BR.com's Sports Reference Blog

Most Home Runs in the American League, Career

I got to do some work on the Batting Season Finder today and was able to add the search for teams and for leagues in general. This will now allow you to do things like pick out the top results by team or by league. I decided to support all of the leagues and teams, and I’m using some javascript/css trickery to swap out the teams list as you select different leagues. Let me know what you think.

Things that it doesn’t currently do, but needs to be added.

1) Support for rate stats allowing you to select various qualifying levels.
2) Career position support (show the career SS leaders in hits, etc.)
3) Others??

Fitts’ law - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

My example may not be an application of Fitts’ Law, but it is annoying web design anyways. I was ordering opening day tickets for the Phillies this morning and twice had to start over after doing what I assumed would be default behavior. The fact is that the ordering process Made Me Think.

I know MLB has done a fantastic job overall with their website, and these are minor nits to pick, but doggoneit I was annoyed!

First, when you enter the little image text (you’re not a bot are you?) checker, you tab off the text entry box onto “Cancel” and not “Continue”. I’d flip the position of the two buttons.

Next, after being prompted to select a delivery method, the box immediately next to that is the release tickets button. Beside the possibility of inadvertent clicks in having two clickable items so close, it seems to me that I should go from the delivery method directly to the checkout. I’d probably look at putting the release tix button next to the section number and the delivery method widget right about the checkout button.

Third, gotta love the $3.50/ticket fee and the $4 order charge. This just amuses me because I can drive myself down to the stadium and talk to a real live person and have no additional charge added. Why they aren’t trying to steer people to the website with free drink coupons and the like I’ll never know. It would be sort of like United charging you extra to use the online boarding passes or the little check-in kiosks.

Also, I guess you now know where I’ll be sitting. Say hi if you are at the game.

The Ted Williams Shift - Baseball Fever

I got an e-mail request for some data. Ted Williams appears to exhibit a big platoon split for some of his years, but we can only assess those games where the opposing starter threw a complete game, so the question is what do Left-handed batters do against complete game starters. Here is a breakout from 1957-2006 with a summary by handedness and then every batter vs. the complete game starter for their career. Note that complete game starters hold their opposition to around a .500 OPS.

Data for batters vs. complete game starters separated by platoon

April 18, 1988 Philadelphia Phillies at New York Mets Play by Play and Box Score - Baseball-Reference.com

Check out the 8th inning with David Cone Pitching.

I get a few requests to help find games and I’m going to post them to the blog in case other people want to find them.

It’s a bit of a down day here in the Sports Reference office. On Monday, Emma, our cat of 12 years, was diagnosed with lymphoma. Today, she died, hissing (as was her custom with strangers) at the vet to the very end. She was a good cat, and we’re going to miss her.

Batting Season Finder - Baseball-Reference PI

I’m currently turning my attention to full-season stats. Here is a first (incomplete) pass at the the batting stats. Feedback is welcomed.

Things you can not yet do with this. You cannot find the catcher with the most career home runs. You can find the catcher with the most home runs in a single season.

You can not search by franchise or by league yet.

You can not do rate stats, since minimum PA requirements are a bit of a mess.

You CAN:

Find the player most home runs in the 90’s.

Find the player with the most 30-HR seasons or the most 100-BB/100-SO seasons.

You can find the player with the most walks before age 25.

You can find the player with the most hits in his first six seasons or the hall of famer with the most hits in his last six years.

You can also find the player who bats righty and throws lefty with the most games played.

You can find the only player to play five games at C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS and the OF all in the same season.

You can also save these searches and send the link to other people.

Naturally, a pitching version will be rolling out at some point as well.

I just got my second complaint about unacceptable page load times. I haven’t seen this behavior yet myself, but I would like to hear how many other people are having problems with the pages loading too slowly for them.

Longest Hitting Streak for a Catcher - Baseball-Reference PI

There are a couple of nettlesome issues involved in building and using the B-R PI.

First off, the URL’s are a mess. They really aren’t meant for human consumption. This is done to keep the back button working in a AJAX application, but it messes things up when trying to save or share a report.

The second issue is that the reports can have a lot of data in them, so sharing them in an e-mail or copying and pasting into a blog just isn’t possible or workable.

Third, if you do send another user a link, if they aren’t a subscriber, they won’t be able to see the same report that you can.

So, the PI now has a “SaveIt!” button.

Clicking this (it will work for non-subscribers as well) brings up a tooltip with two boxes.
1) contains the current query title, and
2) is a box for you to enter notes on your report (leave it blank if you want).
The report titles are generated as best I can by the program’s understanding of what you are doing. You can clean this up quite a bit on your own.

After you enter the new title and a note, you can save it.

Then an address is presented to you, and you can click on it, copy it, or use it however you want, e-mail it, post it, or whatever.

