Sports Reference Blog

Archive for July, 2020

Introducing Basketball’s Premier Research Tool: Stathead

27th July 2020

Today Basketball Reference is excited to announced the debut of the most powerful set of publicly available research tools on the hardwood. We're calling it Stathead Basketball and you can sign up for a free month of access here. Most of these tools may be familiar to some of our users from the Play Index. But Stathead also comes with the first of what will be many new additions: The Player Quarter Finder, which allows users to find the best performance in a quarter, or groups of quarters, since 1996-97.
Read the rest of this entry

Posted in Announcement, Basketball-Reference.com, Play Index, Stathead | Comments Off on Introducing Basketball’s Premier Research Tool: Stathead

WNBA Splits Now on Basketball Reference

24th July 2020

The 2020 WNBA season will begin this weekend, and Basketball Reference continues to bolster our coverage of this league, this time with the addition of player splits. This includes splits by season as well as career splits, accessible from any player's main page. Using Emma Meesseman's career splits as our example, you can see this includes home/road splits, starter/reserve splits performance in wins vs. losses, results by opponent, days rest, and breakdown by minutes played in the game.

Another smaller addition we've made is adding a stat summary to the top of player pages, giving you a quick look at the player's stats for their entire career and their most recent season. We plan to keep working on expanding our WNBA coverage, and we hope you check in with us as you follow the 2020 season! If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.

Posted in Announcement, Basketball-Reference.com, Features | Comments Off on WNBA Splits Now on Basketball Reference

Box Scores Since 1901 Now on Baseball-Reference

24th July 2020

As we were getting ready for 2020 Opening Day, the hard workers at Retrosheet announced their latest update, and we have gotten that new information added to Baseball-Reference as well as our Stathead Baseball tools. The highlight from the latest Retrosheet update is the addition of box scores from 1901 to 1903. This means that we now have box scores for every game in American League history, as the AL's first season was played in 1901. Retrosheet has also uncovered play-by-play accounts for games in 1916 and 1917, extending PBP coverage two more years back, although we should note 100% coverage remains limited to 1973-present. The new play-by-play allows us to further bolster our historical splits and event data.

With game log coverage back to 1901, we now have game logs for the entire careers of Hall of Famers Johnny Evers, Joe Tinker and Mordecai "Three Finger" Brown. We also now have the box score for Christy Mathewson's first no-hitter of his career, on July 15, 1901. Our Stathead Game Finder tools can now search back to 1901 as a result, and Mathewson appears as the 3rd pitcher in that time span to throw a no-hitter before their 21st birthday. Batting and Pitching Event Finder searches have been opened up back to 1916. Of the games we have PBP for in 1916 and 1917, Bill Hinchman leads with 3 walkoff hits in that span. Advanced stats tables that rely on play-by-play will also be extended back to 1916.

If you have any questions about our data coverage, you can always see it here. We're happy to have this new data on our sites and hope you enjoy it as well. Please let us know if you have any comments, questions or concerns.

And thanks again to Retrosheet!

Posted in Announcement, Baseball-Reference.com, Data, Features, History, Stathead | 1 Comment »

NCAA Tournament Starters Complete Back to 1977

16th July 2020

Thanks in part to work from our intern Ryan Sullivan, College Basketball Reference now has starter and reserve designations for all NCAA Tournament games back to 1977. We previously could only claim 100% starter/reserve data back to 1994. Of course, this supplements our Final Four starter/reserve data which is already complete back to 1955. This data can be searched in our NCAA Tournament Player Game Finder.

Some searches that can be updated with these additions:

- Sean Higgins joins the list of reserve players with 30 points in a game, reaching that mark in the Elite Eight of the 1989 NCAA Tournament. He also joins the list of players with 100 points off the bench in their tourney careers.

- Reggie Theus is one point shy of Donte DiVincenzo for most points scored as a reserve in a single tournament, in 1977 with UNLV.

We hope you enjoy this addition to the site. Please let us know if you have any questions or comments.

Posted in Announcement, CBB at Sports Reference, Data, History, Play Index, Trivia | Comments Off on NCAA Tournament Starters Complete Back to 1977