BR.com's Sports Reference Blog

Seth’s Blog: Calendar aggregation

Scheduling is the natural next step for the Baseball Travel Guide.

Inflated Players … and Numbers? - Los Angeles Times

I got the last word in this L.A. Times article on the effect of steroids on home run rates.  The punchline: “We don’t know and never will.”

I came very close to appearing on It’s Your Call with Lynn Doyle tonight to discuss Bonds and Babe, but I admitted that I couldn’t even fake my way through a discussion of the Indy 500, and they decided they wanted someone more of a generalist.

I’ve been a fan of Jeff Angus’s blog for a good while now and we’ve worked together on a few projects as well (most notably sabermetric stats for the Seattle Times). Anyways, Jeff has a new book coming out, and I think it is worth checking out. Here is a plug that Jeff sent out:

I’m Jeff Angus, and I asked my buddy who sent this to you to send this
message to anyone they were pretty confident would like my new book,
“Management by Baseball: The Official Rules for Winning Management in Any
Field.” (Harper Collins, May 2).

The book is a “how-to” manage work that uses baseball stories and history
from 130 years of The National Pastime to illustrate management challenges
and solutions. It’s a fun read, but the management advice is very pragmatic,
hands-on, toolsy, a bit like a Stephen Covey but meant to be brain candy.
Readers have told me it is good for people interested in either management
or baseball or both.

If you decide you like it enough to buy the book for yourself or as a gift,
it’ll be available on line, and through fine booksellers all over North America, Lesotho &
Baseballistan.

Cheers, and “Play Ball”
Jeff Angus Management by Baseball

Jeff included some bonus content that I have uploaded as a pdf. If I did it right, it should be attached to this blog post. Bonus Content For Management by Baseball (395KB, 57 p pdf)

If I had to do it all over again, I would have chosen a different name for this site.  Something shorter and easier to type and something that isn’t generic, but the die is cast, so I’ve got to go with what I’ve got.  That said, you don’t have to type in baseball-reference.com every time you want to come to the site.  I have a whole host of alternate domain names.

• baseballreference.com  (saves you the hyphen)
• bb-ref.com
• bbref.net   (I have .org, but it is pointing to something that I hope to add in the future–contract data)
• 60feet6.com (if you are especially adept at numbers)

One caveat on this.  I really should have all of these then redirect to the main baseball-reference.com name, but I don’t, so if you go through the sponsorship system you will need to use the full domain name in order to sponsor pages.   Not a big deal, but a very subtle gotcha.

I just spent the day working on optimizing my current mysql install in order to get a grip on what sort of issues I need to worry about.  I’m leasing a dedicated mysql machine with about 6GB of memory and dual processors, raid 5 etc.  Currently, everything has been running off one server and I felt performance was suffering.

Long story short, a little tweaking of server parameters has improved the site performance by about 200% by my eye.  Now, I’m thinking the new server may not have been necessary and will be a waste of money.  Oh well, I’ll have to come up with something extra for it to do.

If you are curious, the parameters that I think made the biggest different.

I turned on the query cache, which makes the bullpen FLY.

• I turned on the query cache, which makes the bullpen FLY.
• I upped table_cache to about 200 or so.
• I messed around with the number of threads available and cached.  Previously, mysql was creating new threads for each connection.
• I also upped some buffers like the sort_buffer, tmp_table_size, and the join_buffer (don’t go nuts on these if you have a lot of connections, you’ll use all of your memory).
• I was able to do this because the other changes made only 2-5 threads even necessary.

Anyways, read the ******** manual.  It will pay off.

Players Born Today - Baseball-Reference.com

Not everyone of these random features is going to be new to everyone and I suspect this is one that many people will know about. By the looks of it, May 22 may actually have a worse All-Star team than my birthday of December 14th.

    Cups of Coffee - Baseball-Reference.com

Continuing on the series of random features. Many of these appear in the frivolities section of the site. Cups of coffee, of course, refer to players who were only in the majors long enough to get a cup of coffee (not eat an entire meal). The lists on this page show the players who have played only one game in their major league career. There are a few home runs, lots of 0-fers, and some interesting stories that are waiting to be told. One thing to keep in mind with this list is that a lot of the players listed from the last two or three years are still in the minors or may be in the majors right now, so their status as cups of coffee may change at some point.

Baseball Travel Guide - Baseball-Reference.com

As the site has grown over the years, I’ve added wrinkles and features here and there and I think they’ve often been lost because 1) there is a lot of stuff here, and 2) navigation gets harder the more stuff you add.  So, I’ve decided to highlight some minor features that you might be aware of on Baseball-Reference.com.  I’ll shoot for one a weekday, but I’ll probably averge 3/week or so until I exhaust new features.

The first one is the baseball travel guide.  The travel guide is updated through the 2005 season and has the locations and info for all major league, minor league, and many independent and summer college leagues.  It also has many museums listed as well.  The main way to interact with it is through the front page of the travel guide where you can enter a zip code or town, state combination.  The straightline distance is then calculated for every ballpark nearby and you are presented with a list of the baseball attractions close by.  At the bottom of the page is an interactive map powered by google.

I also have pages separated out by state and by league, so you can interact with the database that way as well.

Popular Mechanics - Barry Bonds Vs. Babe Ruth

Greetings Popular Mechanics readers.

