Sports Reference Blog

I am pleased to announce that Hans van Slooten has taken over day-to-day development of Baseball-Reference.com. Hans has been with Sports Reference for 15 months now and moved over from hockey to baseball last month. Hans is a long-time SABR member and a very talented developer. You are likely to see a bunch of improvements this summer with Hans on the site full-time rather than me on the site half-time. He's also a dedicated Twins fan, so he will not face the unneeded distraction of a deep postseason run by his favorite team. Hans is on twitter at @cantpitch.

I'm not going anywhere. I'm still President of Sports Reference and will certainly be involved in Baseball-Reference.com, just not with day-to-day responsibilities. With six full-time employees, I have a bit more a management role now, and we are also launching a new site this summer and expecting to roll out some changes to all of the sites this summer.

It's been a long winter in Philadelphia (and in Minnesota). In honor of Sunday and Monday, the greatest days of the year, here are some Opening Day features we have here at B-R:

• Franchise Opening-Day Starters (1914-2014)
• Batting and pitching game finders can be set to search "In team's first x games":
  • Example 1: Most HR in team's 1st game of the season (1914-2014)
  • Example 2: Highest Game Score in team's 1st game of the season (1914-2014)
• Use streak finders to look for the longest streaks to open the season:
  • Example 1: Most consecutive games with a hit to start the season (2000-14)
  • Example 2: Most consecutive wins by a pitcher to start the season (1990-2014)
• Game Previews
• Our Mobile Site is perfect for looking up stats at the game, in a restaurant, or on your couch. We even have every box score since 1914 available in an easy to use mobile format.

Give them a try, and enjoy baseball's return.

We have an exciting feature for our users who also happen to be major league ballplayers. The new Baseball-Reference.com TCS® (Tonsorial Consulting Service) can help you decide new directions to take your hair style and/or facial hair without having to take the time to grow the hair first.
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We're offering free access to the Baseball-Reference Play Index through April 15. Just sign up here and use this coupon code: Analytics

The Play Index is the most thorough and powerful publicly available baseball research tool. Subscriptions are normally $36/year. Below is a sampling of some of the search tools:

The Batting or Pitching Season Finder. This tool allows you to search full-season or multi-year totals to find your own custom leaderboards. You can look at the entire history of baseball from 1871-2014 with every year, team, and position available, or you can filter the results in a vast number of ways: by specific years, by age, by first six seasons or last ten seasons, by American League only, by Cubs only, by switch-hitters, by catchers, by outfielder or infielder, by year of debut, but active or retired, by Hall of Famer, by height and weight, by living or deceased, or by a range of common statistical categories. Then you can sort the results by any common statistic, by the teams with the most players matching that category, by players with the most seasons matching that category, or by most recent, youngest, oldest, final year, or year of debut, and others.

The Batting or Pitching Game Finder. This tool allows you to search player game totals (think 4 for 5 with 3 RBI, or 10-SO shutouts) filtering on any of a dozen or more choices. This can be done either on a single player level or on any batter from nearly one hundred years or on any pitcher. The same can be done for Team Batting or Team Pitching Totals.

The Batting or Pitching Split Finder. This tool allows you to search player splits (think most road home runs, biggest lefty/righty splits or most hits in Yankee Stadium) filtering on any of a dozen or more choices. This can be done either on a single player level or on any batter from nearly 100 years or on any pitcher. The same can be done for Team Batting or Team Pitching Splits.

The Batting or Pitching Streak Finder. This tool allows you to search player games looking for the most consecutive games matching a particular set of criteria. This can be done either on a single player level or on any batter from nearly sixty years or on any pitcher. The same can be done for Team Batting or Team Pitching Streaks. Note that when searching for batters, you should limit your searches to 20-25 years when searching through all games.

The Batting or Pitching Event Finder. This tool is player specific and will out put a detailed summary and play-by-play list of all events of a specific type from a single year or an entire career. For example, you can see all of Harmon Killebrew's triples or even his outs to the second baseman.

The Batter vs. Pitcher Tool. This tool presents a complete sortable list of batter or pitcher with totals for every opponent they faced by career or by year. Clicking on the player's name will lead you to a detailed output of their head-to-head plate appearances.

