One of the interesting new features of the PI is the sortable summary provided when using the game finder. This summation provides the total statistics of the games found can be ranked by a variety of different stats. I find this very exciting because it represents the first step in searching splits. Let me explain with an example.

Suppose we wanted to find the player with the most hits on the road in a single season.

1. Use the Game Finder called Player Batting.
2. select "Find Players with Most Matching Games in a Season"
3. Limit your search to Visitor
4. Search for H>=1

That will provide you with this list:

Until now we had to stop at this point and say that "Lou Brock had the most road games with a hit in a season (since 1954)". However, the new version of PI lets us take this a step further. Assuming that it is logical that the player with the most hits on the road in a season would be among the top 300 in games with a hit, we can find that player by sorting for hits. After completing the above search, simply click on the column heading "H" and you will be presented with this list:

Brock drops down to #22 and Ichiro now tops the leader board!
Let's do the same thing for hits at home:

Clearly, this technique is limited. It can't be used for stats that usually occur in bunches (most pitching stats). It also can't be used for rate stats like batting average. However, for a lot of hitting stats it can be a fun and useful new tool.

With the new additions to the Play Index, you can run a wider variety of queries than ever before. Here are just a few examples...

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Here's a tutorial video on how to use our new Share Tool:

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.

With the World Series rapidly approaching, now seems like a good time to give a tour of the expansive Postseason Section we have here at Baseball-Reference. In some ways, our postseason record is more complete than the regular-season one -- our regular-season boxscores only go back to 1954, but we have complete boxscores and play-by-play records for every postseason game ever played (if you don't believe me, check out the first World Series game ever). The play-by-play accounts even feature Win Probability! From 1903!

But that's not all. Beyond the box scores, you can take a broader view of each playoff matchup in history using our series pages, which contain basic linescores for each game of the series, as well as aggregate series pitching and batting stats. These pages are current as of the previous day's action, so feel free to check out an ongoing series or two. Also, take a trip around our leaderboards to learn about all-time postseason records:

• Batting and Pitching Leaders for World Series Career and Single-Series
• Batting and Pitching Leaders for LCS Career and Single-Series
• Batting and Pitching Leaders for Division Series Career and Single-Series
• Batting and Pitching Leaders for Playoffs Career and Single-Year

Finally, our Play Index Batting and Pitching Event Finders let you search through every play in postseason history, up to and including the previous day's games. And as always, let us know your questions or comments, so that we can continue to be your go-to baseball website all year long.

Wikipedia defines a "Cup of Coffee" as,  "a short time spent by a minor league player at the major league level. The idea behind the term is that the player was only in the big leagues long enough to have a cup of coffee before being returned to the minors."

All of you have heard this term before, of course, but maybe you haven't seen the Cups of Coffee page here at Baseball-Reference. If you've ever wondered about players who played just one major-league game in their career and were never seen again at the big-league level, that page is your one-stop source -- it contains every instance in history of a player suiting up for only 1 career MLB outing. Yes, that includes Moonlight Graham, who was a real person and really did play just 1 game (0 AB) for the Giants in 1905 before becoming a doctor in Chisholm, MN.

So for more people who may be just as interesting (if not a famous) as Graham, check out the Cups of Coffee and think about some otherwise-forgotten players who never got a second chance at The Show.

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.

Recently, we've been discussing how to maximize your use of our individual batting and pitching gamelogs, so the next logical step is to apply what we've learned so far to the team batting and pitching logs.

To access the logs at the team level, go to any team page, and hover your mouse over the "Batting [+]" section of the navigation bar under the banner ad. In the drop-down menu, click "Game Logs":

http://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/tgl.cgi?t=b&team=MIN&year=2009

What you see should look familiar from our individual batting gamelogs... As always, the ultra-cool row-summing feature works here, allowing you to get totals and averages over any span of games you desire, The usual batting categories are present as well, and if you click on the blue text in the  "Date" column, you can go to the boxscore of the specific game in that row. Furthermore, recall that clicking the red text in the Gtm column will pop up a small box containing the team's stats through the game in question, as was the case in our indivdual logs.

Turn your attention to the far right side of the table, and you'll see a column for runners left on base, plus the number of batters used by the team in each game, and the opposing starter faced (including his handedness and the Bill James game score he posted vs. the team in that particular game). Above each table is another place for interesting data -- there you will find the team's situational record vs. righty and lefty starters, as well as the longest team streaks of the season with and without a home run.

Now, on to the pitching side:

http://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/tgl.cgi?team=MIN&t=p&year=2009

The same lessons learned on our individual pitching gamelogs will serves you well on these team pages, because you'll be able to sum rows, access game-by-game boxscores (blue text), and call up the year-to-date info via the red text in the Gtm column. The only difference you'll notice will be on the far right side of the table, where you'll see a column for the number of pitchers used, as well as another column identifying exactly who those pitchers were (in order of appearance), the number of rest days they pitched on, their game score for the outing, and which decision (if any) they were tagged with. And last but not least, below the table on these team pitching log pages is the familiar run support table, which lists how often the team helped its pitchers with each number of runs per game.

Enjoy these team features as a companion to the player-based logs we've already discussed, and as always, let us know about any questions or comments you may have.