If you haven't read it already, please read Mike Lynch's rundown of our new Stathead/Baseball service. I'm going to lay out some of the background for this change and explain some of the changes.

As I laid out in our post from early March, we are making changes to our Ad-Free and Play Index products.

Here is the thrust of what we said in March.

So we are making some changes. The Play Index for each site will be moving to Stathead.com. Stathead.com will become the center for all of our subscription products. We expect these products to include tools and information beyond just a redesigned set of Play Index tools. This won't happen all at once, but we'll start with baseball and then proceed through the remainder of our sports. Also, we will be ending our ad-free product and instead Stathead memberships will have ad-free built-in. There just aren't enough users to justify a separate ad-free product. These changes will begin this month and continue through April on baseball and then continue with the other sites after that.

If you are a subscriber, we will make every effort to make certain you are happy with the options we provide to convert your ad-free or Play Index subscription over to Stathead including the option of a refund on your subscription. You will be hearing more from us about the changes over the next few weeks as we will email users directly.

If you've looked at the cost of Stathead/Baseball vs the Play Index, you'll notice we've gone from $36/year (+ $20/year for ad-free) to $8/month. I realize this is a significant increase. As I said in my original post, we are extraordinarily reliant on ad revenue. Back in early March this seemed problematic. Now with the complete collapse of the advertising market it has the potential to be lethal. If you don't block our ads, you may have noticed that we now have more ads on our pages. This is in response to the downturn in ad revenue. Sports Reference is doing fine right now, but if we want to continue to succeed and also be aligned with the needs of our users, a healthy stream of subscription revenue is vital.

We also feel our products warrant this price. The only comparable products to our Stathead tools come from Elias and STATS LLC and would cost you $10,000+ a year to subscribe to. You could create your own from Retrosheet data, but that would probably take more than $8/month of your time to maintain.

We are using monthly billing for at least the first few quarters, so that we can monitor more directly the success we are having in recruiting and maintaining subscribers. We have discussed adding an annual billing option in the future.

For the time being, we will be maintaining both the legacy Play Index site (which has been free since the start of March) and the new site, but before too long we will take down the old Play Index site, probably late May. We are also working on converting the other Play Index sites. First will be hockey and then probably basketball after that.

We realize there aren't games being played and that you might be facing your own financial challenges at this time. Therefore, we are offering the first month free for all users. And then, until the leagues start playing games, we will be giving users the option of claiming additional free monthly subscriptions. We'll provide more details on the latter plan as we approach the time for subscriptions to be renewed.

If you are a current subscriber, we will be emailing you with information about how we will be converting your subscription to the new system and of course, we will provide your money back if you are unhappy with the conversion to Stathead that we are offering you. Our goal is to give you a more than fair deal and see you join us on stathead.com.

Please feel free to reach out to us if you have questions or concerns.

--sean forman

Today Baseball Reference is excited to announce the debut of most powerful set of publicly available research tools in the game. We're calling it Stathead and you can sign up for a free month of access here. These tools may be familiar to some of our users from the Play Index. If you're a current Play Index subscriber, your Play Index login will also work on Stathead. You can try it out here. For some background on this project, please see this blog post from Sports Reference president Sean Forman.

Stathead subscriptions provide access to a suite of tools that allow users to run customized searches through 100+ years of career statistics, season statistics, game statistics, splits and play-by-play. These tools are omnipresent in every press box, broadcast booth, agency and front office in Major League Baseball. We're happy to offer access to these professional tools for the low cost of $8/month. Even better, for a limited time we're offering the first month FREE. For more info on Stathead subscriptions, please click here.

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On the Sports Reference sites that cover professional leagues, we have tables that track team averages in various statistics over the league's history so people can get a sense of how stats have gradually changed as their respective sports evolved. You can see examples of this on Basketball Reference and Pro Football Reference.

We've added this feature to College Basketball Reference so you can see the averages for all Division I schools since 1947-48. The Teams column shows the growth of Division I from less than 150 teams in 1950 to 350 teams in 2020. You can also see the gradual rise in teams' usage of the three-pointer, mirroring its growth in the NBA, as well as the gradual decline in turnovers committed over the past three decades.

Please check out the new game averages table at College Basketball Reference, accessible from the site's Seasons Index. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.

Last August Basketball Reference extended its coverage of play-by-play all the way back to 1996-97 (the earliest season for which comprehensive, digitized NBA play-by-play data is available). As we teased at the time, we hoped to use the play-by-play to build out other features. In October we added the ability to break down our box scores since '96-97 by the quarter or half. Today we're happy to announce that many features that we've had available back to 2000-01 for many years have now been extended back to 1996-97.

