Baseball-Reference.com Play Index / Subscribe to the Play Index

We did a major reworking of nearly the entire website last April. One area that remained unchanged was the Play Index. It took seven months, but the Play Index has finally been updated to match the rest of the site including features like in table sorting, the Share Tool, and pre-formatted and csv text. I have also reworked a number of the tools allowing for more types searches.

The main advantage to this update besides those listed above is that these changes will speed the development of new features dramatically. I've basically been on hold for new Play Index features for 18 months as I worked to move the entire site over to our new platform. Thankfully, that is essentially done now, and we can focus on improvements and additions rather than refactoring old code.

Some of the new features.

I've added a fifth criteria for the game and season finders allowing searches like seasons with "HR > SO" or "CS > SB". This is still pretty crude, but it is a first step toward full arithmetic searches.

The season and game finders now have more matching options at the top of the forms. Most of these options were already in the tools, but were buried in the sort options. These are for searches like "Most multi-hit games in career, 1954-2009" or "Most 20-HR seasons".

For the game finders there are additional new features. When doing a matching search (like "most games with a home run in first 50 games"), you also get a summary line for all of the games matching that search, which allows you to definitively say that Wally Joyner has the most home runs in a player's first 50 games since 1954. This also gives you a way to do a reasonable good split search ("Most wins against the Blue Jays in the last ten years"). There are also more matching options for things like most players with a multiple hits in a single game for one team or both teams.

I've also re-organized the front page and now show only the last 30 days of saved searches by default.

We are also going to add a few more photos to Play Index, so look for those later this week.

Special thanks to our team of bloggers who put these updated tools through their paces. They will be highlighting some of the new things you can do in upcoming blog posts. There are definitely still bugs in there to be ironed out. There are millions of potential searches to do, so we just can't test every possible combination. You can report issues you find through our bug system. Suggestions are also welcome there. Please be as specific as you can.

Subscribe to the Play Index

To celebrate the update, we are offering a free trial for the play index through November 20th. Give it a whirl for free and we hope you'll find it worth your while to subscribe after the 20th. Also, it has been three years since we launched the Play Index and our prices have held constant during that time. We have increased the prices with this update, so that a full year subscriptions has gone from $29 to $36/year.

If something isn't working as before and you really, really can't wait for it to get fixed, the old version is still available.

Thank you for your support of Baseball-Reference.com and your feedback is always appreciated.

B-R User Survey

Most all of the good ideas on Baseball-Reference.com have come from user suggestions or comments. It's been awhile since we ran a survey to get user feedback on what you think of the site and what things you would like to see added. So I would like to take this time to ask you for your feedback. The survey should take 5-10 minutes, and you should feel free to leave anything you want blank.

Users with a sponsorship account will get a $2 bonus upon the completion of a survey.

Monday, October 12, 2009 Game Previews - Baseball-Reference.com

There are a lot of balls in the air behind the scenes at Baseball-Reference.com and one of the places they tend to hit the ground is at the interface between regular and postseason stats.

I've fixed a couple of issues with the regular and postseason stats. The game previews for postseason games now combine regular and postseason stats in (what I think) is a sensible way.

The batter vs. pitcher tools now include an option for including postseason stats as well. For example, here is Cliff Lee vs. the Rockies including postseason stats or just with regular season stats. Please let me know whatever issues you find.

I ran the numbers through our park factor calculator today. Basically, the new parks come out as neutral. Citi get a 98/99 (batting/pitching) park factor and New Yankee gets a (98/97) park factor. Hyperventilation aside they are both very slight pitcher's parks. Whenever possible we use 3-year park factor which are an average of year N-1 and year N+1. When only two years are available we use year N-1 and year N and in the case of New Yankee and Citi we just use the current year. I also only use intra-league games since there is a home and home with every team in the league. Interestingly, if we include the inter-league games in our totals, we have only a percentage point change here or there.

I think we need to seriously rethink park factors and I've done a little bit of that, but don't have anything ready to use.

For now, I'm not going to tweak the park factors in the db. You should assume that Yankees and Mets hitters are slightly better than shown and the pitchers slightly worse, since I've been using 100/100 for the two parks.

Here are the 2009 3-year park factors if the season ended last night.

team_ID BPF_tot PPF_tot
ARI     109.000 109.000
COL     109.000 109.000
CHC     108.000 106.000
BOS     106.000 104.000
SFG     104.000 104.000
TEX     104.000 104.000
DET     103.000 104.000
PHI     103.000 101.000
CHW     103.000 103.000
CIN     102.000 103.000
TBR     102.000 102.000
LAA     101.000 100.000
FLA     101.000 101.000
BAL     99.000  101.000
HOU     99.000  99.000
MIN     99.000  98.000
ATL     99.000  99.000
STL     98.000  97.000
TOR     98.000  98.000
OAK     98.000  98.000
NYY     98.000  97.000
KCR     98.000  99.000
WSN     98.000  99.000
NYM     98.000  99.000
MIL     97.000  97.000
SEA     96.000  97.000
LAD     96.000  94.000
PIT     96.000  97.000
CLE     94.000  95.000
SDP     88.000  89.000

The Baseball Early Bird - Tuesday, September 22, 2009

The Baseball Early Bird is a joint project with Gary Gillette of 247 Baseball that provides a daily e-mail with:

• recaps of last night's games,
• a trivia question,
• a list of players born, died, or debuted on this date,
• current standings,
• pitching performances, and hitting performances from last night's games,
• assorted editorial features, and
• e-mails optimized for html, text, or mobile.

We aim to be out by 8am ET every morning in-season with fewer issues during the off-season. You can opt-out of the e-mail at any time and we will never sell or share your e-mail address with another party. Hope you enjoy the Early Bird.

As the Sports Reference sites have grown, so has the level of interest of our users. And so has the time committed to responding and working with users. I'm not complaining as that is an important part of our job. I've always felt that the best ideas come from users telling us how they want to use the site and where we aren't meeting their expectations.

But....this aspect of the job has soaked up more and more of our time, so much so that when I come to work on Monday, most of the day is spent just cleaning out my e-mail inbox. So we've done what any growing company would do. We hired a really smart, knowledgeable person to take over this job.

Neil Paine started this week as our user affairs coordinator. He is going to handle most user e-mail, work on user education and training initiatives, and work on lots and lots of special projects. Neil is a recent graduate of the Georgia Tech's Science, Technology and Culture (STAC) Program, and he'll be based near Atlanta. He possesses a broad knowledge of all of our sports and is perhaps best known as our stellar basketball blogger. Besides being a good writer, he has a lot of math savvy, so we are really excited to have him onboard.

As a user, not much should change for you other than your e-mails will get answered sooner and bugs will be fixed faster.

I made a couple of server tweaks, mainly passing along ornery script calls (via mod_proxy) to our 16-core 16GB db server rather than the regular b-r web server. It appears to have dramatically improved performance (at least what top is showing me), but there may be some subtle bugs I didn't anticipate, so let me know if you find anything funky going on. Sorry for the poor server performance the last few months. Hopefully this will get us through the end of the year.