In just a couple of weeks, Rob Manfred will announce that the Minnesota Twins are on the clock, kicking off the 2017 MLB Draft. There's no shortage of talent in this year's draft pool: one MLB.com writer suggested Hunter Greene might be the best right-handed high school pitcher ever (no HS RHP has ever been drafted #1 overall), while Baseball America thinks Kyle Wright from Vanderbilt University has a better shot of going to the Twin Cities with the top pick.

For the Twins and other teams with high picks, like the Cincinnati Reds, San Diego Padres, and Tampa Bay Rays, this is a big decision. For an example of what nailing a couple of top picks can do for a franchise, just look at the Washington Nationals. It wasn't too long ago that the Nats were a joke, failing to break even 60 wins in 2008 and 2009. However, those records resulted in back-to-back #1 overall picks in the 2009 and 2010 MLB Drafts, which they used on Stephen Strasburg and Bryce Harper. Now, led by those two stars, as well as 2012 first rounder Anthony Rendon, the Nats have the second best record in the National League and lead the majors in runs scored.

It can be hard to evaluate a draft in the moment or even after just a year or two. Unlike the NBA Draft and NFL Draft, where many of the best players are able to make an immediate contribution, it can take a few years for a baseball draftee to work their way up through the minor league system and have an impact on the major league level. Read the rest of this entry

When we launched our new site three months ago, one of the casualties was the neutralized stats tables we printed on player pages. Those tables were originally built using code that had grown increasingly unwieldy and were not something we'd be able to adequately maintain moving forward. That said, we're happy to announce that we have rebuilt these tables and added new features, as well.

Read the rest of this entry

Exciting news for basketball fans; with the 2017 WNBA season underway, the WNBA section of our site is also up-and-running for this season. If you want to keep up with the Los Angeles Sparks' attempt to defend their title or check on how Elena Della Donne is doing in Washington, just go to the WNBA section of Basketball-Reference (there's a link on every page in the footer).

We'll be updating the site weekly on Mondays. Also statheads should note that, in addition to the standard box score numbers, we also have advanced stats, including Offensive/Defensive Rating, Win Shares, PER, and more.

We're happy to announce that we have added box scores for every Stanley Cup Playoff game in NHL history (back to 1918) to Hockey Reference. With this addition, we've also been able to build game logs to player pages covering their entire postseason career. This has also allowed us to create cumulative box scores for every playoff series in history (for example, the 1975 Stanley Cup Final)

Read the rest of this entry

We have rolled out an update to our search function on Baseball Reference, Basketball Reference, Pro Football Reference and Hockey Reference. If you type "random" or "zz" into our search forms on those sites, you will be taken to a random page. We have also added a random page tool to the frivolities menus on those four sites (Baseball, Basketball, Football, Hockey).

Read the rest of this entry