Sports Reference Blog

Archive for December, 2014

Browse our Biographical Data

22nd December 2014

The holiday travel season is a time when many of us revisit our roots and return to our hometowns and home states. With that in mind, we thought now would be a good time to remind folks of a data-rich, but perhaps rarely seen portion of our site: Bio Data

This corner of baseball-reference features various totals by place of birth, place of death and place of burial.

For instance, it's probably no surprise that California leads all states with 47,958 home runs (more than 3 times more than any other state). But did you know that the 28 players born in New Mexico have the best cumulative OPS? Or that managers born in Florida are the most games over .500?

You can also compare various statistics across birth countries.

And our most recent addition is the ability to sort by age at time of death. Virgil Trucks, for instance, was the oldest former player to pass in the state of Alabama.

There's a lot of interesting data to play around with in this section. Next time your team hires a manager, perhaps they should look in the United Kingdom and avoid Australia, for instance. And, above all else, never scout for pitching help in North Dakota.

Happy Holidays, from Sports Reference.

Posted in Announcement, Baseball-Reference.com, Data, Features, History | Comments Off on Browse our Biographical Data

Draft Stashes List and Stats

17th December 2014

If you've poked around our Draft section recently, you might have a noticed a new link for 'Draft Rights'. We've compiled a list of all held draft rights for players that are currently playing abroad.

The easiest way to view this is to mouse over the 'draft' item in the navigation bar and look for the link:

draft_stash_link

 

The selections are sorted by the retaining team, then by the year of selection. We have current year stats for all players that participate in one of the Liga ACB (Spain), LNB Pro A (France), Lega Serie A (Italy), or Greek Basket League, as well as the Euroleague or Eurocup. In these cases, the Current Team column will link to those team's pages and you can view the player's season stats there.

draft_stash_page2

 

Finally, if that's not enough, on our team pages we've included the current year stats for all players whose draft rights are retained by that team. In some cases, the player will play in a league for which we don't have stats or might not currently be under contract with a team, but most players whose rights are currently held are active and playing in Europe...

draft_rights_team

 

 

Posted in Announcement, Basketball-Reference.com, CBB at Sports Reference, Draft | 1 Comment »

2015 First Round Picks Up

16th December 2014

The 2014 playoff standings, this may give you some hope. We list the average weighted career AV of a player picked at that spot as of the 2007 draft (so that it's not brought down by recent draft picks who haven't had time to amass career numbers). For instance the #7 overall pick has an average weighted career AV of 39, which is about equivalent to LeRoy Hill. You'll also find a link to all of the seventh overall picks so you can hope your team picks more towards the Champ Bailey end of the spectrum and less towards the Troy Williamson end.

Posted in Announcement, Pro-Football-Reference.com | Comments Off on 2015 First Round Picks Up

Games Started, Quality Starts on Hockey-Reference.com

9th December 2014

We've added four new measures to goalies on Hockey-Reference.com, Games StartedQuality Starts, Quality Start Percentage, Really Bad Starts. These should be available anywhere you see goalie stats on the site currently, including the Play Indexes.

Games Started (GS) should be fairly obvious, this is the number of games that a goalie started (i.e. did not come in for another pulled goalie).

Quality Starts and Quality Start Percentage were developed by Rob Vollman, and are described in his Hockey Abstract. Here is a brief description, but we encourage you to pick up a copy of his book for additional discussion of this statistic (and many others):

Quality Start (QS) is when the goalie achieves at least the mean save percentage (for the season) in a game. For the 2013-2014 season that percentage is 91.5%. So, if Tuukka Rask allows only 2 goals on 28 shots (a 92.9% save percentage), that is considered a Quality Start. There is an additional criteria for low shooting games: if a goalie faces 20 or fewer shots, he only needs to get an 88.5% save percentage. The relationship between save percentage and winning percentage (and hence the definition of Quality Start) is shown here (prior to 2009-2010):

Save % Win %
0.913 or better 0.777
0.900 to 0.912 0.536
0.885 to 0.899 0.503
0.884 or worse 0.246

Quality Start Percentage (QS%) is simply the number of Quality Starts / Games Started. This gives you a sense of how often the goalie has a Quality Start. A good rule of thumb for this stat is that anything less than 50% is bad, anything over 60% is among the league leaders, and the league average for an NHL regular is about 53.4%. Also, according to Vollman: "Based on the average of every goalie with fewer than ten starts in a season, the average for replacement -level goalies is 42.8% but, in fairness, there is some selectino bias involved in this since playing that poorly will generally limit you to ten start in the first place."¹

Really Bad Starts (RBS) is another stat coined by Vollman that is "awarded" whenever a goalie has a save percentage in a game less than 85%. A team only has a 10% chance of winning when the goalie has save percentage that low.

Where to find these new stats

"So," you are asking, "where do I find these new stats?" They are available anywhere goalie stats have been listed on the site. Due to a limitation of our data source, they are only available going back to the 2007-08 season. So, if you go to a goalie page, you'll see the stats listed in the NHL Standard and NHL Playoffs sections.

Additionally, you can see the league-wide stats on the yearly page for a league. For instance, the 2015 stats are available here.

Finally, the stats are available on the Player Season Finder for goalies and the Player Playoff Finder for goalies.

As always, we welcome any feedback.

Posted in Advanced Stats, Announcement, Hockey-Reference.com | 2 Comments »