BR.com's Sports Reference Blog

ESPN.com - Sox May Face Toronto Without Bullpen

It keeps getting weirder.

SportsTicker (OAKLAND), August 31, 2006 - Boston manager Terry Francona may not find much help in the Fenway bullpen should David Wells encounter trouble against tonight’s opponent, the Toronto Blue Jays. The entire Red Sox bullpen was quarantined following the end of yesterday’s game with the Oakland Athletics after several fans contracted smallpox while seated near the Red Sox relievers. Closer Jonathan Papelbon, a strong candidate for the AL Rookie of the Year Award, was greeted by Center for Disease Control officials in hazmat suits after leaving the field and was required to return to the bullpen for observation. The bullpen area which was covered with a large plastic bubble immediately after the game is now a temporary home to the Red Sox relievers, who hope to be released sometime today. “They have video games, tv, and some food in there, so they will probably be ok. We just hope no one contracts small pox as our starter depth is a little thin now and we really need a bullpen,” said manager Terry Francona.

The remaining Sox players were forced to return to Boston on separate flights as flight crews refused to fly with more than two Sox personnel on any one plane. “We were going to call up Craig Hansen for tonight’s game,” said GM Theo Epstein, who was forced to walk from Logan to his home in the Fenway District as no cab driver would take him on as a fare. “But he tripped walking out of a Chilis after last night’s PawSox game and gave himself a concussion. We are working on some other options.”

For several hours yesterday afternoon, it looked like tonight’s tilt might have to be cancelled as an unprecedented swarm of locusts had descended on Fenway Park. “Thankfully, grounds crews were able to clear the field using snowplows,” said owner John Henry, whose personal fortune was cut in half yesterday by an ill-informed investment orange juice futures.

posted this on BTF, but I thought I’d put it up here also.

1985 Kansas City Royals Batting Orders - Baseball-Reference.com

The batting order and lineup pages are now live on the site. Each lineup and batting order for each game in a team’s year are listed. There are some things that you can see from these pages.

Here is the list of lineups for the 85 Royals.

One other addition to the site (thank you Arnie Braunstein) is the list of MLB relatives for each player.

Here is Ray Boone.

2005 New York Yankees Lineups - Baseball-Reference.com

I’m getting my arms around more of the retrosheet data, and here is an output of lineups for every game from the 2005 season for the Yankees. I expect to load this for other teams and years tomorrow. The most common lineup appears at the end of the page. Sometime tomorrow, I should have the lineups for the last fifty years up.

I’ve also done the same thing for Batting Orders.

2005 New York Yankees Batting Orders - Baseball-Reference.com

SI.com - News and Scores from Sports Illustrated

9:14 pm EDT. Still no mention of the Panthers steroid use on the CNN/SI front page. It does appear on the NFL page, but none of the CNN/SI talking heads have seen fit to write an article about it.

Oh, but guess what is on the front page.

Bonds’ trainer held in contempt, back in jail

Yeah, there is no double standard for the NFL. Players run 4.8 40’s and weigh 325 pounds, naturally.

FoxSports now has Bonds story #2, Panthers story #6.

CBS sportsline: Bonds’ trainer story merits front page. Panthers with bosoms, no mention. No mention on the NFL front page either. Hmm, don’t they broadcast the NFL?

After their in depth coverage of the Panthers’ story with a single wire article. ESPN now has Bonds’ trainer #1 and nothing on the Panthers. On the NFL front page, it merits a mention below Len Pasquarelli’s discussion of “Character”.

Charlotte Observer | 08/27/2006 | On file: Steroids’ risks, ravages

I picked this up from Sabernomics.com. Three out of five of the offensive linemen for the 2003 Super Bowl bound Carolina Panthers received prescriptions for steroids and one even received a prescription to help him keep from growing breasts. What do you think would be the media firestorm if the starting infield of the 2004 St. Louis Cardinals was found out to be using steroids during the entire season?

This report was published yesterday.

