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Archive for the 'Features' Category

Stathead Baseball Adds the Pivotal Play Finder

21st October 2020

Last month, we added Championship Leverage Index (cLI) and Championship Win Probability Added (cWPA) to Baseball-Reference. These stats measure how much of an impact each player had on their team's chances of winning the World Series. Today, we are launching the Pivotal Play Finder, which measures the impact that each individual play had on a team's World Series win probability. This tool allows you to customize your query using a number of different filters to find the most impactful plays in a given situation.

It's not surprising to see that the most pivotal play in MLB history occurred in Game 7 of the 1960 World Series. But many would be shocked to find out that it was not Bill Mazeroski's walk-off (which is 6th all-time). The most pivotal play actually occurred an inning earlier. In the bottom of the 8th inning with 2 outs, the Pirates were down 7-6 with runners on the corners when Hal Smith put his team up by two runs with a 3-run home run. This play increased the Pirates' chances of winning the World Series from 30% to 93%. Unfortunately for Smith, the Yankees erased the lead in the top of the 9th, and then Mazeroski became the hero.

With the Pivotal Play Finder, you can search by event type and find out that Babe Ruth's caught stealing to end the 1926 World Series was the most impactful caught stealing in MLB history (10.22%), or that Fred Snodgrass' muff in the 1912 World Series was the most critical error in history (24.39%).

We can also search for plays involving a particular player. Derek Jeter was involved in many memorable moments during his career, but none more pivotal than his walk-off home run in Game 4 of the 2001 World Series.

We can drill down even further and search by team to see that Randy Arozarena's home run off Lance McCullers Jr. in Game 7 of the 2020 ALCS was the most pivotal home run in Tampa Bay Rays history.

In addition to sorting by Championship Win Probability Added, we can also sort by Championship Leverage Index to find the most crucial moments. These situations are usually the most pressure-packed because the difference between an out and a run has an enormous impact on a team's World Series win probability. The situation with the highest cLI in MLB history came in Game 7 of the 1962 World Series. In the bottom of the 9th inning, the Giants were down 1-0 with 2 outs and runners on 2nd and 3rd with Willie McCovey at the plate. A hit would likely tie or win the game (and World Series) for the Giants, while an out would mean a championship for the Yankees. As we know, McCovey lined out sharply to Bobby Richardson to end the series.

Please note that at the time of this writing, Regular Season event data is complete back to 1973, mostly complete back to 1950, and somewhat complete back to 1916. Postseason event data is complete back to 1903. Please see the data coverage page for details.

Posted in Announcement, Baseball-Reference.com, Features, Stathead | 1 Comment »

Introducing Football’s Premier Research Tool: Stathead Football

15th September 2020

In previous months, we have launched Stathead Baseball, Stathead Hockey and Stathead Basketball. Today, we're thrilled to announce that Stathead Football has joined our suite of Stathead tools, the most powerful set of sports research tools available to the public. In fact, they're so good that the pros (whether they're running teams or covering them) also swear by them.

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Posted in Announcement, Data, Features, Pro-Football-Reference.com, Stathead | 3 Comments »

Decades of Matches & Stats for Top Flight Leagues Added to FBref

14th August 2020

We are proud to announce that FBref has added an enormous new data set, containing over 60,000 match reports, to our site. This represents a major update that takes our coverage of major leagues like the Premier League, Bundesliga, La Liga, and Champions League to the next level.

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Posted in FBref, Features | Comments Off on Decades of Matches & Stats for Top Flight Leagues Added to FBref

WNBA Splits Now on Basketball Reference

24th July 2020

The 2020 WNBA season will begin this weekend, and Basketball Reference continues to bolster our coverage of this league, this time with the addition of player splits. This includes splits by season as well as career splits, accessible from any player's main page. Using Emma Meesseman's career splits as our example, you can see this includes home/road splits, starter/reserve splits performance in wins vs. losses, results by opponent, days rest, and breakdown by minutes played in the game.

