Sports Reference Blog

Baseball-Reference keeps track of the birthdays of every active MLB player as well as the majority of historical ballplayers on our site. You can access today's birthdays by clicking on the Happy Birthday/Born On This Day link on Baseball-Reference's front page. You could already sort birthdays by birth year, years played in MLB, All-Star Game selections and other basic statistics. But now, we've added our Wins Above Replacement metric as an additional stat to sort by.

Since today's August 24th, let's give a spotlight to the top 10 players born on this day, ranked by WAR:

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.

Basketball-Reference already had a section for single-game league records for various categories, such as points and total rebounds. But now, we've made it easier to see an individual player's single-game records by adding a Game Highs table to every player page. It will be located below the Advanced table (as well as the Shooting and Play-By-Play tables for post-2000 players).

For example, this is what Kevin Durant's Game Highs table looks like:

You can see Durant's career high in 3-pointers made in a game is seven, which he's tied in five different seasons. Also, looking at the 2017-18 season, it's easier to see that he achieved a new personal high for blocks in a game.

For players with postseason statistics, there will also be a Playoff Game Highs table further down a player's page, just above the Similarity Scores table. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.

For several years, many of the tools in the Basketball Reference Play Index have allowed for game-level searches back to the 1963-64 season. However, since we have at least a basic box score for every game in NBA/BAA history (established in 1946-47), we have now opened up game-level Play Index searches back to 1946-47. Read the rest of this entry

On Pro-Football-Reference, we've made a small addition to our franchise coaching encyclopedia pages, adding a cumulative statistics table on top of our year-by-year results table. With this, it's now a little easier to look at franchise leaders in wins and playoff appearances. The wide berth between Bill Belichick and the rest of the Patriots' coaches is that much more evident on New England's franchise coaches page, and now there's a place on the Philadelphia Eagles' page to have Doug Pederson sandwiched by Greasy Neale and Buck Shaw in the franchise championships column.

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.

Regular Basketball-Reference users are well acquainted with the Play Index, which allows us to compare players across eras and slice and dice season-level data by many criteria. Today we are now introducing the WNBA Player Season Finder, which will be accessible from both the Play Index page and from our WNBA home page. We have WNBA stats back to the league's inaugural 1997 season, which means you can now search all of WNBA history with this tool.

Just like our NBA Player Season Finder, with the new WNBA tool you can do single-season, combined season and total season searches. For example, with the combined season search, you can now create franchise career leaderboards, maybe to see how far ahead in first place Tamika Catchings is among point scorers in Indiana Fever history. Or with the total seasons search, you can now execute a search like players with the most qualified seasons of 2 blocks per game; Margo Dydek and Lisa Leslie lead with nine seasons each finishing with that mark in their career.

Of course, current season stats are also searchable with the Player Season Finder, so you can give them some perspective with past stats. A'ja Wilson is burning up the league in her first WNBA season, currently averaging over 20 points per game. Here's a look at the others in WNBA history who finished with 20 points per game in their rookie season.

Stay tuned for more additions to the WNBA section of our site here on the Sports-Reference Blog. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.

In an inevitability, your team gets off to a rocky start by dropping its first four games of the season. NFL media members will then leap to giving you some morsel of hope by telling you, "Wait, this 0-4 team made the playoffs, so don't panic!"

Well, now you can find this kind of information on your own with Pro-Football-Reference's Team Record Finder, the latest addition to our ever-expanding Play Index. With this tool, you can input any record that a team may have had at some point in their season, and then see the final record of every team that was in that situation.

Using the previously mentioned example, here is a list of the 91 teams since 1990 (when the 12-team playoff system began) that started 0-4 and their final records. Along with a full list, the Team Record Finder gives you a nice summary including a team's average finish (4-12 if you started 0-4) and the percentage of teams who made the playoffs (1.1% of 0-4 teams managed to accomplish that). For teams that did make the playoffs, we also include how far they got; we can see that the only 0-4 team to make the playoffs was the 1992 San Diego Chargers, who finished the regular season with 11 wins and won their wild card game before falling in the divisional round to the Miami Dolphins.

