Sports-Reference, with the help of researcher Greg Spira, is proud to present our definitive, comprehensive reference page regarding the performance-enhancing drug policies in place for various North American sports leagues/associations. In it, you'll find a list (in FAQ format) of the various PED regulations in pro sports leagues, in addition to lists of every athlete suspended under each league's policies.

We want this page to be your best source for information about steroid/PED policies in pro sports. However, pages like these are constantly growing and evolving with new information, so if you know of a policy or a suspended athlete not listed on the page, send us an e-mail and we'll be sure to include it on the site.

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.

Chain of Teammates from Bid McPhee to Elvis Andrus

Just updated the oracle with the 2009 player data. Enjoy.

Finally got around to fixing some things on the site. Should be live within the hour.

*The Park Factors now have the 2009 numbers incorporated into them.
*The similarity scores have been re-run for the end of the season
*2009 Transactions and Salaries are updated
*Various bug fixes
*Re-ran all of the pages (excluding old previews and box scores) on the site, so the nav bar is now consistent
*High School played for is now on the site.

Play Index should have an update later this week.

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.

Rating the National League Playoff Teams - Bats Blog - NYTimes.com

I'll be doing some guest blogging at the New York Times during the postseason.

Baseball-Reference Blog » All-Time Tiebreaker Playoff Games

Neil just went through and created a list of all of the tiebreaker games in MLB history.

In case you hadn't made your way over to Hockey-Reference yet today, here's a reminder that H-R is up-to-date with stats and information through the current 2009-10 season, and will be automatically updated with the previous day's results every morning from now until the end of the playoffs in June.

I've been making some updates and improvements to the postseason stats on the site.

First off, the playoff stats on the player and postseason summary pages now match what we have in our pbp database. In the past, these were essentially two different sources with some crossover. It all now jibes with our pbp database. The main changes are that 1981 is not messed up for pitcher IP's as it was, the recent years have full stat lines, we now have wpa info for the 1914 WS. The fact the Braves played in Fenway messed things up and we got that fixed.

Second, I have added a best_of column to our database, so you can now search for just game 7's (or 5's) in the Game Finders and Postseason Event Finders.

I've re-run all of the postseason pages, so they should be ready to roll for next week.

Barry Bonds Batting Against Greg Maddux - Baseball-Reference PI

I'm getting ready for the postseason and I've cleaned up the presentation of the batter vs. pitcher numbers to include a line for the playoffs along with a total line for the regular season and also for regular and postseason.