BR.com's Sports Reference Blog

baseball-stats-online.com

The newest addition to our blogroll.  Chad Eastridge has put together a database-backed site with the ability to make custon leaderboards.  Definitely worth a look.

One of the things I hope to take a whack at this summer is a new take on the database-backed site.  I don’t have anything to show the public yet, but I think there will be some neat things that people will enjoy.   I just can’t figure out what to call it when I do launch it.

Sports Reference Blog - powered by FeedBurner

This is WAY too self-referential, but I’ve set up feedburner account, so you can subscribe easily to this blog (not that there has been much to make it worth it…yet).   They have links for all of the various readers on this page.

Also, if there is something else I should be doing, I’m open for suggestions.

Major League Baseball : News : Major League Baseball News

This is a link to an article on MLB.com on a new partnership they have with ScorePAD for selling their scoring software.  I don’t have much to say about the scoring software as I’m partial to pen and paper, but just what CMS is MLB using.  You’ll notice the title of the article shows up nowhere in the links above. That is because MLB doesn’t put the article titles within the pages title tags.  Someone should really fix that if they want bloggers to comment on their articles.

Mario - Live - Google Video

 Hat tip to Waxy Links

I love stuff like this.  This is probably better than the lego robot that Middlebury students programmed to clear round one of Super Mario Brothers.

About wikiCalc 0.1

We are getting close to a product that we need to really do a great job on the baseball-databank.  WikiDB.  I would love to have a program that automatically maintains all versions of a db and can handle sql commands and the like.  WikiCalc is a spreadsheet wiki that can handle a few thousand cells.   Hat tip to sviokla’s context.

Visual Page Rank: Baseball-Reference.com

This is kind of a neat tool for showing you the google page rank of all of the pages linked from a particular page.  It is a bit slow for a site with as many links as BR has on it, but it can give you the lay of the land as far as you page rank goes.

Baseball Fans Have an Online Six Pack

MLBAM is doing a lot of good work these days.  They have to be one of the leading edge streaming media outlets going right now.

However, if anyone reading knows how to get mlb.tv working with linux let me know because I haven’t been able to watch games so far this year on the linux side

Retrosheet Event Files

Now complete from 1957-2005 with the soon to be fixed exception of 1999.  Kudos to retrosheet for this tremendous work.  One of the things I want to work on is using these files to dramatically and radically deepen and extend the data on Baseball-Reference.com.  I think that baseball fans will enjoy some of the things we have planned for this data.

Chadwick: An Open Source Baseball Scorebook

Ted Turocy is to be lauded for the great work he has done getting this going.  If anyone wants to take a whack at writing code for generating PBP results or Box Scores from retrosheet files, and including it into Chadwick let me know.  I think it might be an interesting project to take on.

Play Ball: Introducing Fungoes | Linux Journal

Warren Buffet has often said that he invests in companies with big moats around their products. Meaning that the cost to compete with them is very large. The baseball stats site moat is more like a ditch you can hop over.

Here is yet another site that is starting to go down the baseball stats encyclopedia route. There are a lot of people touting the dynamic page route and it has some advantages, but it just won’t scale very well. We run all of the stats sites on one machine that is now handling 20+ requests for files/second. If the sites were dynamic our server costs would probably be $10,000/month or more. I agree that some dynamic ability on the pages would be useful and I have some ideas as to how to do that less invasively. Perhaps this fall or winter I’ll be able to get to that.
I’m curious if the open source comment means he is going to make the code for the actual pages open source or if they are just using open source tools.

For those curious, BR is built on a LAMP stack. Linux, Apache, MySQL, and 110,000 lines of Perl code.

I had the pleasure of hearing former Commissioner Fay Vincent speak at Saint Joseph’s yesterday. He was invited to speak in John Lord’s baseball course, but the talk was open to the public. Dr. Lord has done a tremendous job bringing in speakers for this course. In the past few years, he’s had Andrew Zimbalist, Bill Giles (every semester), Gerry Hunsicker, Pat Gillick, several sportswriters and negro league players as well.

Commissioner Vincent gave a few remarks, starting with a Yogi Berra story and then going on to discuss Larry Doby’s place in history and stressing to the students that they couldn’t fathom the difficulty that Negro League players had to overcome just to play ball. He also discussed the oral history project that he and Claire Smith of the Philly Inquirer had put together for the Hall of Fame.

Some other comments.

“Warren Spahn had a unique intelligence and is probably the smartest ballplayer he ever met.”

Greatest accomplishment was putting Negro Leaugers on the veteran’s health plan.

“Reinsdorft is 5x smarter than me and 50x smarter than Steinbrenner.” He had a lot of good Steinbrenner stories.

“Steroids is 50x worse than the Pete Rose incident.” and “It is absurd to say that steroids were not banned.”  He also equated amphetamines to a “strong cup of coffee.”
He recommended that Bonds should hold a three hour news conference admitting all and answering all questions and that would then cause the public to lose interest, just as they’ve done with Giambi.

