PFR user Oscar asked today about whether we had a football version of Baseball-Reference's Hall of Fame standards using Weighted Career Approximate Value. To that end, I analyzed weighted career AV data on retired players who started their careers in 1950 or later. Here was a breakdown of all Hall of Famers in that group:

Using a regression formula, we can also say what your odds of making the Hall are at any given Weighted Career AV threshold:

We've added a Team Game Finder for hockey to find single games (Which game had the most penalty minutes?), cumulative season stats (Which team led the league in power play goals in the 1995-1996 season?), cumulative multi-season stats (Which team has the most losses when scoring 5+ goals since 1980?) and many more.

The search features basic game stats since 1917 and more specific stats (shots, power play goals, short handed goals, etc.) since 1987, so you can create custom searches to your heart's content. Let us know if you have any issues, comments, or questions.

We've never included Spring Training stats on the site before, but decided to add our own take this year, so we now have spring training stats on the player and team pages and on a league register page, so you can see every player in camp on one page.

One hard thing about spring training is that you've got a very wide variety of players in camp. Veteran major leaguers, AAA, AA, and even low-A ball players. A player hitting .400/.500/.600 against A-ball competition is a lot different than one who does that against MLBers (though truth be told the sample sizes are so small as to not tell us much definitively). To give you a feel for the level of competition we've provided an OppQual column that is 1-10. Each opponent for each PA for that batter or pitcher is graded between 1 and 10 based on the level or average level (weighted by IP or PA) they played at last year.

• 10 - MLB
• 8 - AAA
• 7 - AA
• 5 - High A (Cali or Carolina)
• 4 - Full-Season A (Midwest and SALLY)
• 1.5 to 3 - Rookie or Short-season
• 1 - for pitchers if the opposing batter is a pitcher

So a player over 9 is facing mostly MLB guys while someone under 9 is facing mostly minor leaguers. Players like John Lackey in 2012 or Yu Darvish in 2011 who did not play in an MLB affiliated league are simply excluded from the rating.

Player Pages - Spring Training Stats appear at the top of major and minor league player pages.

Team Stats: 2013 Atlanta Braves Spring Training, these are all linked from the site front page.

League-wide Stats: Batting Register and Pitching Register. These tables are sortable, so you can look up current leaders if you like.

Here's a neat tool that lets you find every player in NFL history (since 1950) to wear a certain number... It can even allow you search by team.

Player Twitter Accounts - Baseball-Reference.com

We just launched a set of team-centered twitter pages. These summarize all of the twitter feeds we have for players by their membership on the 40-man roster. Clicking on subscribe will allow to follow all of the players with one click, and we'll do the updating for you.

Player pages now have expanded assists totals going back to the 1967-68 season, located in the NHL Standard stats section of each page. Compiled from Hockey Summary Project boxscore data, the data breaks out short-handed, power play, and even strength assists, so you can learn that Wayne Gretzky had 15 short-handed assists in 1985-86.

We had these in beta for a few weeks, but now we're ready to officially release the following Play Index Split Finder tools:

What can you do with these?

Each is set up in a similar fashion, so let's use the Player Batting Split Finder as an example. For starters, you can tell it to find Individual Seasons, Totals Spanning Seasons, or Career Totals, depending on your preference, and set the usual range of PI options -- year ranges, teams, age, season, active/retired, etc. The big attraction of this finder, though, is on the right side of the form, which allows you to choose split types and stats to sort on.

The split types are any of those which you can find on a player's split's page, and you can just sort on those if you want. For instance, here are the lefty batters who had the most HR against left-handed pitchers in the last 30 years.

Even cooler is the ability to select the "Compare this split to the player's season/career totals" option, which calls up a dialog where you can set a minimum overall requirement (playing-time or otherwise) and the choice to sort by the percentage of the player's total within the given split. An example of this would be, among batters in the last 30 years with 30+ HR in the whole season, who had the highest percentage of their HRs in the second half of the season.

There's also an option to find the difference between the player's stat in the split and his overall number, which works best for rate stats. For example, which hitters had the biggest boost in OPS vs "power pitchers" compared to their overall career OPS?

