We know that a lot of you are interested in grabbing data from our site and reusing it in excel and generating reports on your own. We got our start doing that.

The redesign complicates that because we add some helper elements to the page that are relevant for the vast majority of users and helpful in their use of the site. I'll call this material Mobile Formatting. It includes the frozen left column on wide tables, the max width of the page and side scrolling, the use of interior table header rows and sort direction indicators. So to make sorting easier, I've added an option to the "Share & more" menu to strip this content out in one click.
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On the old version of the site on the front page, we placed the cursor into the search box automatically which could cause some issues if you had already scrolled down the page. Your browser would then be jerked back to the top of the page. On the site redesign, all you have to do is (once the page has loaded) hit the tab key one time and you'll be put into the search box. Lickety Split.

In November, we announced that we were no longer able to support automatic export of our tables to Excel. This was due to newer browsers not behaving in ways we expected, making it difficult to support the feature. We're happy to announce that we've figured this out, however.

Today, the automatic Excel export feature has returned to all of our sites. To export any of our tables to Excel, please hover over "Share & more" above the table you'd like to export. Once you hover, you'll see a dropdown where you can select "Get as Excel Workbook (experimental)", which will download the table into an xls file you can open with Excel.

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We added support for the Make Tiny Url in the play index. Previously, you would not be able to fully share those reports, but this has been fixed and works easy as pie. Just create your report and click on the "Make Tiny Url" and share the url.

An added perk of this is that this could be used to re-run reports daily. Just bookmark the link and re-use it.

As you probably noticed, we re-designed Baseball-Reference.com last week. Our goal is to have all of the kinks ironed out as soon as possible. This means that we don't have as much time as we normally would to get things like Spring Training stats up and running. Many people would like to see them now, but the fact of the matter is that few will care about them a month from now, so it's not our highest priority. That said, we hope to have Spring Training stats up and running within the next two weeks. We are also hopeful to get 2017 Marcel Projections up, but we cannot make any promises

Thank you for your patience as we work on perfecting the new site.

Update: A March 9th update on where the redesign stands

First off, change is hard. I know that. We've moved a few things and some things have changed, but please be assured that we had very good reasons and have tried to make the redesigned site more useful than it was before. It's not perfect, but neither was B-R last month. Please keep an open mind for a day, and if you still hate it, please let us know.

If you follow me on twitter, you know that this work has been a long time coming. Starting in January of 2015, Adam Wodon, Adam Darowski, and I started throwing around ideas for a more mobile-friendly version of our sites. Our mobile experience could have been charitably described as limited and functional. With over two-thirds of our visits coming from handheld devices, we clearly needed to up our game there.

This led to a complete review of how we present data on desktop and how we can make that usable on a small screen. It's not easy and after months of design, user testing and work, we have an approach that we believe will serve both desktop and mobile users better than they are now. If you use our other sites, this is not a surprise as all of those sites were re-launched last summer and into the early fall. That left the baseball site and its 17 years of code that needed some changing, rewriting, upgrading and general improvement. It's taken awhile, but the entire Sports Reference team has pulled together to get this out before the games start this spring.

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While the National Baseball Hall of Fame voters didn't agree that there were at least 12 candidates worthy of election this year, they did go ahead and vote in three very deserving candidates. It will be beyond thrilling to watch Jeff Bagwell, Tim Raines, and Ivan Rodriguez, three of the greatest to ever play the game, take their rightful places in Cooperstown this summer.

However, time marches onward and, with this year's voting in the books, it seems like a good time for an early peek at what lies ahead for voters. In short, it looks like the 2018 Hall of Fame Ballot is going to be as exciting, unpredictable, and infuriating as the 2017 voting. I don't envy the voters who face another agonizing year of paring a list of many worthy candidates down to just ten or fewer. Read the rest of this entry

Welcome back to Play Index 101! This series of videos will teach you how to use the Sports Reference Play Index to research statistics and facts from sports history. This is Episode 2; in this episode, you'll learn all about how to use the Game Finder:  Read the rest of this entry

Welcome to Part Three of our look at the 2017 Baseball Hall of Fame Ballot. If you're just joining us, make sure to go back and read Part One, which was about the 13 players that I think are easy Nos, and Part Two, about four players who were automatic Yes votes.

In our final installment, we'll be getting into the real meat of the issue. There are 17 players left to review and, with a few exceptions, all of them are plausible Hall of Famers. However, they all have flaws that could keep them out for a couple of years, or perhaps permanently. If you've been waiting for takes on DHs, closers, Coors Field, and more, this is the part for you. So let's dig in. Read the rest of this entry

Welcome to Part Two of our look at the Hall of Fame Ballot! If you missed Part One, detailing 13 players on this year's ballot who were easy Nos, click here to read it.

For today's post, I get to do something a lot more fun: talk about four people who ruled at baseball. If, when all is said and done, these people aren't in the Baseball Hall of Fame, we should probably change the name to something else. And yet, all of them have been on the ballot for multiple years. In fact, part of the reason this year's Hall of Fame ballot is so loaded is that these four are still hanging around.

So, without further ado, here are the four players who would absolutely, no-doubt get a vote from me if I had one to give. Read the rest of this entry