The site was down for about 2 minutes this afternoon.  The site’s logs had not rotated for a week due to a bad software update and the log size was getting out of hand, so I needed to rotate the logs and that took the server down.  Sorry for the inconvenience.  I’m hoping that getting the log rotations working again will speed up the site a good deal.  We’ll see.

Thank you for visiting the site.  I hope that I can keep it running at optimal speed given the traffic we’ve been seeing.

Win Expectancy Finder - Major League Baseball 1979-1990

A nice little web app that prints out the probability of a team winning a game based on the inning, run differential, and base/out situation.  Hat tip to Hardball Times for finding this.

I apologize for any deterioration in service you’ve seen around here lately.  It is a little embarassing to have the site so slow at times.  The site has been absolutely clobbered the last few weeks.  The load average has been around 15-20 during peak times and has topped 30 on occassions where I’ve tried to do some routine maintenance or data retrieval stuff from the DB.  We’ve topped 20 hits/second and now are averaging over 15/second each day (remember hits include all files like images, js, css, so that isn’t the pageview stat).

The database has exceeded the max number of connections a few times, so player search requests have just been dropped.

Well, to get this fixed, I’m probably going to lease a second big server and move all of the database stuff over there.  I’ll also probably lease a cheap server for source control, email and other things like that, and then leave the current machine just for http.  System administration is a bit of a black art, but I think I can get it done.

MercuryNews.com | 05/07/2006 | Move over, Kevin Bacon: Six degrees of Barry Bonds

A nice article on the Oracle of Baseball. One of the big additions to this that I would like to add is the Minoso exclusion feature.  Perhaps someway to select any player for exclusion.  It obviously isn’t a huge priority.

Also to give credit where credit is due, the software was all written by Patrick Reynolds.  I started out licensing it from him and then I ended up buying the software from him.  I put the pretty front end on it.

Prints and Photographs Digital Item Display at the Library of Congress

At today’s Philly SABR meeting Joe Dittmar gave a presentation on photos from the library of congress collection.  He stated that many of them needed to be touched up, but that in all they were in good condition and they had a varied collection of stars and minor players from much of major league baseball history.  Here is their print and negative collection webpage.  I’m trying to figure out if it would be worth it for me to just link into their search engine using players on the site.  Maybe starting out with just guys with 200+ games would be best.  I’m not sure.  For example, here is a photo of Dode Paskert.

If anyone reading is going to be at the Philly Chapter’s SABR meeting tomorrow, please say hello. Unfortunately, I will be getting there late (around lunchtime), since my wife has to give a final exam (Number Theory) tomorrow morning and I have drawn babysitting duty.

The SABR group will also be attending tomorrow night’s game with the Giants. I was at Scott Rolen’s first game back to Philly, and I never thought I’d hear booing louder than that. I suspect that the reception for Bonds in the first inning will beat it. A three home run night would give us something to tell the kids. Should be fun.

I don’t know if there is still room or not, but here are the details.

Eric Sink on the Business of Software

As a neophyte ISV (Independent Software Vendor) founder, I’ve developed a bit of a business book fetish over the last two years or so. Just glancing over at my bookshelf, I’ve probably read 20-30 business books over the last year. I’m a little scared that I’ve developed a case of “read-one-more- book-and-I’ll-find- secrets-of-business-success”-itis. When what I really need is “My-last-paycheck-from- SJU-is-in-August,- so-get-your-butt- in-gear-and-make- something-people-will-pay-for”-itis
Anyways, you may have seen the link to Eric’s Weblog in the blogroll, and this book is a collection of material that has previously appeared on his weblog, so probably 90% of it is available for free there. If you are working on a software product to sell to people, I can’t recommend this book enough. He has advice for marketing, product placement, attending trade shows, managing developers and what to look for in hiring and all kinds of other stuff. There wasn’t a chapter where I didn’t think, “Hey! that is a good idea.” And he is an entertaining writer, at least for a geek audience. Anyways, I give it a “4 for 4 with 6 RBI” rating.

It is now official. I have been granted my leave of absence by Saint Joseph’s and I will now be taking the year to work on Baseball-Reference.com and other Sports Reference, Inc. activities. (Big thanks again to SJU for understanding).  Very exciting and a little scary, and rather than rehash (poorly) what Daring Fireball wrote last week when stating they were going off on their own, I’ll copy what he said as it resonated perfectly with my sentiments at the moment:

What I’ve concluded, though, is that if I want to make a full-time income from Daring Fireball, I need to just do it full-time. I.e. that it’s not going to work the other way around — to wait for the revenue to burgeon and then start putting full-time effort into it.

There’s nothing I want to do more than this. But even so, it has been an extraordinarily difficult decision to make, partly because I’m so prone to over-thinking that I sometimes have trouble deciding what to have for lunch, but mainly because there exists the very real possibility of failing in an excruciatingly public way.

That raises the question as to why I didn’t just do this without announcing anything. I.e. just try putting full-time work into the site without announcing anything, and see how it goes. But that, more or less, is just as cowardly as the original “just keep growing the revenue until it’s enough and then slip on over” plan.

I see no way around telling you, the regular readers of this site, what it is that I’m trying here. To lay it all on the line. The point here isn’t to guilt anyone into buying t-shirts or becoming a member (e.g. Oh, man, Gruber quit his job, I better help him out). The point is to prove to you how much better Daring Fireball can be than it has been, and how much more you, the readers, will enjoy it, now that I’m devoting my time to it.

So there it is. Finals are over this week, so starting May 8, it will be Sports Reference full-time.