Sports Reference Blog

Archive for the 'Expire30d' Category

Baseball Reference is sunsetting the Oracle of Baseball

28th May 2024

We have decided to turn off the Oracle of Baseball for good. There are a couple of reasons for this which I'll get into below. This feature was launched in 2002 or so, so this isn't a decision we take lightly. We know there are a number of users who will be sad to see this tool go, but in order for us to update the sites in a number of important ways we will be making this change.

  • The Oracle of Baseball only gets about 10,000 user sessions per year which makes it very hard to prioritize work to improve or modify it.
  • Related to the above, the Oracle data hasn't been updated since 2021. Due to some underlying data changes it became difficult for us to keep the data generated and up to date. As I said above, it's hard to prioritize a multi-day project to update the tool when it won't pay off for decades at current usage rates.
  • We are working on a major upgrade to our operating system on the sites' servers. The Oracle is a custom built app that runs as a daemon in the background on the servers and porting this over to our new infrastructure would be a difficult process even for a tool that was generating a lot of revenue.

All three together mean we can't make a business case (or even a user-based case given the opportunity cost of this work) to continue supporting this feature. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Posted in Announcement, Baseball-Reference.com, Expire30d, General | Comments Off on Baseball Reference is sunsetting the Oracle of Baseball

FBref: Progressive Carries back on FBref (and tweak to dribble/take-ons)

3rd February 2023

Last October, when we converted over from StatsBomb to Stats Perform Opta data one of the stats that we had to stop carrying on the site was Progressive Carries. Thanks to help from Michael Caley of the Double Pivot Podcast, we are pleased to reintroduce Progressive Carries to the site. Given our expanded data coverage from Opta, we now have this stat for over 20 competitions (for both current and historical seasons) including most of the top women's football leagues.

Read the rest of this entry

Posted in Advanced Stats, Announcement, Expire30d, FBref | Comments Off on FBref: Progressive Carries back on FBref (and tweak to dribble/take-ons)

Sports Reference Purchases the Databases of Pete Palmer, Ken Pullis, and Gary Gillette

24th February 2021

February 25, 2021

Sports Reference LLC is pleased to announce that they have purchased the historical, statistical databases of Pete Palmer, Ken Pullis and Gary Gillette. This includes full historical databases for

Major League Baseball,
the National Basketball Association,
the National Hockey League, and
the National Football League.

Since their launch in 2000, the Sports Reference sites have presented and relied upon the groundbreaking and painstaking work of Palmer, Pullis and Gillette. Palmer’s pioneering work in baseball statistics has made his database the gold standard in the field, and his work with John Thorn on the Hidden Game of Baseball and Total Baseball is legendary. Pullis’s award-winning work in the field of pro football statistics formed the basis for the ESPN Pro Football Encyclopedia--the last pro football encyclopedia ever printed. Gillette created and edited the ESPN Baseball and Pro Football Encyclopedias and compiled a set of unique MLB databases for subjects like the Disabled/Injured List that previously had never been covered.

We are excited that we will now be the stewards of these databases. We intend to build upon Ken, Pete and Gary's extraordinary work. At Sports Reference, our purpose is to answer questions, so our users can grow their appreciation, understanding, and love of the game. Owning these databases will allow us to continue doing that, but also open up potential new opportunities such as making free databases available for researchers and publishing new products incorporating these datasets.

We are honored that Pete Palmer and Ken Pullis will continue the work on their databases as consultants to Sports Reference and look forward to expanding the scope of what is known about the history of North American sports. We will also be working with Gary Gillette on several special baseball projects in the future.

Sports Reference LLC is based in Philadelphia, PA and serves millions of users a month through its websites: Baseball-Reference.com, Basketball-Reference.com, Pro-Football-Reference.com, Hockey-Reference.com and others.

Pete Palmer is a titan in the field of baseball research and history and has been one of the foremost chroniclers of the National Pastime for the past five decades. He has edited or contributed to virtually every baseball encyclopedia that has been published in the last 50 years. Along with John Thorn, Palmer served as co-editor for seven editions of Total Baseball. Along with Gary Gillette, Palmer served as co-editor for five editions of the ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia. Palmer was also the co-author with Thorn of the seminal 1984 analytics book The Hidden Game of Baseball—a landmark work republished by the University of Chicago Press in 2015. Along with Gillette and Pullis, he served as co-editor of the ESPN Pro Football Encyclopedia. Palmer is also known as co-author of The Hidden Game of Pro Football and as a contributor to Total Football. He lives in Hollis, New Hampshire.

Gary Gillette is the founder and current chair of the Friends of Historic Hamtramck Stadium, a nonprofit that is working to restore the former Negro League ballpark near his home in Detroit. Gillette also served for a decade on the Tiger Stadium Conservancy’s board of directors. He has four decades of baseball research, writing, and editing experience, beginning with his work with Bill James and Project Scoresheet in the mid-1980s. A contributor to six editions of Total Baseball, Gillette later designed and co-edited with Pete Palmer the five editions of the ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia. Gillette also designed the ESPN Pro Football Encyclopedia and served as executive editor for both editions of that reference work. A former member of the Society for American Baseball Research’s (SABR) board of directors, Gillette is a past co-chair of two of SABR’s major research committees—the Business of Baseball Committee and the Ballparks Committee. He was the founder and president of SABR’s Detroit Chapter and is now the chair of SABR’s new Southern Michigan Chapter.

