I've added a selector for specific playoff rounds on the Player Game Finder tool. If you select "Playoffs" under Game Type it will give you a dropdown to select a particular playoff round, should you want to, say, find hat tricks in the Stanley Cup Finals.

2013 Minor League Baseball League Encyclopedia

Our minor league section is off and running today with daily updated stats for every league currently underway.

Japanese (Nippon Pro Baseball-NBP) League History & Current Standings

Baseball-Reference.com currently has full player stats for Japanese baseball updated daily and also back to 2007. Team standings, rosters, and team statistics go all of the way back to the inception of the Central and Pacific Leagues in 1950. Prior to 1950, various seasons may also have roster and standings information.

High School & Secondary School Alumni in the Majors

We've always had the high schools of foreign MLBers in our database, but didn't have the schools listed on our schools directories. Here are the foreign high schools that have had an MLBer.

Now that the season is upon us, here's a reminder about our Play Index Split Finder tools, which we believe will add an incredible new element to your research capabilities:

So, 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.

There have been about 203,500 games in major league history (at least if you count the National Association 1871-1875 which many baseball historians including us view to be a major league). In the course of preparing for this season, I noticed that we had 4,999,745 games played in our appearances table, which meant we'd hit 5m on Opening Day.

This includes all kinds of games played from Cal Ripken's consecutive innings streak to Larry Yount getting the starting nod and getting knocked out while warming up in the bullpen for his only "appearance". We love these corny milestones, so we decided to track it today and figure out just who was #5,000,000. We caught a bit of a break as the way the games were played today we hit #5m near the end of the 4:00 games and before the 7:00 game, so we didn't have to give a starting 18 all of the credit.

Well, it was close but by our measure Wilkin Ramirez edged out Matt Thornton for the 5 millionth appearance in an MLB game. Are we 100% sure this is correct? Yes given our count it was Ramirez, but our count is almost certainly off by dozens if not a hundred or more in either direction. From baseball's distant past recordkeeping especially about defensive subs was notoriously bad, so we are probably missing some games.

But regardless this is the best we can do and it's a fun milestone. Happy Opening Day.