With the NHL starting back up after the lockout, here's a reminder that we offer our familiar Play Index tools for hockey, too:

Player Game Finder
Search through NHL regular season and playoff game logs spanning from 1987-88 to today for games that match your criteria.

Player Season Finder
Search through NHL regular season statistics spanning from 1917-18 to today for single seasons or combined seasons that match your criteria.

Player Playoff Finder
Search through NHL playoff statistics spanning from 1918 to today for single years or combined years that match your criteria.

Batting Season Finder -- - Baseball-Reference.com

I've added search options to the pitching and batting season finders which apply the at bat and innings pitched minimums for rookie status. This leaves out the "less than 45 days service time prior to Sept. 1" requirement which I simply can not compute at this time (nor do I ever expect to).

I've retroactively applied these standards back to the 1871 seasons, so some simple searches are now possible.

2012 Team Scoring and Leads Summary - Baseball-Reference.com

This tool has been around for awhile, but I just updated the look to use tables rather than pre-formatted text (I think there is only one tool left that is pre-formatted) which adds the embed, share and sorting tools into the mix.
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Event Finders with Batted Ball Types

Did you know that the Pirates gave up the most ground ball bunt singles last year (30) and the Rangers and Brewers the fewest (10)? Or that Matt Cain gave up 10 all by himself.

You can now find information like that on the Play Index Event Finders as we've added the type of batted ball in our DB to the event finder outputs.

All 579 bunt ground ball singles in the MLB last year

Greg Spira Award now Accepting Nominations

New Honor To Recognize Up-and-Coming Talent

A group of distinguished baseball writers and researchers have collaborated to create a new award as a memorial to the late baseball researcher Greg Spira. The new Greg Spira Baseball Research Award (www.SpiraAward.org) will be given annually in recognition of the best published article or paper containing original baseball research by a person 30 years old or younger. The winning entry must display innovative analysis or reasoning.

Happy birthday to Drew Brees, Matt Holliday, Randy White, Ricky Sobers, Adam Burt, and all the other athletes born today -- and a friendly reminder that you can look up player birthdays at all of our pro sites:

Birthdays at Baseball Reference

Birthdays at Basketball Reference

Birthdays at Pro Football Reference

Birthdays at Hockey Reference

Automatic Player Linker / Add your site to our newsfeeds

Here's a reminder that you can request for your site to be added to our player newsfeeds. To get started, all you have to do is write a post as you normally would and use our linker tool, causing baseball-reference player links to be automatically added. Then let us know you want to be included by sending us the following information:

• The name of your site to appear in the feed (at most 25 characters)
• The url for your rss feed (must be a full feed)
• A contact e-mail address
• The url of an example page with our links in place

We'll review your request, and try to get your content added as soon as we can. It's a great way to get your content out there, and it gives your readers quick access to player stats and information.

With the holidays upon us, it might be time to consider making the Baseball-Reference Play Index a stocking-stuffer for the baseball fan in your life.

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.

We already have some salary data from 1915-1969 period thanks to SABR and Doug Pappas's research, but we are now pleased to add the work of Dr. Michael Haupert. Dr. Haupert is a professor of economics at UW-LaCrosse and he has painstakingly gone through the Hall of Fame's records to find player contract information for nearly 7,000 player seasons.

The next question is always, "Well, Lou Gehrig made $416,000 in his career, what is that worth in 2012 dollars?" So in addition to the added data, we have added a form control to the salary output on player and team pages that quickly converts the player or team's salaries to the equivalent amount in a different decade using the Consumer Price Index (via the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Board). Just select a year and all salaries will be converted to the equivalent amount for that year. For example, in 2012 dollars, Lou Gehrig made $6.6m for his career, or just tad more than the $6.5m Marlon Byrd made last year.

Try it with 1927 Yankees or with Ty Cobb

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Thanks to the great folks at RetroSheet we are now able to launch box scores and game logs for 1916 and 1917 and additional play-by-play for 1945-1947 along with additional games found here and there for 1948-1973.

For a full list of our data coverage, check out our Data Coverage page.

I have yet to re-run the full site, so the 1916 A's and 1917 retirees will not yet have links to splits or gamelogs, but that should happen later today or tomorrow.

Box Score Directory (1916-2012)

Note: RetroSheet also has 1915 AL and NL box scores, but not yet Federal League boxes. Given our setup we require a full set to be available before we can publish a year's worth of box scores.