Sports Reference Blog

Thanks to the tireless efforts of the fine folks over at the SABR Biographical Research Committee, we have recently made some biographical updates to players on Baseball Reference. Most of the changes are added birthplaces, birth locations and deaths. A few of the updates feature changes to player names and/or moving statistics from one player record to another. Some highlights:

• A player who made one appearance for the 1889 Louisville Colonels of the American Association has been identified as Walter Fisher. He was previously listed as Charles Fisher due to some confusion in contemporary newspapers. Thank you to Justin McKinney for tracking down this correction.
• A player who played two games for the 1884 Washington Nationals of the Union Association has been identified as George Pierce. He was previously believed to be Maurice Pierce.
• A player who played six games for the 1884 St. Paul White Caps of the Union Association has been identified as Ed Brown, who previously played for the St. Louis Brown Stockings and the Toledo Blue Stockings of the American Association. This record has previously been associated with Jim Brown, who pitched for Altoona Mountain City (UA), New York Gothams (NL) and Philadelphia Athletics (AA).
• A player for the 1875 Brooklyn Atlantics who was previously identified as Thomas N. Smith is now identified as D. Smith.

You can now play Immaculate Grid Basketball, along with your other favorites like baseball and football! In an effort to bring you all of the sports you love, we're proud to introduce the newest sport to the Immaculate Grid suite of games. New basketball grids will launch every day at 9am ET.

WNBA Grid update: The Sports Reference team is taking some additional time before launching a women's basketball grid. Our goal is to to make sure we do it right. Due to the relatively small number of teams and the short history of the league, there are some unique challenges to overcome ahead of a launch. If you have feedback or ideas, please share them with us here.

Reminder: Starting July 26th, new baseball grids will launch at 9am ET rather than the original time of 12am ET. Learn more about the change here.

We have expanded our newly acquired trivia game, Immaculate Grid, to include professional football! You can now play the viral sports trivia game for both baseball and football with more sports coming soon. New football grids will launch daily at 9am ET.

Integrating into Pro-Football-Reference.com and Stathead, Immaculate Grid Football will include the same features as baseball grids: hyperlinked player pages, possible answers for each cell, most popular answers, accuracy, rarity score, and player scores.

Test your football knowledge now at immaculategrid.com/football.

Programming Note - New Grid Launch Timing Starting Wednesday, July 26th, 2023.

Starting 7/26/23, new Immaculate Grid games for existing sports will launch at 9am ET. In order to provide the most reliable and supported experience for our users as we expand to multiple sports, this time change will allow the Sports Reference team more flexibility to respond to issues and feedback in a timely manner. It also allows us to stop pulling all nighters :)

Questions about any of the above? Contact us at here.

We're excited to announce that we've brought one of the most commonly requested features to Stathead! All Team Game Finders on all sports now have filters for scoring and margin by quarter/inning/period. Read the rest of this entry

Exciting news from your friends at Stathead! We've rolled out a new set of filters to the Season Finders on all of our sports. These filters allow you to explore the history of the draft in some exciting new ways! Read the rest of this entry

Sports Reference LLC has acquired the online baseball-themed trivia game, Immaculate Grid. 

This unique opportunity and acquisition for Sports Reference is the company’s first venture into expanding its websites to have playable content. With over one million users a day, Baseball Reference hopes to drive new traffic to the game, and vice versa. 

Read the rest of this entry

Thanks to the research of Ken Pullis, Pro Football Reference has added game-by-game coverage of player fumbles for the 1989 season. For instance, you can now see which games all of Randall Cunningham's career-high 17 fumbles occurred in in the 1989 season via his 1989 gamelogs.

Last fall Pro Football Reference added a suite of new punting statistics going back to 1976. We have recently extended many of these statistics back to the 1970 merger thanks to the work of Pete Palmer and Ken Pullis.

This means that we now have coverage for return yards against, net punting yards, net yards per punt, touchbacks and touchback% for all punters back to 1970. Punts inside the 20 coverage, however, still only extends back t0 1976. Bobby Walden's page is a good example of the variable statistical coverage for punters since he punted from 1964 to 1977. You'll notice 1976 and 1977 have the broadest statistical coverage but that 1970-75 is now nearly on par with 1976 and beyond. Pre-merger punting stats, however, remain limited to punts, punt yards, long punts, etc.

Thanks to the work of researcher and former NFL official scorer Pete Palmer and fellow research Ken Pullis, Pro Football Reference has made slight fixes to 150 player single-game passing, rushing or receiving totals in the 1960s. For NFL games, these were generally changes that we made after the fact and impacted some single-game totals for teammates. Most of the fixes were in the AFL from 1960-1965. No team or season NFL statistics were changed.

The Hockey Season Finder just got a massive upgrade.

We merged the Advanced Stats Finders into the Player and Team Season Finders. Now you can combine your traditional stats and advanced stats. For example:

• Dustin Brown of the 2007-08 Kings had the most hits (311) among 30-goal scorers since 2007-08.
• Justin Williams of the 2018-19 Hurricanes had the highest expected +/- (+24.8) among players with a negative actual +/- (-4) since 2014-15.

We added a bunch of new stats while we were at it! For example:

• Expected Goals: Since 2014-15, MacKenzie Weegar had the highest single-season xGF (Expected Goals For, or expected goals for the team while the player was on the ice at even strength) with 88.8. Cam Fowler of the 2022-23 Ducks had the highest xGA (Expected Goals Against, or expected goals against the team in the same situations) with 85.3. The single season leader in E+/- (Expected Plus-Minus) is Charlie McAvoy’s +29.6 for the 2021-22 Bruins.
• Scoring Chances: With scoring chances, you can see which player’s teams generated (or conceded) the most scoring chances when they were on the ice (Erik Karlsson’s 884 last year are the highest created since 2014-15). You can also see which player individually contributed the most scoring chances (Timo Meier barely edged Auston Matthews for the NHL lead last season).
• High Danger Scoring Chances: Over the last three seasons, Auston Matthews generated the most individual high-danger scoring chances with 187. We can also see that last season, the Sabres conceded 282 high-danger scoring chances when Owen Power was on the ice, the most in the league.

We hope that you enjoy these updates to the Hockey Season Finder. If you're not subscribed to Stathead Hockey, now is a great time to try it out (and get your first month free!).