Ken Pullis is a retired air traffic controller and former US Air Force pilot. He has had a lifelong interest in pro football statistics and began doing original research in the late 1980s. Pullis is the 2002 PFRA Ralph Hay Award winner for Pro Football Research and Historiography and was co-editor with Gillette and Palmer of the ESPN Pro Football Encyclopedia, volumes 1 and 2. He currently resides in Vermilion, Ohio.

Posted in Announcement, Baseball-Reference.com, Basketball-Reference.com, Expire30d, Hockey-Reference.com, Pro-Football-Reference.com, Statgeekery, Stathead | 3 Comments »

Sports Reference adds a DevOps Engineer

10th November 2020

Nick Pazoles has joined Sports Reference as a DevOps engineer. Nick previously worked for Cleo in the Chicagoland area and is the first White Sox and University of Michigan football fan on staff.

Posted in Announcement, Baseball-Reference.com, Basketball-Reference.com, CBB at Sports Reference, CFB at Sports Reference, Expire30d, FBref, Hockey-Reference.com, Pro-Football-Reference.com | Comments Off on Sports Reference adds a DevOps Engineer

2017 Spring Training Stats

7th March 2017

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.

Posted in Announcement, Baseball-Reference.com, Data, Expire30d | 3 Comments »

Sports Reference Welcomes Adam Wodon to Our Staff

9th February 2015

Adam Wodon has joined Sports Reference today as a Managing Director for Hockey Reference. Adam will be working out of our Philadelphia office as our staff size has now risen to six. Adam brings a great deal of development experience and hockey knowledge to Sports Reference. Adam is the founder and managing editor of College Hockey News. Adam is an Isles fan through and through and also supports the Mets, Jets, and Nets making him the first diehard National League fan on staff. Adam is also on twitter at (@chn_AdamWodon).

Hans VanSlooten (@CantPitch) who had been working on the hockey site for the last 14 months will be taking over primary day-to-day development of Baseball-Reference.com.

Posted in Announcement, Baseball-Reference.com, Basketball-Reference.com, CBB at Sports Reference, CFB at Sports Reference, Expire30d, Hockey-Reference.com, Olympics at S-R, Pro-Football-Reference.com | 2 Comments »

Basketball-Reference.com is Ten Years Old

10th May 2014

Happy Birthday to us! It's been a good run and we'd be looking for that one last big veteran deal if we were an NBA player. Hopefully we have at least ten more years in us.

The vast majority of the credit for the site goes to Justin Kubatko, who you really should be following over at Statitudes.com. Thank you for all of your support through the years.

Posted in Announcement, Basketball-Reference.com, Expire30d | 3 Comments »

Mike Lynch Joins Sports Reference

31st March 2014

Mike Lynch has joined Sports Reference as our new User Affairs Coordinator. Mike is a Philly native and Boston U. grad. He has an extensive background in sports history and studio production research working for ESPN as the lead researcher for NBA Tonight, for the Big Ten Network, and most recently for Comcast SportsNet Mid-Atlantic. Mike is on twitter at @SportInfo247.

Posted in Announcement, Baseball-Reference.com, Basketball-Reference.com, CBB at Sports Reference, CFB at Sports Reference, Expire30d, Hockey-Reference.com, Olympics at S-R, Pro-Football-Reference.com, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Job: User Affairs Coordinator @ Sports Reference

6th January 2014

User Affairs Coordinator @ Sports Reference.

Yes, we'll pay you money to spend all day answering questions about sports. Please pass along this job ad to anyone you might think would be interested.

Posted in Advanced Stats, Announcement, Baseball-Reference.com, Basketball-Reference.com, CBB at Sports Reference, CFB at Sports Reference, Expire30d, Hockey-Reference.com, Olympics at S-R, Pro-Football-Reference.com, Statgeekery, Tips and Tricks, WAR | 5 Comments »

Neil Paine Joining FiveThirtyEight

19th December 2013

As Nate Silver tweeted out earlier today, Neil Paine is leaving Sports Reference early next month to join Nate's new FiveThirtyEight.com. I know I speak for everyone here at SR when I say I'm feeling a mix of sadness that on a daily basis we won't get to tap Neil's encyclopedic knowledge of European NBA players, his knowledge of pretty much every sabermetric study ever done, his patience dealing with every kind of user complaint, and his wit, pluck, and genuine enthusiasm for his work. But also happiness for Neil that his writing and thinking is getting the platform it justly deserves. I know someday we'll be bragging that we knew Neil Paine before he was a bigshot. :)

I'll be anticipating his articles and I suggest you search them out as well when the site launches in early 2014.

Posted in Announcement, Baseball-Reference.com, Basketball-Reference.com, CBB at Sports Reference, CFB at Sports Reference, Expire30d, Hockey-Reference.com, Olympics at S-R, Pro-Football-Reference.com, Uncategorized | 7 Comments »