Sports Reference Blog
Span of Games Searches Enhanced in Play Index Game Finders
Posted by Mike Lynch on September 12, 2014
Just a quick post to announce that we've rolled out an enhancement to the Play Index Game Finders (comprised of Player Batting, Playing Pitching, Team Batting & Team Pitching Game Finders).
Previously, subscribers could customize their searches by a team's first "x" games. Now, you can also select a player's first "x" career games or a span of career games from "x" to "y." Additionally, team games can also be searched using any span from "x" to "y" within a season.
If the above made little sense, here's a few concrete examples of searches that can now be completed:
- Ichiro played for the winning team in 114 of his first 162 games (most by a non-pitcher since 1914).
- Rudy York's 55 HR in his first 162 career games played are the most by any player since 1914.
- Jorge Soler is just the third player since 1914 with an extra-base hit in each of his first five career games.
- Since 1914, only Dwight Gooden had more double-digit K games in his first 83 games than Yu Darvish.
- The most wins by a non-playoff team in the Wild Card Era from Games 82-162 is 52 by the 2006 Angels.
- Phil Niekro won 148 games after his 500th game. That's the most by any pitcher since 1914.
We hope you enjoy these new tools as much as we do. If you're not already a subscriber, but are interested in the Play Index, you can subscribe here for less than a dime per day.
I'm certainly glad for these enhancements. But I would still like to see a feature whereby we could paste PI Results into our own Excel spreadsheets with a single push of a button like we can do on Fangraphs. Also I would like to be able to differentiate stats for players with shared names such as Ken Griffey, George Burns, Frank Thomas , et al.
Hey nice addition - and I second the suggestion for differentiating shared names - maybe just having a column in each results table with a unique player ID so we can sort by them when analyzing data?
Richard, that can be done with the "export" button on the results page. Or you can also just convert to CSV, as well, with the CSV button.
The names are clickable in the results to differentiate players.
Great addition! I can see lots of applications for this. Like what players were most responsible for a team's hot or cold stretch. Or to see if a player over his career wears down in the last 20 games of the season (Cal Ripken for example). This tool could be made even better by adding a "last x games" option.
Thanks, Ken. Maybe one day on your suggestion, but it's significantly easier to count from the start to finish of a career or season than it is do it backwards, which makes it a trickier thing to implement. Thanks for the feedback, though.
@3: Thanks Mike. However using the Export button only puts the page on display into an Excel spreadsheet. On Fangraphs all of the pages,whether on display or not, are placed onto the Excel spreadsheet.
@2: Fangraphs has a player ID number system.
Richard, we intentionally the restrict the length of our outputs.
As for the ID system, the play index is designed for people to look at and use, not for mining data. We hope you can understand our perspective here.
[…] Data via the Baseball-Reference.com Play Index (thanks to a new feature this week) […]
I was trying to find the results for every game 163 (i.e., tie breakers). I set it to 163-163 and regular season, but it still seems like I got postseason games. Can you check this, please.
P.S., love the new feature!
@10: NatsLady: I ran 163-163 and it worked for me, i.e. I got regular season games. Also game 163 is not necessarily a tie-breaker, it could be an additional game due to an earlier tie game.
If this feature were put in the streak finders, it would be soooo great.
@11: I ran the query with 163-163 for "team won the game" (so I wouldn't get both teams) and got 57 occurrences. I added "team made the postseason" (possibly by winning game 163), and got down to 16 occurences. Obviously those might include re-plays of tied games, so that's not the best method. I suppose I will have to check each individual game. Might help if there were a "Games Back" feature, i.e., the team played this game when they were 17 games back in their league/division, or eliminated from the postseason, etc. (If that exists, I apologize.)
So there were dozens of tied baseball games? Must have been in curfew days but after MLB went to the 162-game schedule in 1961 I believe. I don't suppose there is any way to do that with play index? As far as I can tell there is no option for "teams tied".
@13:
You can find tie games but it's best done on a yearly basis. Go to the Game Finder, Batting or Pitching, and select a year and either Home or Away. Select Get Report and then sort by Game Result and scroll down to tie games. You will have to search several Results sheets.