The below article lamenting the loss of the fake to third, throw to first pitcher gambit caught my eye back in Feb, so I made a note to check back in June on whether it mattered. It looks like it has. Below are the SB_attempts per 1000 (this is SB+CS) when runners are on first and third. The numbers have actually gone up a bit this year and then SB_success rate which I computed as (SB + Def Indiff + Adv on Pickoff error)/(SB+CS+DefIndiff+Pickoffs + pickoff errors). Essentially advances over attempts to advance to put out the runner.

BBTF's Newsblog Discussion :: Morosi: Showalter balks at new pickoff rule.

| year_game | outs | count(*) | SB_att_per_1000 | SB_success_perc |
+-----------+------+----------+-----------------+-----------------+
|      2010 |    0 |     1004 |         30.8765 |              82 |
|      2011 |    0 |      941 |         41.4453 |              88 |
|      2012 |    0 |      950 |         43.1579 |              85 |
|      2013 |    0 |      429 |         51.2821 |              91 |


|      2010 |    1 |     2158 |         42.6321 |              77 |
|      2011 |    1 |     2241 |         52.6551 |              78 |
|      2012 |    1 |     2126 |         41.8627 |              73 |
|      2013 |    1 |      875 |         37.7143 |              76 |


|      2010 |    2 |     2991 |         65.8643 |              89 |
|      2011 |    2 |     2910 |         80.4124 |              87 |
|      2012 |    2 |     2950 |         83.0508 |              86 |
|      2013 |    2 |     1276 |         86.9906 |              93 |

Want to find a chain of teammates between any two players in MLB history, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon-style? Then check out our Oracle of Baseball, which can help you find things like this:

Chain from Mickey Mantle to Mike Trout

Players born on June 14 - Baseball-Reference.com.

Some folks want to see all of the Phillies or Braves born on this date, so I've added a column of franchises played for that you can easily search (you do know ctrl-F right?).

The Major league Baseball draft is tonight, so here are some tools you can use to prepare for the event:

• B-R Draft Section - Search every year, every pick, in draft history
• 2013 Draft Preview - Draft order for first 3 rounds + historical info for pick #s
• Draft-related B-R Blog posts

Check them out as you get ready for the 2013 Draft!

With Wins Above Replacement (WAR) gaining more prominence since last season, it's a good time to remind everyone about our WAR 2.2 guide:

• Baseball-Reference.com WAR Explained - This explains the basics of WAR, the philosophy behind the stat, and some of the changes we made to the formula the past few years.
• Weighted Runs Above Average (wRAA) Explained - This describes how wRAA, the core hitting stat of WAR, is computed.
• Position Player WAR Calculations and Details - This explains how we turn wRAA, Baserunning & Double-Play Runs, Fielding Runs, Positional Adjustment Runs, and Replacement level Runs into WAR for position-players.
• Pitcher WAR Calculations and Details - This explains how we take a pitcher's runs allowed & innings pitched, and turn it into WAR.
• Converting Runs to Wins - This further describes the process by which Runs Above Replacement (for both pitchers and position players) are converted into Wins Above Replacement.
• WAR Comparison Chart - This chart shows the differences between the WAR found here at Baseball-Reference and those from a variety of other sources, including FanGraphs & Baseball Prospectus.
• WAR Data Downloads - If you want to download the raw WAR data yourself and play around with it, you can also get the Batting and Pitching data from our site.

Many of the questions we typically get about WAR can be answered by reading the guide linked above.

Here's a page you may not know about, because even I didn't know it existed until Sean pointed it out this morning:

2013 Major League Baseball Recent Transactions & Injuries

Simply put, it contains a list of recent transactions, as well as a report on who's currently injured (i.e., questionable for tonight's game or on the disabled list).

The start of June is the perfect time to check out the Baseball-Reference Play Index if you haven't already signed up. What's the Play Index? It's a set of research tools that allow you to create customizable queries on our database, save the results, and share them with others. Using the PI, you can:

• Search full-season or multi-year totals to find your own custom leaderboards - Look at the entire history of baseball from 1871-2012 with every year, team, and position available, or filter the results in a vast number of ways: by specific years, by age, by first six seasons or last ten seasons, by American League only, by Cubs only, by switch-hitters, by catchers, by outfielder or infielder, by year of debut, but active or retired, by Hall of Famer, by height and weight, by living or deceased, or by a range of common statistical categories. Then sort the results by any common statistic, by the teams with the most players matching that category, by players with the most seasons matching that category, or by most recent, youngest, oldest, final year, or year of debut, and others.
• Search player game totals - Filtering on any of a dozen or more choices, search for games on a single player level, or on any batter from 1916-2012, or on any pitcher. The same can be done for Team Batting or Team Pitching Totals.
• Search player games looking for the most consecutive games matching a particular set of criteria - This can be done either on a single player level or on any batter in the last 97 years or on any pitcher. The same can be done for Team Batting or Team Pitching Streaks.
• Search the records of a specific player - Output a detailed summary and play-by-play list of all events of a specific type from a single year or an entire career. For example, you can see all of Harmon Killebrew's triples or even his outs to the second baseman.
• Search Batter vs. Pitcher Matchups - This tool presents a complete sortable list of batter or pitcher with totals for every opponent they faced by career or by year. Clicking on the player's name will lead you to a detailed output of their head-to-head plate appearances.
• ...And more!

Personal Subscriptions to the Play Index still cost just $36 for a year, $6 for a month, or $2 for 24 hours. Subscriptions may only be used by a single user, and there are discounts for users sponsoring at least $35 in pages.

Organizational Subscriptions can be set up for either an unlimited number of users ($600/year), or for up to five users ($125/year).

There are Two Steps to Subscribe to the Play Index:

1. Login to or create a Sports-Reference.com account (the same account used to sponsor pages).
2. Already logged in (or just created an account)? Go to our subscription page to sign up.

Our Always-Available Free Trial: Non-subscribers can use the PI's features as much as you like. However, your outputs will be restricted to a limited number of results.

The Play Index comes with a money back guarantee. We will gladly return the unused portion of any Play Index Subscription should you be dissatisfied with the Play Index.

So go ahead, give the Play Index a try -- we're confident that once you start using it, you'll wonder how you ever got along without it.

The Baseball-Reference Bullpen: Baseball's collaborative encyclopedia

Here's a reminder for everyone to check out the B-R Bullpen Wiki, the collaborative baseball encyclopedia that anyone can edit. We have 65,285 articles -- and counting -- thanks to users just like you, and we hope to add many more as we collect and organize as much baseball knowledge as possible. To get you started, here are some links on the project:

• What is the Bullpen?
• How to contribute
• Guidelines
• Learn more
• What's Happening in the Bullpen

Or you could just go to a Random Page.

Give it a try, explore a little, and maybe even take a shot at editing a page. There's a lot of baseball knowledge out there just waiting to be added to these pages!

Team Pitching Split Finder.

I know that some folks like to study league-wide trends as a whole, like the percent of innings pitched by relievers, percent of decisions earned by starters, percent of league hits by shortstops and they like to compare that over time. We've made these calculations much much easier by adding the league total splits to the team split finders. To use this tool, you got to the Team Batting Split Finder or the Team Pitching Split Finder and set the following items.
Read the rest of this entry

Baseball-Reference.com Front Page.

We've added quick links to our daily reporting tool, so you can now see all of the batters, pitchers, home runs, wins, saves, and stolen bases with just a single click.