Peter King’s MMQ on the Panthers:

PANTHERS (Spartanburg, S.C.): It’s hard to imagine a player not wanting to play for John Fox. What more do you want from a coach than a man who puts you in the best position to win, with a competitive team, and who looks you in the face and tells you what’s what? Every time I’m around his team, I appreciate the hold he has on it — and the fact that his players know he’ll do whatever it takes to win, playing whomever he has to play to get that win.

ESPN.com has a wire article about it with no commentary from their talking heads. It is a tiny link on their front page and on the NFL page.

CNN/SI does not even have the story anywhere on their website that I can find.

NFL.com has nothing.

FoxSports.com has nothing and doesn’t even have a wire story.

Considering the gallons of ink spilled over MLB this is preposterous.

I’m convinced that as a sports league no one cares about the NFL.

People care about the NFL because of

1) Gambling
2) Fantasy Football
3) Entertainment

People will argue over old baseball players for hours, but this almost never happens in the NFL and probably doesn’t happen any more than it does for hockey or basketball. The NFL is purely an entertainment venue.

I spent last week running to a two-inch high (no kidding, I measured it) stack of bugs and feature requests that users had e-mailed me and I had printed out for future use. The primary corrections are that I’m now up-to-date with SABR’s biographical committee updates (Yay! SABR!) I’ve also added a few new features.

• Player batting and pitching lines now end with a short note if the player as an All-Star or received MVP, CYA or RoY votes that year.
• Links to the bullpen from player pages were made more prominent.
• We’ve added a large-print front page, for users with impaired vision.


• Birthdays and date of death pages now link to the next and previous days.


• We have a handedness report to go along with the Place of Birth report.


• Players with the most games played and no postseason appearances are listed.


• Team HOF registers list the players who played that season and went on to the Hall of Fame.


• Literally, hundreds of bugs and corrections were entered. Thank you to all of you who have contributed corrections and suggestions.

There are also a few updates that were made earlier.

• Player Pages now show the player’s performance (from the last 50 years or so) in their debut and link to a box score on the Retrosheet website.


• Team Schedules and Splits now have additional information like the winning and losing pitchers and a link to the game’s boxscore on the retrosheet website (click on the “b” next to the date).

Keep in touch because there are going to be lots of new features rolling out over the next few months.

Most Games Played with no Post-Season Appearance - Baseball-Reference.com

Another new list on the site. Ernie Banks is of course #1, but Jeromy Burnitz and a soon-to-disappear Carlos Delgado head the active players.

Handedness Report - Baseball-Reference.com

A user was curious as to whether batter handedness had changed over the last few decades. This tool is a natural extension of the Place of Birth report.

Head-to-Head Record - Baseball-Reference.com

In our tour of things that you could already do on BR, here is the head-to-head record finder. You can get to this from the Games Directory selecting head-to-head. Selecting a franchise and range of years will give you the output above.

Then if you click on “games” on the right-hand side…

Head-to-Head Game-by-Game Results - Baseball-Reference.com

You can get the individual game scores for those two teams along with stuff like longest games, winning streaks, year-to-year head-to-head records. For instance, the Red Sox have taken the season series from the Angels the last four years. I’ve also incorporated links to the retrosheet boxscores in these pages as well.

Situational Records - Baseball-Reference.com

I’ve got a couple of tools using the gamelogs that people may not be aware of. The Main Index lists all of the tools. For instance, the linked query shows you that from 2000-2005, the home team won one-run games at a 61% clip. You can also break this out by various teams, leagues, and years and find the best one-run record of the last 100 years if you want.

Other tools allow you to find a team’s best N game streak by wins or runs scored and allowed.

Mike Piazza Statistics - Baseball-Reference.com

I’ve added debut information for player’s from the retrosheet era. For instance, on Piazza’s page we list that he went 3-3 in his first game against the Cubs. As a bonus, there is a link to the boxscore on the retrosheet site.

