In SABR's Fall 2019 Baseball Research Journal Ed Coen produced some remarkable research on the history of franchise nicknames.

Coen wrote:

Of the major league teams that trace their history before 1960, most started out with several short-term unofficial nicknames or even no nickname at all. Although several reputable sources provide a history of these nicknames, there are numerous contradictions between the available sources, and sometimes even when these sources agree, they conflict with the original sources. In other words, they do not reflect what the team was actually known as at the time.

Coen then performed exhaustive research using local newspapers to find out what teams were actually most commonly referred to at the time in their home cities. Thanks to his research, we are now able to use the actual names these teams were mostly commonly known as locally at the time on Baseball Reference. In many cases, you'll see the teams had no nicknames at all and were just known for the city and league they played in. Below is a list of the changes we have made: Read the rest of this entry

Basketball Reference is thrilled to announced that it has added arena information for every game in NBA (including BAA) and ABA history to the site.  We believe this to be the first time this data has been compiled so comprehensively. It can be viewed on our league-wide schedule pages and also on our box scores, such as this one for a 76ers/Bullets game played at Boehm Junior High School in Yardley, PA.

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Sports Reference is happy to announce that we have resolved a long-standing issue on our College Football site: the fact that our statistics from before 2002 were a mixture of totals that sometimes included and sometimes excluded bowl games. Thanks to our friends at Sports Data Research, our pre-2002 statistics have uniformly had bowl games removed. This is in line with official NCAA policy. So you'll notice that today we no longer list Ron Dayne as the all-time FBS rushing leader, but rather Donnel Pumphrey. In the future we hope to have statistics for all (or most) bowl games, which will allow for users of our site to add them in (or back them out) if they'd like. For more on this change, I'm including a blog post from SDR's Shane Holmes below. Read the rest of this entry

Basketball Reference has added awards voting data for many WNBA awards to its database. This information can be accessed via the pages for individual awards and clicking a link for full voting. For instance, our page of WNBA MVPs has a 'voting' column where you can see every player who received votes for various awards in that season. Here, for instance, are the 2022 WNBA awards votes. This information goes all the way back to the league's inaugural season in 1997. Read the rest of this entry

Thanks to the tireless efforts of the fine folks over at the SABR Biographical Research Committee, we have recently made some biographical updates to players on Baseball Reference. Most of the changes are added birthplaces, birth locations and deaths. A few of the updates feature changes to player names and/or moving statistics from one player record to another. Some highlights:

• A player who made one appearance for the 1889 Louisville Colonels of the American Association has been identified as Walter Fisher. He was previously listed as Charles Fisher due to some confusion in contemporary newspapers. Thank you to Justin McKinney for tracking down this correction.
• A player who played two games for the 1884 Washington Nationals of the Union Association has been identified as George Pierce. He was previously believed to be Maurice Pierce.
• A player who played six games for the 1884 St. Paul White Caps of the Union Association has been identified as Ed Brown, who previously played for the St. Louis Brown Stockings and the Toledo Blue Stockings of the American Association. This record has previously been associated with Jim Brown, who pitched for Altoona Mountain City (UA), New York Gothams (NL) and Philadelphia Athletics (AA).
• A player for the 1875 Brooklyn Atlantics who was previously identified as Thomas N. Smith is now identified as D. Smith.

Thanks to the research of Ken Pullis, Pro Football Reference has added game-by-game coverage of player fumbles for the 1989 season. For instance, you can now see which games all of Randall Cunningham's career-high 17 fumbles occurred in in the 1989 season via his 1989 gamelogs.

Last fall Pro Football Reference added a suite of new punting statistics going back to 1976. We have recently extended many of these statistics back to the 1970 merger thanks to the work of Pete Palmer and Ken Pullis.

This means that we now have coverage for return yards against, net punting yards, net yards per punt, touchbacks and touchback% for all punters back to 1970. Punts inside the 20 coverage, however, still only extends back t0 1976. Bobby Walden's page is a good example of the variable statistical coverage for punters since he punted from 1964 to 1977. You'll notice 1976 and 1977 have the broadest statistical coverage but that 1970-75 is now nearly on par with 1976 and beyond. Pre-merger punting stats, however, remain limited to punts, punt yards, long punts, etc.

Thanks to the work of researcher and former NFL official scorer Pete Palmer and fellow research Ken Pullis, Pro Football Reference has made slight fixes to 150 player single-game passing, rushing or receiving totals in the 1960s. For NFL games, these were generally changes that we made after the fact and impacted some single-game totals for teammates. Most of the fixes were in the AFL from 1960-1965. No team or season NFL statistics were changed.

We have run an update on our data from our friends at Retrosheet on Baseball Reference. Retrosheet, which provides box scores and play-by-play covering most of AL/NL history, has significantly expanded the availability of play-by-play for the 1921, 1922 and 1923 seasons, and, for the first time, added play-by-play for 1914 season. Thanks to their efforts, we now have play-by-play for 65.41% of 1914 games (53% in the AL and 79% in the NL), 97.72% of 1921 games, 97.35% of 1922 games and 93.35% of 1923 games. Additionally, 38 other seasons between 1917 and 1971 have seen smaller improvements in play-by-play coverage. This is our first play-by-play for the 1914 season, so many of our statistical tables that need play-by-play in order to be calculated (win probability, situational batting/pitching, base-running/miscellaneous, batting against, etc) will now have rows for 1914 for the first time. The 1921-23 seasons previously had ~80% coverage and are now very nearly complete.

Check out our full play-by-play data coverage map.

The additional play-by-play is also available in Stathead. For example, we now have 9 walk-off home runs from 1914. Two of those were hit by Gavvy Cravath of the Philadelphia Phillies. On Cravath’s Home Run Log, you can see we now have play-by-play data (and therefore win probability added) for 18 of his league-leading 19 home runs. The most important of these 18 home runs (by WPA) was his walk-off home run on June 11 against the Reds. In the bottom of the ninth with two outs and the bases empty, he ended the game with a deep blast to center off Earl Yingling. It had a WPA of .468.

The one Cravath home run from 1914 that we’re missing (August 4) was also a walk-off home run. We know this thanks to the Tattersall/McConnell Home Run Log, a database of all homers hit in the major leagues since 1876. This third walk-off home run is not in the Event Finder because we do not have any other events for that game.

Cravath’s season WPA is 4.3, tops in the NL and second in the majors to Eddie Collins’ 4.7. On the pitching side, Jeff Pfeffer of the Brooklyn Robins leads the way at 6.4. You can check out the complete WPA stats for the AL and NL. These are subject to change as play-by-play for more games is added.

This new data, along with our recent Seamheads update, will also allow us to re-run our WAR numbers, so keep an eye out for that update this week.

Thanks to a recent updated provided to us by researchers extraordinaire Pete Palmer and Ken Pullis, Pro Football Reference now has team rushing attempts for almost every NFL game since 1940. Read the rest of this entry