Another smaller addition we've made is adding a stat summary to the top of player pages, giving you a quick look at the player's stats for their entire career and their most recent season. We plan to keep working on expanding our WNBA coverage, and we hope you check in with us as you follow the 2020 season! If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.

Posted in Announcement, Basketball-Reference.com, Features | Comments Off on WNBA Splits Now on Basketball Reference

Box Scores Since 1901 Now on Baseball-Reference

24th July 2020

As we were getting ready for 2020 Opening Day, the hard workers at Retrosheet announced their latest update, and we have gotten that new information added to Baseball-Reference as well as our Stathead Baseball tools. The highlight from the latest Retrosheet update is the addition of box scores from 1901 to 1903. This means that we now have box scores for every game in American League history, as the AL's first season was played in 1901. Retrosheet has also uncovered play-by-play accounts for games in 1916 and 1917, extending PBP coverage two more years back, although we should note 100% coverage remains limited to 1973-present. The new play-by-play allows us to further bolster our historical splits and event data.

With game log coverage back to 1901, we now have game logs for the entire careers of Hall of Famers Johnny Evers, Joe Tinker and Mordecai "Three Finger" Brown. We also now have the box score for Christy Mathewson's first no-hitter of his career, on July 15, 1901. Our Stathead Game Finder tools can now search back to 1901 as a result, and Mathewson appears as the 3rd pitcher in that time span to throw a no-hitter before their 21st birthday. Batting and Pitching Event Finder searches have been opened up back to 1916. Of the games we have PBP for in 1916 and 1917, Bill Hinchman leads with 3 walkoff hits in that span. Advanced stats tables that rely on play-by-play will also be extended back to 1916.

If you have any questions about our data coverage, you can always see it here. We're happy to have this new data on our sites and hope you enjoy it as well. Please let us know if you have any comments, questions or concerns.

And thanks again to Retrosheet!

Posted in Announcement, Baseball-Reference.com, Data, Features, History, Stathead | 1 Comment »

Getting the Most out of Stathead’s Player Season & Career Finders

19th June 2020

The Player Season/Career Finders are a great starting place for a first-time Baseball Stathead user. Learning to use these tools will also provide invaluable indoctrination, as the search fundamentals you will utilize are applicable to our other tools, which drill down a little deeper, as well. The basic gist of these tools is that they’re the place to go when you’re looking to place a player’s season or career stats in perspective.

Here are some sample searches you can run using these tools. If you click "See how this search was built" after following the link, you can see how the search form was manipulated in order to achieve the desired results:

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Posted in Announcement, Baseball-Reference.com, Features, HowTo, Stathead, Stathead Tutorial Series, Tips and Tricks | 3 Comments »

Adjusted Shooting Stats Added to Basketball Reference

1st June 2020

There's been much debate about the greatest players in NBA history of late. One of the most difficult things about ranking players in a league with 70+ years of history is that the game has changed a lot over the years. Sure, some of it has to do with the skill and quality of the players. But some of it also has to do with the quality of the balls, the floors, the rims, the training, the travel, the accommodations, available nutrition and pretty much any other variable you can think of. For a better idea of how the league has changed over time, please see this table of league averages for each season in the history of the NBA. As you can see, 2019-20 is the fifth straight season in which a new league-wide eFG% record has been set. There are clearly things at play here beyond just player improvement. Though today's players are certainly more skilled than the ones that produced a league-wide 27.9 FG% in 1946-47 (the first year of the NBA's 'official' forerunner the BAA, which was objectively worse than the league it eventually merged with, the NBL).

To help bring a bit of objectivity to cross-era comparisons, we have added an Adjusted Shooting table to all player, team and season pages. These tables will show a player's shooting percentages and tendencies, as well as league-wide percentages and tendencies, and then scale them. Like OPS+ on our baseball site it will be scaled so that 100 represents a league-average shooter. 125 is 25% better than average and 75 is 25% worse than average. These figures are obtained by taking the player's shooting percentage, dividing it by the league-wide shooting percentages and then multiplying it by 100. So 125 doesn't mean a player was 25 percentage points above average, but 25 percent above average. We are also publishing adjusted versions of 3-point Attempt Rate and Free Throw Rate to give a better idea of how often the player shot 3s or got to the line relative to their era.