1970 Baltimore Orioles Schedule - Baseball-Reference.com

I updated the gamelog data for the team schedules using retrosheet data, so now we have team gamelogs for every team in mlb history and I’ve also linked to the boxscores for the games at Retrosheet. Winning and losing pitcher, attendance, and time of game are now listed as well.

More changes to come.

Dallas Green and the Phillies drubbing the Mets again aside, the big news was Jose Reyes hitting three home runs in the game. Here are all shortstops to hit three HR in a game in the retrosheet era.

| date_game  | name_common       | AB | HR | RBI  |

+————+——————-+—-+—-+——+

| 1957-09-14 | Ernie Banks       |  3 |  3 |    3 |

| 1980-06-20 | Freddie Patek     |  6 |  3 |    7 |

| 1991-06-28 | Barry Larkin      |  4 |  3 |    6 |

| 1992-07-12 | Jeff Blauser      |  4 |  3 |    5 |

| 1995-06-02 | John Valentin     |  5 |  3 |    3 |

| 1996-05-28 | Cal Ripken        |  5 |  3 |    8 |

| 1998-04-03 | Jose Valentin     |  3 |  3 |    5 |

| 2000-04-11 | Kevin Elster      |  3 |  3 |    4 |

| 2000-04-16 | Alex Rodriguez    |  5 |  3 |    7 |

| 2001-06-30 | Miguel Tejada     |  5 |  3 |    8 |

| 2002-07-23 | Nomar Garciaparra |  5 |  3 |    8 |

| 2002-08-07 | Chris Woodward    |  4 |  3 |    3 |

| 2002-08-17 | Alex Rodriguez    |  4 |  3 |    4 |

| 2003-07-30 | Jose Valentin     |  4 |  3 |    5 |

Dallas Green Managerial Record - Baseball-Reference.com

The talk radio stations are abuzz with news that Charlie Manual gave Dallas Green a tongue lashing prior to last night’s game. I am so sick of Dallas Green being trotted out as some sort of white knight managerial hire. The guy is 24 games under .500 for his career (Manual is around 40 games over .500) and managed to barely win a WS title with a pretty talented Philadelphia team. Is Bob Brenly going to get the same treatment for the remainder of his career?

SI.com - MLB - Judge: Statistics not intellectual property of MLB - Tuesday August 8, 2006 7:07PM

Wow, a summary judgment. I would think that this means MLB has little chance of continuing their $500,000 rights fees for outlets like ESPN, etc. Score one for the little guy.

Nick Punto recently had three RBI without a hit. Ben Petrick once had four and a lot of guys had three. Here is a list.

