Heavy Play Index users, especially those who try to share their findings, may have noticed that the URLs for Play Index queries tend to be very long and unwieldy. Here, for example, is the URL for a simple query of most HRs in a season:

As many an infomercial host has suggested, there simply has to be a better way. Fortunately, there is! Every Play Index tool has a button in the top right that says "Make Tiny URL" Read the rest of this entry

On Friday, we moved all of the sites over to secure http (or https, more simply). Here's the Wikipedia explainer. Basically, this just means that the data between your computer and our browser is now encrypted, rather than plain text. You should now see "secure" and/or a lock in the address bar when you are on the site. We have never stored credit card information and still don't. All payments were always encrypted and handled by third parties, Paypal and Stripe.

We have not seen any issues surface in this switch, but if you do find something, we'd greatly appreciate you letting us know.

We have rolled out an update to our search function on Baseball Reference, Basketball Reference, Pro Football Reference and Hockey Reference. If you type "random" or "zz" into our search forms on those sites, you will be taken to a random page. We have also added a random page tool to the frivolities menus on those four sites (Baseball, Basketball, Football, Hockey).

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With the NFL Draft kicking off Thursday night, now might be a good time to point out all the draft resources we have available at Pro Football Reference. You can check out:

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While the NBA Playoffs, MLB season, and Stanley Cup Playoffs may be in full swing, football never sleeps. This weekend, the country's most popular sport will take center stage as the NFL Draft descends on Philadelphia.

Last year's draft showed how a smart team can use the draft to turn their fortunes around at warp speed, as the Dallas Cowboys, who went 4-12 in 2015, took Dak Prescott and Ezekiel Elliott with two of their first five picks and then watched as that duo led the team to a 13-3 record and the #1 seed in the NFC. While it may be too much to ask for a team to replicate the feat of finding two franchise-changing, All-Pro skill players in the same draft, Dallas' experience shows that it's not impossible.

Are any teams out there poised to pull off the same feat as Dallas and go from their division's cellar to its throne by shrewd drafting? Is there another Dak Prescott out there, waiting for the right team? Let's dig into those questions and more, with our preview of the 2017 NFL Draft. Read the rest of this entry

We're pleased to announce the newest video in our series showing how to get the most out of our websites. Today's video is all about the stat tables themselves. We've programmed several ways for the site to reorganize and add up stats on the tables for you, just by clicking a button or two. However, many users don't realize these hacks exist. Hopefully, this video will save you some time and also illustrate how to answer questions like "What was Bryce Harper's OPS over his last 10 games" Read the rest of this entry

If you're viewing this site on Internet Explorer 11, chances are you're having a frustrating experience. In recent weeks, we've received voluminous feedback about our sites not loading properly. The common denominator to this feedback is that the users are almost all part of the small portion of our traffic from users on IE11. It seems that IE11 is unable to render many of our pages, probably due to some ad code. Nothing we have tried so far to resolve this seems to have worked. To fix this issue, we may try removing ads on IE11 to see if performance improves. As we're dependent on advertising to keep our sites afloat, this isn't a decision we relish.

Until we figure out what the issue is, we highly recommend user a superior (and free!) browser such as Google Chrome or Firefox.

Please let us know if you have any questions.

We're excited to post the latest video in our How To series, showing you some secrets and hacks that will help to get the most out of the Sports-Reference family of sites. Today's video is all about sharing. While many users know how to find the data they're look for, fewer know the different ways of sharing it. From embedding tables on a website or blog, to posting them to Reddit, to downloading directly to your computer as a spreadsheet, this video will show you the different ways that you share all the info you find on our sites:

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We know that a lot of you are interested in grabbing data from our site and reusing it in excel and generating reports on your own. We got our start doing that.

The redesign complicates that because we add some helper elements to the page that are relevant for the vast majority of users and helpful in their use of the site. I'll call this material Mobile Formatting. It includes the frozen left column on wide tables, the max width of the page and side scrolling, the use of interior table header rows and sort direction indicators. So to make sorting easier, I've added an option to the "Share & more" menu to strip this content out in one click.
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On the old version of the site on the front page, we placed the cursor into the search box automatically which could cause some issues if you had already scrolled down the page. Your browser would then be jerked back to the top of the page. On the site redesign, all you have to do is (once the page has loaded) hit the tab key one time and you'll be put into the search box. Lickety Split.