-install bookmarklet. Check the Player Newsfeeds page for details. This link share will also work for tables you share using the SHARE tooltip found above every stats table on the site.