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.

It's been a little under two months since we launched FBref and the response has been amazing. Thanks to all of you who have used the site, let us know how much you're enjoying it, and given us thoughtful feedback on how to improve it.

With the league seasons about to begin in Europe, we wanted to catch you up on the latest updates we've made to the site. Specifically, we've added coverage of three additional countries: Netherlands, Portugal, and Scotland. These additions have done a great deal to expand our site's depth and scope. For completists, FBref now has things like Luis Suarez's early career numbers with Ajax and Cristiano Ronaldo's age-17 season with Sporting CP. USMNT supporters will be able to check in on the progress of players like Matt Miazga, while those of you following the latest transfer rumors can check out rumored targets like Hirving Lozano. Lastly, with the update, our site features Hulk for the first time!

We're going to continue to roll out new countries throughout the rest of the summer, and we're also working on a lot of great features for the league season. In the meantime, if you have any feedback for us, we'd love to hear it! Send us a message through our feedback form or FBref's official Twitter account.

Over three years ago, we added the Player Comparison Finder tool to the Pro Football Reference Play Index. The tool, which allows you to compare up to six players at a time over a season or span of seasons, originally only allowed you to compare offensive skill position players. However, earlier this week we were discussing freshly-minted Hall of Famer Brian Dawkins and how he compared with the other great safeties of his era and realized it'd be nice to see some data all on one screen. So you can now see things like tackles, interceptions, sacks and forced/recovered fumbles in the Player Comparison Finder. For instance, here's B-Dawk compared with Troy Polamalu and Ed Reed.

On Pro-Football-Reference, while the majority of our statistics are for players, we also have a good amount of coaching data, including team ranks during a coach's tenure as well as coaching history. One of our offseason projects at PFR was to fill out the coaching history of every head coach and coordinator since 1990, and we have pushed that data out for the public eye today.

Some examples:

Tom Cable is currently an assistant head coach and offensive line coach for the Seattle Seahawks, and he's been on the West Coast for the grand majority of his career, ever since he started off as a graduate assistant for Idaho and San Diego State in the late 1980s.

David Shula had an ignominious head coaching tenure for the Bengals of the 1990s, but now we've added in his 1991 year as a WR coach that got him promoted to head coach the ensuing season.

Lane Kiffin has been out of the NFL for a while, but we've added in his latter-day college experience as an offensive coordinator for Alabama and a head coach for Florida Atlantic. Never forget he got his head coaching gig with the Raiders from a college offensive coordinator position, so anything is possible.

To get at least one actually successful coach in here, Dick Vermeil now has his 1970s stints with UCLA as well as his 1969 season as the Los Angeles Rams' special teams coordinator included in his history.

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.

We've made lots of additions to the player data on College Basketball Reference in recent years. In an effort to make it a little more clear what data we have and what data we don't have, we've made this coverage map back to 1947-48.

Our rosters are essentially complete back to 1992-93, and our coverage of box score stats is also nearly complete back to that year (aside from minutes played, turnovers, personal fouls and offensive/defensive rebounds).

For seasons before 1992-93, it's important to note that our rosters are not 100% complete. It was NCAA practice for many years to combine the stats for non-rotation players on team stat sheets under the label "Others." So for many teams we have stats for the eight, nine, ten, etc. players who received significant playing time, but not for the players with negligible playing time. Additionally, we're missing 621 school seasons completely (mostly in the 40s and 50s). So when we say we have points for 98.8% of players in 1947-48, that means we have points for 98.8% of the players in our database for that season (which excludes players lumped in as "Others" or players on teams we are completely missing).

The link to this coverage map can be found both in the Player Season Finder tool and in our About section.

If you happen to have any of the data we're missing, please let us know. Over time, we hope to fill in as many gaps as possible.