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The 2020 WNBA Draft will take place tonight, with the New York Liberty owning the first overall pick. Basketball Reference continues to gradually expand its WNBA coverage, and in honor of the occasion we've added the league's draft history. In addition to the rookie draft held yearly, we also have the various dispersal, allocation and expansion drafts performed over the league's history, as well as the Elite draft of 1997. As you can see in the 2019 rookie draft table, we also include college or former international team, as well as their career WNBA stats.

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.

FBref carries a wide array of advanced stats powered by Statsbomb to help give you all the needed context and analyze a player's performance from as many angles as possible. You can look through our blog's FBref tag for a look at the most recent additions we've made to the site, and today we have another mass addition of advanced stats you can now access on player pages. Here's the list:

Passing

- Total distance of completed passes
- Progressive distance of completed passes (distance toward goal)
- Progressive Passes

Pass Types

- live-ball, dead-ball, under pressure
- corner kick types (in-swinging, out-swinging, straight)
- pass height (ground, low, high)
- by body part (left/right foot, head, throw-ins, other)
- pass outcomes (completed, offsides, out of bounds, intercepted, blocked)

Goal and Shot Creation

- Goal Creating Actions (GCA) and Shot Creating Actions (SCA), meaning the two offensive leading to a shot or goal. This includes live-ball passes, dead-ball passes, successful dribbles, shots which lead to another shot, and being fouled

Defensive Actions

- tackles by location on pitch
- pressures, successful pressures, pressures by location on pitch
- blocks (shots, shots saved, and passes)
- clearances
- errors leading to an opponent's shot

Possession

- touches, touches by location on pitch
- carries (total and progressive distance)
- pass receiving (targets and completions)
- miscontrols and dispossessions

Miscellaneous

- Aerials won/lost

From league pages, these stats can be accessed by using the Squad & Player Stats tab between Scores/Fixtures and Nationalities. Of course, you can also see this on player pages if they've played in competitions we have xG data for.

We're excited to see what analysis people can derive from this new information, which is available thanks to the hard work of Statsbomb. You can keep up with the latest additions of statistical coverage and new features here on the Sports Reference Blog, or by signing up for the This Week in Sports Reference mailing list. Feel free to send us any questions or suggestions through our feedback form or FBref's official Twitter account.

With the current state of sports being mostly halted due to coronavirus concerns, the Chinese Professional Baseball League is in a rare position as they had their Opening Day and are planning to fill a regular schedule, albeit without spectators. Baseball Reference tracks various foreign leagues already, and we're happy to report that we will be receiving 2020 CPBL statistics as the season moves along.

The first game of the season was a win for the Uni-President 7-Eleven Lions over the Chinatrust Brothers. The Lions' Opening Day starter on the mound was Ryan Feierabend, who pitched for the Toronto Blue Jays in 2019. Former Seattle Mariner Ariel Miranda was the Brothers' starting pitcher. The only homer of the game was launched by Kai-Wen Zheng, who's been with the Lions since 2016.

We've also filled in CPBL history so now we have player stats for the league since 1990. For example, on Manny Ramirez's page we finally show his .352/.422/.555 campaign in 2013 with the EDA Rhinos (at age 41, no less).

2020 CPBL statistics will be updating daily so keep up with the league on Baseball-Reference! Please let us know if you have any comments, questions or concerns.

When the National League was founded in 1876, one of the inaugural teams was the Cincinnati Reds. They folded a couple of years later, and the team we know as the Reds today would be founded in 1882. Previously, we had the inaugural Reds franchise as lasting to the 1880 season before folding. However, after research presented by Jim Farmer and consultation with John Thorn and Retrosheet, we've decided to mark 1880 Cincinnati as a different franchise named the Stars, with the inaugural Reds having ended after the 1879 season.

Putting it another way:

BEFORE

Cincinnati Reds (old): 1876-1880
Cincinnati Reds (new): 1882-present

NOW

Cincinnati Reds (old): 1876-1879
Cincinnati Stars: 1880
Cinncinati Reds (new): 1882-present

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.

In 2019 Pro-Football-Reference added advanced statistics provided by Sportradar such as air yards, yards after contact, drops, and passer rating allowed among others. We have those available at the season level on player pages, as well as on the game level within box scores. We have now added advanced game logs, accessible from player pages, so you can see an individual's advanced stats at the single-game level.

Here are links to some examples:

Aaron Rodgers

Christian McCaffrey

Richard Sherman

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form or Pro Football Reference's official Twitter account. Thanks for following us!