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Six games to play and the Detroit Tigers (managed by yours truly) are a half game up on the Yankees. The Blue Jays would need a miracle to make it, but they are probably still alive mathematically.

Tigers have three with the Brewers and three with the Orioles.

The Yankees have three with the Blue Jays and four with the Red Sox.

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You may have noticed that most of the SR sites (sadly baseball does not yet, but will!) have a shiny new logo in the upper left-hand corner. We had been talking about getting nice logos for years, but the formation of the LLC this past December finally gave us the boost to actually get something done. In fact, when we got together at the Baseball Winter Meetings to sign the documents that offically formed the LLC, we met a graphic designer by the name of John Hartwell. John runs a company named Hartwell Studio Works. He has done a lot of sports-related work, including designing the logo of the Birmingham Barons, a minor league baseball team. We have been extremely impressed with John, not only the finished product, but also with the professionalism he displayed throughout the process.

Our hope is that these new logos further unify the sites. We want people of to think of our web sites as parts of a whole, not distinct entities, and we believe these logos are an important step in that process. Please feel free to let us know what you think (you’re never shy about that, are you?), and as always we thank you for your support of our sites.

B-R should be getting the S-R treatment this early this summer. We did a complete redesign of the guts of the other three sites starting in November and we left B-R for last. When you’ve got 100,000’s of lines of code already written you don’t undertake a re-writing lightly.

Here is what the logo will look like.

Sports Reference Store

If you were at the 2007 SABR convention in St. Louis, you were able to buy Baseball-Reference.com t-shirts and hats at a booth we had there. Now you can order the same t-shirts and hats via our Yahoo! Store.

There is also a data download available there. We may start rolling out more of these if there seems to be any interest.

One other note, we have been working with a designer on new logos to tie all of the Sports Reference sites together, so the B-R logo will be changing, so if you want the classic B-R on a t-shirt or a hat look now is your chance.

2008 Toronto Blue Jays Franchise Batting Stats and Depth - Baseball-Reference.com

The players on the depth chart are now linked to either their majors or minors pages. They are routed to the area that the most recently played with by year. So Vic Darensbourg would send you to his minor league page, Clay Buchholz to his major league page and Mike Timlin (who’s done both this year) to his major league page (ties go to the major leagues). Eventually all of the stats will be on one page some time this summer.

2008 AAA International League Batting Leaders for Runs Created/Game - Baseball-Reference.com

I’ve tweaked the minor league leaderboard to have common sense cutoffs for PA’s and IP’s for the leaderboards for rate stats. Before this readout would have been blank.

Also, SB-CS values for Catchers is now on the team and player pages for 2008 and I’ve added RF/9 to the team pages as well, rather than the very crude RF/G.

Holds are such a goofy stat. I had introduced an issue that caused cases where a pitcher had a decision to register as no hold. Well, turns out you can get a hold and a loss. Figure that one out.

Anyways, I’ve corrected the hold calculation, so it now gives hold in those “appropriate situations”. Derrick Turnbow had two such hold losses last year and they are marked in the gamelog with an HL, as in “What the HL is that?”

2008 International League Standings and Statistics - Baseball-Reference.com

Apologies for it taking two weeks, but we now have 2008 minor league data updating daily on the site.

Enjoy.

I think this does it for things that needed to get up and running for the start of the season. Now I’m hoping to focus a bit more on new stuff for the foreseeable future.

Hockey-Reference.com Blog » Blog Archive » Welcome to Hockey-Reference.com

In December we acquired a large database of hockey data and then we put Justin Kubatko on the job creating the pages. In my biased opinion he has created the best hockey statistics site on the web. I hope you’ll agree. Be sure to tell all of your hockey fan friends about the site as well.

SportingNews.com - Fantasy Games and In-Depth Fantasy Analysis

In case any front office types are scoping out managerial talent for next year, my 1986 Tigers team is up by 2.5 with 19 to play and also are the owners of the best record in baseball (replayed 1986 baseball).

It took a bit longer than I wanted, but the splits have now been updated on the site. I re-wrote the split engine to much more easily handle the addition of new splits (and their inclusion for teams, players, careers, etc.). It’s a big job. For example, I’ve got a db with over 4.5m split lines for the 52 years of batting stats alone (just for players). Here is a rundown of the improvements. I hope you enjoy them.