It's been reported in numerous locations, and now we've added an additional page to our League Encyclopedias that confirms it: games have reached scoring lows not seen regularly since the 1960's (8.13 R/G) and are longer, on average, than they have ever been (3 hours and 7 minutes per game in 2014). Additionally, 9-inning games were over three hours long, on average, for the first time in MLB history last year (3 hours and 2 minutes).

This new page also includes historical averages for extra-innings games, pitches/PA, pitchers/game and season, batters/game and season, pinch runners/game, and pinch hitters/game.

To find these pages, click on the menu Seasons > All Seasons, then click on Misc on the right side of the page for any of the leagues.

Regular visitors to the site have likely noticed a small tweak we recently made to the layout of player pages. The change is the addition of a shortcut to our Player Comparison Finder tool. For instance, from Stephen Curry's page, someone might decide that they want to compare him to James Harden. This can now be done very simply by typing Harden's name into the "compare to" box shown in the image below:

Once you type in Harden's name and click on it, this career comparison page is generated:

This is the default comparison search, but you can easily edit it to just compare 2014-15 (or any other season(s)). Just click the red "Show/Hide Search Form" link on top of the stat tables to bring up the search form. From there, edit your search to compare "single seasons" in the yellow part of the search form. Then select 2014-15 for both players and click "get results." This will take you to this page, comparing two leading 2014-15 MVP candidates in a variety of statistical categories, from basic to advanced.

As an added bonus, if you go back to the search form, you'll notice there's room for up to 6 players in a comparison. You can go ahead and populate any players you'd like there. For instance, here's 6 leading 2014-15 MVP candidates compared:

We should note to longtime fans of this tool that it is still accessible from the main Play Index page, but we've added this search to player pages as an added convenience.

We're excited to announce that we have added nearly every box score in ABA history to basketball-reference.com. The ABA ran from 1967-68 to 1975-76, and we now have the boxes for every season except for 1967-68 thanks to the efforts of Michael Hamel, who researched the box scores and has allowed us to use them.

The boxes are accessible from season pages, team schedule pages and team game logs. These box scores have also allowed us to calculate a limited number of team splits.

Perhaps most significantly, we now have game logs and splits from the ABA days of some of the greatest players in basketball history, like Julius Erving and Rick Barry.

This data has also allowed us to create series stats pages for ABA Playoff series. Like this one, in which Dr. J averaged 37.7 PPG in an ABA Finals series win over David Thompson's Denver Nuggets.

This data has not yet been incorporated into player game finder searches or other play index tools, but that's something we'll be looking into in the future.

We hope everyone enjoys this new addition and thanks again to Michael Hamel for his permission to use this data and for his excellent research.

You may have noticed that we've added trades to the bottom of player pages (which also reflects if the player's draft pick was traded). Since we have now gotten that data populated to 1994, I figured I would commemorate 20 years worth of trade data by building a trade finder tool. You can use this to find:

• trades involving the first overall pick
• or trades of all first round picks
• or trades between two particular teams
• or even trades involving a WR or a RB

As I said, this data is complete back to 1994 with more years to come as I feel like digging out the NFL Record and Fact Books and entering them. Let us know in the comments or via the feedback form if you have any other suggestions for this tool.

We have added historical snapshots of franchises with the creation of organizational pitching and batting depth charts back to 2010. These pages are accessible from the team's page. For instance, if you wanted to see the 2010 Phillies, first go to their team page. From there, to see the pitching depth chart, hover over "Pitching" on the gray bar and then choose "Org. Depth Chart."

This will then lead you to a page where you can look at a breakdown of the various pitchers (LH starters, RH relievers, etc) throughout different levels of the organization with their stats and levels played at for that season.

The same thing can be done for batting and these pages are available for all franchises back to 2010.

Please note that the formatting on these pages may appear a bit wonky at times, as these are mainly there as historical artifacts.

2015 Spring Training statistics are now up and running on Baseball Reference. You can see all player statistics on one page with our batting register and pitching register. Additionally, spring training stats can be found on top of the Standard Batting table on player pages and on Spring team pages, which can be accessed via the home page.

You may notice that the Opponent Quality column has not yet been filled in, but we're working on that and will have it updated soon.