Sports Reference Blog
Getting the Most out of Stathead’s Player Season & Career Finders
Posted by Mike Lynch on June 19, 2020
The Player Season/Career Finders are a great starting place for a first-time Baseball Stathead user. Learning to use these tools will also provide invaluable indoctrination, as the search fundamentals you will utilize are applicable to our other tools, which drill down a little deeper, as well. The basic gist of these tools is that they’re the place to go when you’re looking to place a player’s season or career stats in perspective.
Here are some sample searches you can run using these tools. If you click "See how this search was built" after following the link, you can see how the search form was manipulated in order to achieve the desired results:
Most Stolen Bases in Rookie Season
Most Home Runs in first 5 seasons combined
Most Seasons with 50+ Stolen Bases
Most position player WAR in a season by a teenager
Most 20-HR players on a single team in a season
Most players in a franchise’s history with 100+ Home Runs
Most 40-HR players in a single season in all of MLB
Least WAR by a player with 50+ Home Runs
Players with more Home Runs than Strikeouts in a season
Most Wins in rookie season in Expansion Era
Most Strikeouts in first 7 seasons combined
Most Strikeouts in a season by players with over 10x as many Strikeouts as Walks
Most pitcher WAR in all seasons through Age-25 season in Divisional Era
Most 20-win pitchers on a single team
Franchises with most 100-win pitchers
Seasons with most pitchers with 200+ Strikeouts in MLB
These searches are just to give you an idea of the kinds of searches possible with these tools. There’s practically no limit to the variety of searches you can perform with this tool. If you have any questions about how to use this or requests for search criteria or tools you’d like to see added, please let us know.
Nice and helpful tool.
Hi Guys. I often have "most seasons" questions, like "what player (including pitchers) has the most seasons in the majors, not born in the US." Is there a "seasons" statistical filter? I have used proxies like games or plate appearances, then gone to the players' respective pages and looked to see how may seasons they played, but what I really want is the number of seasons. And is there an inclusive way to bring in both pitchers and players? Am I just missing how to do that? Thanks,
John Odell, Curator of History and Research
Hi John,
If you use the Season & Career Finders (https://stathead.com/baseball/season_finder.cgi?type=b and https://stathead.com/baseball/season_finder.cgi?type=p) at the top of the form you can change the preset from 'Find Single Season Totals' to 'Find Players with Seasons Matching Criteria'. If you set no criteria on such a search, the tool will just generate a list of players with the most seasons, period.
Here's the batting list: https://stathead.com/tiny/YXzVw
And here's the pitching list: https://stathead.com/tiny/eTmCU
The batting list will include many pitchers (if they had a batting line for the season), but not all pitchers since many AL pitchers never had PAs in many seasons.
Please reach out to us at support at stathead dot com should you ever have any questions (we're less likely to catch questions in the blog comments)
Best,
Mike