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

1970 Minor League Batting Leaders - Baseball-Reference.com

Got a little bit of time today to add league pitching leaders and yearly leaders (across all levels). To get to a year, go to the front page of the minors select a year and then select the leaders. To get a league leader, go to the league page and then select the leaders. Here is a pitching leaderboard.

A couple things are still missing.
1) Leaderboards by level (A, AA, etc.)
2) Speed, this is really slow, so I may have to cache results or something

BTW, a 20-year old SS in AAA with a .340/.389/.522 line?! We'd be going crazy over that now.

Longest Streak to start career with multi-hit games - Baseball-Reference PI

Ian Desmond has gotten off to a fine start for his career with three multi-hit games, but he'll need to be better to be the best of recent memory.

To generate this list I used the batting streak finder. I made the decision to only consider games with 2 or more AB's. This causes us to include Oliva's streak. In 1962 and 1963 he pinch hit a bunch of games, but actually had only one multi-AB game in that stretch. He then started 1964 with five multi-hit games. Salazar pinch ran in his debut and then rattled off his streak. The caveat that this is only for the retrosheet-era 1954 on applies. If you want to push the retrosheet era back earlier, volunteer here.

                   StreakStart  Streak End Games    AB    R    H   2B  3B  HR  RBI  SO   BB   SB   CS   BA   OBP   SLG   OPS  Teams
+-----------------+-----------+-----------+-----+---------
 Tony Oliva         1962-09-14  1964-04-19     6     27    6   13   3   2   1    9    3    3    0   1  .481  .533  .852 1.385 MIN

 Luis Salazar       1980-08-17  1980-08-21     5     19    3   11   0   1   0    3    4    1    0   0  .579  .600  .684 1.284 SDP 

 Josh Anderson      2007-09-14  2007-09-17     4     18    3   11   2   0   0    5    2    1    0   0  .611  .650  .722 1.372 HOU
 Willy Taveras      2005-04-05  2005-04-09     4     15    3    9   1   0   0    1    2    1    1   0  .600  .625  .667 1.292 HOU
 Morgan Burkhart    2000-06-27  2000-06-30     4     15    3    8   1   0   0    4    1    4    0   0  .533  .632  .600 1.232 BOS
 Pete Coachman      1990-08-18  1990-08-21     4     18    1    8   1   0   0    4    4    1    0   0  .444  .474  .500  .974 CAL
 Doug Dascenzo      1988-09-02  1988-09-05     4     19    3   10   3   0   0    4    0    1    0   0  .526  .550  .684 1.234 CHC
 Nyls Nyman         1974-09-10  1974-09-13     4     14    5    9   2   1   0    4    1    0    1   0  .643  .667  .929 1.596 CHW
 Ken Griffey        1973-08-25  1973-08-29     4     17    3    9   2   0   0    0    1    0    1   0  .529  .529  .647 1.176 CIN
 Rich Coggins       1972-08-29  1972-09-05     4     16    2    9   3   0   0    0    4    0    0   0  .563  .563  .750 1.313 BAL
 Tommy Helms        1965-09-01  1965-09-04     4     16    2    9   2   1   0    2    2    2    1   0  .563  .611  .813 1.424 CIN
 Gene Baker         1954-04-13  1954-04-18     4     17    7    9   3   0   2    7    0    3    0   0  .529  .600 1.059 1.659 CHC 

 Ian Desmond        2009-09-10  2009-09-13     3     13    2    8   3   0   1    4    2    1    0   0  .615  .643 1.077 1.720 WSN
plus many more with three

Keeping Score - Numbers Indicate Rodriguez Didn’t’ Tip Pitches With Rangers - NYTimes.com

We did a little work for Dan Rosenheck who wanted to look into the pitch tipping allegations around A-Rod. I looked at it as per his requests and sent him what I found. I've seen many comments that said something to the effect that this doesn't prove anything as the nefarious behavior may have taken place with only one or two other players and therefore it wouldn't show up in the overall numbers.

So that said, here are the 30 at bats I've found where the score differential was six or higher, 6th inning or later, and A-Rod had either an extra-base hit or a line drive. I'm offering these without comment.

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Change in Baseball Attendance 2008 to 2009 - Baseball-Reference.com

I've gotten a lot of requests for this type of data, so I've decided to make it available to all.

A reader asked about the most shutouts in a single day of major league play. Brushing off the db, these are the most we found.

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Progressive Leaders & Records for Stolen Bases - Baseball-Reference.com

One of the features I really like on the site are the progressive leaderboard pages that give you a view of the record holders for a particular stat over the years.  I was noticing that the current active steals leader was just at 432 steals which seems very low to me.  Scanning this list you can see that this is the lowest total for the active leader going back to pre-Maury Wills and the station-to-station 50's and early 1960's.

Year-by-Year Per-Game Batting Stats

We've got lots of things on the site so they can often get buried in the pure volume of things to look at. What I linked to here is the per-game statistical totals for the entire major leagues. As you can see the home runs and scoring has tailed off a bit from the earlier torrid pace. Walks are way up. We are still well off the levels seen in 1999 and 2000.

We have similar outputs for the AL and the NL.