Update: Platoon splits for 1999 are messed up, they will be fixed tomorrow morning.

• We now have 1956 splits
• 2008 splits are now updating.
• Leverage (low, medium and high) Clutch hitting and pitching splits have been added. (about wpa)
• For team splits, we now show splits by month and half for starters and relievers.
• Pitchers now have splits for save and non-save situations.
• We now have splits for runner on third and less than 2 outs and runner on third and 2 outs.
• Day’s Rest splits are now divided between Games Started and Games Relieved. GS splits are day’s rest before a start and GR are day’s rest before a relief appearance. The previous appearance could be a start or a relief appearance.
• For games from 1988 to the present we have added splits for Ball Location: To the Infield, To the Outfield, Ball In Play, Ball Not In Play (Including HR over the fence, think 3 True Outcomes), Fair Territory, Foul Territory, Pulled, Up the Middle, or Opposite Field (as RHB or LHB), Ball Trajectory (Ground Balls, Fly Balls, Line Drives or Bunts).
• For batters, splits in team wins and losses, as a starter or as a sub.
• We cleaned up the handling of players who PH for a DH.
• We added a split for Leading off the Game.
• For splits where the player’s context can’t change after they reach base (like defensive position, leading off the inning, inning, etc.) runs scored now is shown and is the number of runs scored eventually by that batter from that time at bat. So the leading off an inning split now shows how many times the leadoff batter scored, not just how many home runs they hit. For example, Tim Raines led off the game 1398 times and scored 285 runs (just 16 leadoff home runs). (Runs aren’t shown for things like scoring margin or clutch stats because the score may change from when the batter batted to when they finally scored.)
• SB and CS totals are now given for context splits. These are accurate for the actual player and do not represent the SB and CS totals of others on base. For example, Jose Reyes has stolen 178 bases against RHP and 56 against LHP. He is 34 of 42 when the count is 0-1. He is 26 of 31 when stealing third with no one on first. He is 73 of 88 when there are 2 outs. (Here’s Rickey. Unfortunately, his 1999 stats will be updated tomorrow.)

There are likely errors, please let me know when you find them.

My stats provider has not yet provided me with stats for the play-by-play for Saturday’s games, because of this we have not been able to update the site yet. I apologize for the error and hope we can get this sorted out next week. We may need to add some redundancy to the system to make sure everything works, every day. Sorry.

There was a weird error with the 2007 splits (many of them were deleted), but I think that I’ve gotten it taken care of for the players. Also, for 2007 there are a couple of new splits, just for 2007. This fix was a stopgap and it still isn’t 100% fixed (as the team and league splits have issues).

For batters: In wins and In losses. As starter and As sub. Runner on third with two outs, runner on third and less than two outs.

For pitchers: In Sv Situations and In non-Sv Situations, Leading off an inning.

These splits should be rolled out to everyone (along with some others) in the next 3-5 days.

I had hoped to have these launched previous to the start of the season, but I wanted to get the announcement out there today in case you are checking the blog for the start of the season.

Baseball-Reference.com will be adding splits for

1. Batting Vs. Pitchers on PED’s
2. Batting vs. Pitchers not on PED’s
3. Pitching Vs. Batters on PED’s
4. Pitching vs. Batters not on PED’s

We’ve exhaustively researched this topic using player interviews and in some cases surreptitious drug testing to separate the clean from the dirty. At some point we are going to add a PED fudge factor to the neutralize tool as well to tell you what the player would have REALLY done.

We were going to roll this out for the football site as well, but, well, none of the stats would have changed.

Well, in the process of fixing a bug with the 2007 GS totals, I decided it made sense to spend three more hours and add retrosheet-extracted fielding to the player pages.

Retrosheet data is essentially complete back to 1956, so for those years forward, we now have.

SB, CS, and WP allowed data for all catchers. Johnny Bench

Innings Played and GS for all players at all positions. Ozzie Smith, 1960 Fielding Register
– This means range factor calculations are now much more accurate.

Composite OF totals and LF, CF, RF totals for those 52 years.