| name_common      | tm  | date_game  | opp | AB | H | BB | HBP | RBI  |

+——————+—–+————+—–+—-+—+—-+—–+——+

| Ben Petrick      | COL | 2000-09-20 | SDP |  3 | 0 |  1 |   0 |    4 |

| Tommy Griffith   | BRO | 1922-09-30 | PHI |  2 | 0 |  2 |   0 |    3 |

| Del Crandall     | MLN | 1960-06-12 | SFG |  1 | 0 |  0 |   0 |    3 |

| Norm Larker      | LAD | 1960-09-30 | CHC |  2 | 0 |  0 |   0 |    3 |

| Ernie Banks      | CHC | 1961-06-02 | CIN |  2 | 0 |  0 |   0 |    3 |

| Bob Chance       | CLE | 1964-07-31 | DET |  3 | 0 |  0 |   0 |    3 |

| Danny Cater      | NYY | 1971-08-04 | CLE |  2 | 0 |  1 |   0 |    3 |

| Bob Boone        | PHI | 1973-08-09 | SDP |  3 | 0 |  1 |   0 |    3 |

| Richie Hebner    | PIT | 1974-08-27 | SFG |  2 | 0 |  3 |   0 |    3 |

| Mike Hargrove    | TEX | 1976-06-25 | CHW |  2 | 0 |  1 |   0 |    3 |

| Bert Campaneris  | OAK | 1976-09-27 | KCR |  4 | 0 |  0 |   0 |    3 |

| Terry Puhl       | HOU | 1978-09-01 | CHC |  3 | 0 |  2 |   0 |    3 |

| Dave Concepcion  | CIN | 1980-09-24 | SDP |  4 | 0 |  0 |   0 |    3 |

| Roy Howell       | MIL | 1982-08-08 | CLE |  3 | 0 |  0 |   0 |    3 |

| Jack Clark       | SFG | 1982-08-08 | HOU |  4 | 0 |  0 |   0 |    3 |

| Amos Otis        | KCR | 1982-08-28 | CHW |  4 | 0 |  0 |   0 |    3 |

| Vince Coleman    | STL | 1986-05-01 | SDP |  2 | 0 |  0 |   0 |    3 |

| Don Mattingly    | NYY | 1986-05-03 | TEX |  2 | 0 |  0 |   0 |    3 |

| Tom Herr         | STL | 1987-06-08 | PHI |  4 | 0 |  0 |   0 |    3 |

| Candy Maldonado  | SFG | 1987-08-29 | NYM |  1 | 0 |  0 |   0 |    3 |

| Tony Gwynn       | SDP | 1989-09-19 | CIN |  4 | 0 |  0 |   0 |    3 |

| Darin Erstad     | ANA | 1998-09-24 | OAK |  4 | 0 |  0 |   0 |    3 |

| David Ortiz      | MIN | 2000-07-03 | BOS |  0 | 0 |  1 |   0 |    3 |

| Ellis Burks      | SFG | 2000-09-02 | CHC |  1 | 0 |  3 |   0 |    3 |

| Chad Curtis      | TEX | 2000-09-29 | OAK |  4 | 0 |  1 |   0 |    3 |

| Edgar Martinez   | SEA | 2002-08-03 | CLE |  1 | 0 |  1 |   0 |    3 |

| Raul Ibanez      | KCR | 2003-07-02 | CLE |  3 | 0 |  1 |   0 |    3 |

| Milton Bradley   | LAD | 2004-04-16 | SFG |  3 | 0 |  1 |   0 |    3 |

        …..

+——————+—–+————+—–+—-+—+—-+—–+——+

60 rows in set (5.27 sec)

Of course, this list is from the retrosheet era.

Batter v. Pitcher - Baseball-Reference.com

Please keep in mind that this is very, very beta at the moment, but this is sort of project that I’ve been working on over the last two months. The user interface needs A LOT of work, but using the db that I’ve created it took me two hours to build this basic page today. There is going to be a lot more stuff like this coming out onto the site in the next two months and beyond.

Here is another that might be interesting.

Seems to work pretty slick.

Amazon.com: The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More: Books: Chris Anderson

I read this book at the beach. I have to admit that I felt a bit like a loser reading business books while everyone else was devouring fiction, but what can I do. I just can’t get into fiction when there are all of these things to learn.

Anderson coined the term “long tail” which refers to the idea that while the big sites, movies, songs, and interests are very big, people’s interests are so varied that smaller sites, movies, songs, and interests can likewise thrive when people are given the opportunity to find things using the internet or other means. What this means is that big organizations like the broadcast networks are in trouble (hence the horrendous bidding for the NFL) if they want to find a single big audience, but that niches will only proliferate more and more.

This idea meshes nicely with some of the micropublishing ideas I want to work on over the next year.

I’m back after an extremely hot week at Virginia Beach, VA. But only for a day as the little brother is getting married in New Hampshire on Friday.

Anyways, those of you trying to access the site on Saturday may have run into some issues as the db appeared to fritz out. I haven’t been able to pinpoint the issue. The dbserver kept dropping connections to the web server and then after that happened ten times the dbserver got fed up and decided not to allow the webserver to connect anymore. I’ve upped that from 10 to 10,000 and fixed a couple of buggy scripts that I had been ignoring, so hopefully this will correct the issue.;

Excruciating Baseball Lists

Lots of great lists from Mike Mav.