The Pitching Split Finder works the same way, but it also adds the option to view the output in the form of traditional pitching stats (IP, ERA, etc), the opponent's batting line, or both.

The team finders are similar in function, allowing you to find things like the teams who got the most IP from pitchers age 36 or older, or teams whose leadoff hitters created the highest percentage of their runs.

Needless to say, these examples barely scratch the surface of the kinds of queries you can run with these new tools, so please play around with it and have fun finding incredibly obscure splits! And as always, email us with your questions, comments, and bug reports.

We are spinning up a new database server (transitioning from unitas => rice (Jerry)) and will have what I expect to be a minute or so of downtime as we make the switch. I expect to flip the switch at 2:30 pm.

We've added a lot of new data outputs to go along with our uniform data.

Franchise Summaries - for each franchise we show every player to wear a number for that franchise. Here are the Red Sox and links to every other franchise.

Yearly Summaries for the League - for each season since 1929, we show the players to wear the number for that season. Here is the 2012 season. It's under the "Other" tab on the yearly league pages.

All-time and Year-by-Year by Number - In our Frivolities section we added tools to search for every player to wear a number and clicking on a year there will show you a particular season/number combination with stats. Here is everyone to wear 00.

All Retired Numbers - also in frivolities, we show every MLB retired number.

Example Color Schemes - also in frivolities, we show every MLB uni color scheme since 1929.

With Spring Training just around the corner, be sure to make the Baseball-Reference Play Index a part of your baseball experience for the 2013 season!

What's the Play Index? It's a set of research tools that allow you to create customizable queries on our database, save the results, and share them with others. Using the PI, you can:

• Search full-season or multi-year totals to find your own custom leaderboards - Look at the entire history of baseball from 1871-2012 with every year, team, and position available, or filter the results in a vast number of ways: by specific years, by age, by first six seasons or last ten seasons, by American League only, by Cubs only, by switch-hitters, by catchers, by outfielder or infielder, by year of debut, but active or retired, by Hall of Famer, by height and weight, by living or deceased, or by a range of common statistical categories. Then sort the results by any common statistic, by the teams with the most players matching that category, by players with the most seasons matching that category, or by most recent, youngest, oldest, final year, or year of debut, and others.
• Search player game totals - Filtering on any of a dozen or more choices, search for games on a single player level, or on any batter from 1916-2012, or on any pitcher. The same can be done for Team Batting or Team Pitching Totals.
• Search player games looking for the most consecutive games matching a particular set of criteria - This can be done either on a single player level or on any batter in the last 97 years or on any pitcher. The same can be done for Team Batting or Team Pitching Streaks.
• Search the records of a specific player - Output a detailed summary and play-by-play list of all events of a specific type from a single year or an entire career. For example, you can see all of Harmon Killebrew's triples or even his outs to the second baseman.
• Search Batter vs. Pitcher Matchups - This tool presents a complete sortable list of batter or pitcher with totals for every opponent they faced by career or by year. Clicking on the player's name will lead you to a detailed output of their head-to-head plate appearances.
• ...And more!

Personal Subscriptions to the Play Index still cost just $36 for a year, $6 for a month, or $2 for 24 hours. Subscriptions may only be used by a single user, and there are discounts for users sponsoring at least $35 in pages.

Organizational Subscriptions can be set up for either an unlimited number of users ($600/year), or for up to five users ($125/year).

There are Two Steps to Subscribe to the Play Index:

1. Login to or create a Sports-Reference.com account (the same account used to sponsor pages).
2. Already logged in (or just created an account)? Go to our subscription page to sign up.

Our Always-Available Free Trial: Non-subscribers can use the PI's features as much as you like. However, your outputs will be restricted to a limited number of results.

The Play Index comes with a money back guarantee. We will gladly return the unused portion of any Play Index Subscription should you be dissatisfied with the Play Index.

So go ahead, give the Play Index a try -- we're confident that once you start using it, you'll wonder how you ever got along without it.