More Details Here.

Obviously RetroSheet is primarily responsible for this data being available. Thank you to all of the retrosheet volunteers.

We are on course for daily updates starting with Monday. I would have liked to get the Sox-A’s series up, but I had too many other things to squeeze in this week. Sorry.

Thanks to the tremendous work at RetroSheet we have added the 1956 play-by-play data to the site. We don’t quite have all of Hank Aaron’s Home Runs or Sandy Koufax’s strikeouts, but we are getting closer. Any glitches or errors that you come across, please let us know. It is a big update, and lots can and does go wrong.

Here are three glossaries that outline some other new stuff that we’ve added:

• Win Probability Added
• Pitch Data in the Box Scores and Gamelogs
• Hit Type and Location

Also, splits are not yet updated. Hopefully this week or early next week. We have A LOT of big updates and changes coming down the pike this summer, so keep in touch.

I am updating the database with 1956 stats and additional data for other years, so you may not be able to reach the database with some queries. I hope that this will be completed by this evening (Monday, March 24). Sorry for the inconvenience.

September 8, 2007 St. Louis Cardinals at Arizona Diamondbacks Box Score and Play by Play - Baseball-Reference.com

I’m doing some work on the box scores and this is a bit rough at the moment, but I’d love some feedback as these take 40 hours to build, so I don’t want to have to do them twice. This is also the only one that I’ve uploaded.

The additions. Lots of new pitching stats like called, swinging and inplay strikes. True GB-FB-LD values when available (back to 1988).

WPA and Leverage for pitchers. WPA isn’t included for batters because I haven’t tackled baserunning thus far. WPA is adjusted to the league and park context and will be available from 1956 on.

Then a running WPA value for the winning team in the pbp account. I’ve also pulled out the five top plays as a summary above the pbp account.

Other suggestions?

2007’s Most Historic and Impressive Team Splits — The Hardball Times

If the site seemed a little slow the last few months it was probably because Chris Jaffe was viewing and downloading every split from the site. (Just kidding Chris). He tells you what he finds here.

Jobs @ Sports Reference

Sports Reference is hiring–not full-time at the moment, but for summer internships. If you are interested, please apply, and if you know someone who might be interested, please pass our ad along to them and encourage them to apply. We’ve got some interesting projects for the interns to work on, so I’m hopeful that we can fill these positions. Let me know if you have any questions. Job Ad

Pat Burrell Batting Count Summary - Baseball-Reference PI

This is another tool that had been under wraps. This shows for batters and pitchers their various pitch summary data by count. For instance, in 149 3-2 counts in 2007, Pat Burrell saw 51 balls and 98 strikes. He took 5 strike 3’s looking. He swung and missed 17% of the time.

BOP Outcomes 2007 BOS 1 - Baseball-Reference PI

Development on Baseball-Reference.com has been slow lately due to a lot of business stuff going on and a lot of work on our Football site, but now that pitchers and catchers have reported, so have I.

This tool was some specialized development for a client, that I got to make public after a year. It basically runs through all of the possible splits for a batting order position for a team. Above is the Red Sox leadoff position last year. You can pick any of the nine slots for any team back to 1957.

I’m working on adding in the 1956 retrosheet data and rebuilding my db with some new features and fixes. It is a big project. We are up to 8m rows with about 150 columns of data for each row or a billion individual values just for the event tables.

Sports-Reference: All the statistics one could ever want « Sports Tech Now

An e-mail interview I did a couple of weeks ago.

And he shall be called… - The Boston Globe

Another use for Baseball-Reference.com. Clear your baby names with us. The B-R mention is that the end of page 3.

Flickr Photo Download: [Joe Jackson, Cleveland AL (baseball)] (LOC)

Kudos to the library of congress. They just uploaded 1000’s of photos to flickr.com. Included are a lot of baseball photos from the Bain News Service. These are the same photos I use on the play index.

BR Bullpen - Today in Baseball History

Through the work of tireless volunteers the B-R Bullpen has one of the best baseball datebooks on the web. I’ve created an RSS Feed with this data, a permanent link (the link for this post), and a script that pulls some of this data onto the front page of the site where it now appears at the bottom of the middle column.