Additionally, we have calculated Field Goal Points Added and True Shooting Points Added to show how many points each player scored above or below what a league average player would have scored given an equal number of field goal attempts or true shot attempts, respectively. This is to show which players combined volume and efficiency (or those that combined volume with inefficiency, for that matter).

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Posted in Advanced Stats, Announcement, Basketball-Reference.com, Data, Features, History, Statgeekery | 7 Comments »

BPM 2.0 on College Basketball Reference

28th May 2020

In February, our pro basketball site incorporated Daniel Myers' BPM 2.0, the update to the classic Box Plus Minus measurement. We have now completed that update for College Basketball Reference as well. BPM 2.0 aims to estimate a player's performance relative to league average by using a player's box score information and his team's overall performance.

BPM 2.0 will appear on College Basketball Reference in the same places you found old BPM, and is available back to the 2010-11 season. Leaderboards have been updated to reflect the new measurement. BPM 2.0 also allows for game-level calculations, which means that our box scores since the 2010-11 season will now include BPM 2.0 in the Advanced table.

For more information on why the update was made, you can refer to our February blog post on the BBR update, as well as Daniel Myers' in-depth explainer on how BPM 2.0 is calculated. We thank Myers for his contributions and we hope you enjoy the addition to College Basketball Reference.

Posted in Advanced Stats, Announcement, CBB at Sports Reference, Features | Comments Off on BPM 2.0 on College Basketball Reference

Big 5 Leagues Pages on FBref

27th May 2020

FBref covers basic and advanced statistics for dozens of domestic leagues around the world, with the English Premier League, Spanish La Liga, German Bundesliga, Italian Serie A and French Ligue 1, commonly referred to as the "Big 5", being the most visited league stat pages. Up to this point, if you wanted to compare statistics between the leagues, you'd need to have a tab open for each one.

That will no longer be as necessary now that FBref has added combined Big 5 stat pages, with a combined league table, leaderboards across the 5 leagues and stat registers that include players who've played in any of the leagues. In the Player Standard Stats section, sorting by G+A-PK per 90 minutes gives you Jadon Sancho (Bundesliga), Kylian Mbappé (Ligue 1) and Lionel Messi (La Liga) at the top this season. In the Squad Goal and Shot Creation section, you can see Bayern Munich and Dortmund are leading all Big 5 teams in Goal Creating Actions per 90 minutes.

Check out our new Combined Big 5 pages and so much more that we offer at FBref! You can keep up with the latest additions of statistical coverage and new features here on the Sports Reference Blog, or by signing up for the This Week in Sports Reference mailing list. Feel free to send us any questions or suggestions through our feedback form or FBref's official Twitter account.

Posted in Advanced Stats, Announcement, FBref, Features, Leaders | Comments Off on Big 5 Leagues Pages on FBref

Baseball Reference Awards Page Revamp

27th May 2020

Baseball-Reference's Awards index covers all the major awards MLB has established over the years. In the past, we had some awards combined, such as MVP and Cy Young, on the same page. We've recently made a change to our Awards page so that each award is now given its own table, which allows for providing more statistical context than we previously did in these sections. For example, here's a link to our updated Cy Young Award page; you'll notice that you can now sort by the different basic pitching stats, if you wanted to take a quick glance at highest ERA (LaMarr Hoyt in 1983) or most innings pitched (Steve Carlton in 1972).

Take a look at our Awards index and scroll through the pages of baseball history at Baseball-Reference.com! Please let us know if you have any comments, questions or concerns.

Posted in Announcement, Awards, Baseball-Reference.com, Features, History, Leaders | 1 Comment »