Katie Sharp has joined Sports Reference and will be working both on social media and customer success for our Stathead subscription service. Katie spent seven years as a researcher with ESPN's Stats and Info Group, and since then has worked as a writer, editor and researcher on dozens of articles and books. Most recently, she has been a recurring guest on Jomboy Media's Talkin' Yanks podcast. Katie graduated from Williams College and also has an MBA from the University of Oregon. She's on twitter at @ktsharp.

Hi everyone,

If you've been following our series of How-To videos for the site, you'll be excited to hear that we've released a couple more over the last few weeks. These videos are the first two parts of our in-depth look at Baseball-Reference's Play Index.

The B-R Play Index is pretty sophisticated, and has a lot of tools and features that the other sites don't. As such, we wanted to make some videos focusing on it specifically. Here's Part 1, about the Season and Game Finders: Read the rest of this entry

We added support for the Make Tiny Url in the play index. Previously, you would not be able to fully share those reports, but this has been fixed and works easy as pie. Just create your report and click on the "Make Tiny Url" and share the url.

An added perk of this is that this could be used to re-run reports daily. Just bookmark the link and re-use it.

Welcome back to Play Index 101! This series of videos will teach you how to use the Sports Reference Play Index to research statistics and facts from sports history. This is Episode 2; in this episode, you'll learn all about how to use the Game Finder:  Read the rest of this entry

Welcome to Play Index 101! This series of videos will teach you how to use the Sports Reference Play Index to research statistics and facts from sports history. This is Episode 1, all about the Season Finder:

For an overview of this series, check out our introductory blog post. You can also search through the Play Index category on the blog to learn more. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact us on e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, or Reddit.

I'd estimate that around 99% of the time, when someone comes to a Sports Reference site, they go to a player or team page and then log off. More advanced users may find their way to the frivolities pages, experiment with features like the Oracle of Baseball, or just spend several hours following link chains to various players and games.

But, just like Westworld, there's another level to our websites, one that relatively few people know how to navigate. It's called the Play Index and, in all sincerity, figuring out how to use it will change your life as a sports fan. If you've ever wondered how people find tidbits like "Mike Trout has the most WAR of any hitter through age-24" or "Dennis Rodman had seven 0-point, 20-rebound games in his career", the answer is usually that they've used the Play Index.

While the Play Index is easy to use if you know your way around, it can seem daunting to a newcomer. We often get messages from people who are eager to learn how to use the Play Index, but don't quite know where to start. So, with that in mind, we're starting a new video series called Play Index 101! Read the rest of this entry