He was surprised that Buck O’Neil was not inducted.

He thought that an owner as commish was bad because you can never be viewed as independent and he thinks the next commish will be independent.

He claimed that if he were still commissioner and had the minority hiring record of the current administration, he would be absolutely killed in the press, but Selig gets off scot free.

He called the Florida-Montreal-Boston ownership machinations very ugly and underhanded.

He said if the senate was really interested in pushing MLB’s buttons, they would threaten to make luxury boxes non-deductible. Of course, the senators wouldn’t get to sit in them then.

He also feels the sport is healthy among young fans as a viewing and entertaining sport. He worries about it in terms of the percentage of kids who play baseball. He also pointed to the decrease in african americans in baseball and doesn’t believe there are any easy answers. He seems to think the lack of division I scholarships in baseball is a primary reason.

Later, he was asked about the next collective bargaining agreement and that since teams were doing much better now if he thought they would get a deal done easily. I was pretty stunned by his answer. He believed that half the teams were losing money and that the Brewers were probably worth only a fifth of what Attanasio paid for them ($225m or so). I pointed out to him that Tampa Bay probably makes $45m from revenue sharing, TV, and internet and they clearly had to be making money. He commented their payroll was $15m, but seemed to imply they were still losing money.

The latest Sports Business Journal states that MLB made $5.1 billion in reveneu last year and will see $300m in internet revenues alone. They also said that 27 teams were profitable. Mr. Vincent may have been combining the profitability and competitive balance issues in saying that 15 teams can’t both compete and be profitable, but his statements seem way out of whack with reality to me. Of course, he hasn’t seen real books for 12 years or more, so that might explain it.

Deletion log - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Between this and Fay Vincent giving me the blankest of stares when I mentioned Baseball-Reference.com, yesterday wasn’t a good day for the old ego.

DonkeyMagic: Google Map Maker

I’ve been using google maps for the Baseball Travel Guide for a little while now.  This is a pretty slick tool if you would like to add a google map to your website.  It generates all of the code for you. You still have to sign up for an API key.  Hat tip to LifeHacker.

Venture Voice: Blog

Since I’m now part of a venture selling baseball stats for the IPod, I laid down $280 on a 30GB ipod.  I have to say I really enjoy having it.  I’ve been downloading the stats and trying those out, and I think there are a lot of directions we could go with that.

I’ve also spent $70 on Itunes and subscribed to a number of podcasts.  The podcast that I enjoy the most so far is VentureVoice.  The interviews are with youngish entrepeneurs looking to start new companies or in the middle of starting new companies and while it focuses on venture capital a great deal, the stories about building the businesses are very interesting to me.

MLB.com: The Schedule is a Major Undertaking

As an applied mathematician by trade, I have a lot of respect for the folks who put together the schedule. It really is a massive undertaking. The number of potential schedules is practically infinite. Finding a valid schedule, let alone one that minimizes travel time is a daunting task. If you want to get an idea for how hard it is, put together a schedule for your local college basketball conference (double round-robin) and then make sure that everyone has the same number of weekend home and road games and that no team plays more than two games on the road in a row and then add a couple of rivalries that have to occur in the final week. And accomodate a team that wants to play a non-conference game some weekend, and ESPN who wants you on Big Monday. BTW, Michael Trick was one of my external reviewers for my tenure application.

Color Tool 2.0.1 Alpha

This is a pretty cool color tool for charting out how different colors interact and testing some ideas.

Ballbug

This is an interesting news aggregator to baseball information. There must be some money to be made in this as we’ve seen some people with some successful non-sports blogs dip their toes into baseball blogging. This one is by the folks at memeorandum.com and then Markos of DailyKos.com has the whole AthleticsNation thing going. It has a nice set up. They don’t have Repoz of BTF.

://URLFAN - Ranking sites in the Web 2.0 world

This is a handy tool for finding out what the blog intelligentsia is linking too.  BR is currently 1900th or so.  Twice as good as ESPN.com, and just behind All-Baseball.com.

Press-Telegram - Sports

BR was cited in a discussion of the number of players over age 35 in the major leagues as starters.

BTW, why don’t these paper websites actually link to the websites they cite?

Loaiza has been Mr. April, which could bode well for A’s
Felipe Alou is moving up on Harry Wright by the most wins by a foreign-born manager.

Philadelphia Inquirer | 04/03/2006 | His Magic Number Is 21
The Philly Inquirer uses the Oracle to link Jimmy Rollins to Joe DiMaggio.

Major League Baseball : The Official Site

HAPPY OPENING DAY!!

BaseballAmerica.com

Baseball America’s website has a new look.  It is a nice update, but it has one GIGANTIC usability red flag that they need to fix ASAP.  If you look at an interior page, the logo in the upper left corner is not a link back to the home page.  I tried clicking this about 5 times the first time I visited the site, but to no avail.  To get back to the home page you have to click a tiny link in the second row of choices on the far right end.  Please fix this!