Here is a link to the report that I generated.

You can also (if you are logged in) view all of the reports that you have generated.

Link away!

007-Interview with Baseball Reference’s Sean Forman (Baseball Zealot Radio)

The audio of a podcast I did with the guys at Baseball Zealot this past week.

Sports Search from Sports-Reference.com

Greg Spira and I have been working on a new feature using the Google Co-op feature. Basically, we (meaning Greg) has put together a list of 1200 sports sites and using google you can search just through those 1200 sites. Unfortunately, wikipedia kind of messes things up as it covers every possible topic, but still it will give you jmore sports oriented searches.

For example, compare a search of Satan on the Sports Reference Search (Miroslav is #2) to Google’s standard results (Miroslav is on page 3). Anyways, let me know if you have an suggestions or recommendations.

ESPN.com: Page 2 : A site you can’t take your eyes off

A very nice article about B-R by Jim Caple.

Yes, as Jim states, I have in fact resigned from SJU and I’m doing the site full-time. Also, just to clarify in case any venture capitalists are out there reading ( ). The 40-50,000 is users not hits.

Tom Seaver: 9 Hits Allowed in Career, as last play of game

I’ve rolled out the drill down feature to the main event finder tool. Here is a list of the walk off hits allowed by Tom Seaver in his career. Nine total. Joe Torre is the only player with a walk off home run off Seaver.

www.myspace.com/baseballreference

Yes, BR now has a myspace page. If anyone has any ideas about how I might actually use this to help people find and use the site, let me know and there might be some money in it for you.

Batter Events Barry Bonds - Baseball-Reference PI

I’m looking for feedback on these revised event finders. I have added a greatly expanded feature set. Previously, the summary above the list of events had just static text which did not allow you to add more criteria when searching for events. You were given 1993 home runs and that was it. Now you can drill down within the events.

Within the summaries at the top, each summary is now a red tooltip and selecting on that criteria allows you to add that to criteria. So now, after getting all of Bonds’s Home Runs you can get just the home runs against the Dodgers at home, or just the bases loaded home runs, or just the home runs with a full count, runner on first, and his team down by two in the third inning.

When you click on the criteria, it is added to a list under the box for event selection. You then re-click “Get Report” to get the refined summary. Clicking “Drop [X]” removes the criteria.

I’ve also added a summary statistical line for these events, so you can essentially get deep splits using this tool with “Plate Appearances” selected. Albeit, one split at a time.

Here is the corresponding pitcher event tool. I will be rolling these out as the default event finders for all players (you can tweak the url to get other players–change the playerID after the “n1=”) this week once I’m convinced there aren’t any egregious bugs. I think they are solid, but if you can report any suspicious behavior, I would appreciate it.

As an example, here are Bonds’s 22 bases loaded walks in his career

Hank Aaron 1966 Batting Gamelogs - Baseball-Reference PI

I have rolled out the span selection and summation to all gamelog pages. Clicking the first and last row of a span will cause that span to be highlighted and then summed within a tooltip.

You can clear the selection, using the clear select and close link in the popup tooltip, re-clicking on the first and last row, or clicking on “clear selection” near the top of the page.

You can turn this off and on page-by-page using the checkbox at the top of the page, and you can set the default to on or off by clicking on the links near the top of the page as well.

Within the summation tooltip, clicking on the “Permanent Link for sharing” link will send you to a new page. From there just copy the url in the address bar and you can share that with anyone via e-mail or web forum and the highlighting will show up for them as well.

Hope it helps you win those important baseball arguments.

Longest Streak with SO>=10 For 2006

I finished the final streak tool in the quartet of streak tools. And I’m in the process of rolling them out to the Play Index Main Page. Enjoy, and please let me know if you find any issues. One known issues involves incorrect team earned runs for some 1968 games. We’ll hopefully get these fixed soon.

Pitching Streak Finder - Baseball-Reference PI

Just finished the beta version of the pitching streak finder. You can do things like find the most consecutive starts in which a player had more than 100 pitches, or the most consecutive relief outings with less than three batters faced, or any of a whole host of things.

Enjoy.

Orel Hershiser 1988 Pitching Gamelogs - Baseball-Reference PI

Here is another iteration and I think this might be the best. You just click on the first game in the span and the last game of the span and the intermediate games are highlighted and a tooltip is created.

Let me know which of the versions you like the best.

Version 1: page reloads after a selection by dragging mouse
Version 2: tooltip loads after a selection by dragging mouse
Version 3: click on the two games that you want to sum across

Longest Streak for a Team with HR>=2 From 1957 to 2006

The answer is nine. In addition to stats, you can also get things like the most consecutive wins, losses and find streaks of batters. For example, the longest streak using only nine batters in a game is 15 by the 1980 Brewers.

I’m progressing on the streak finder tools. Next up individual pitching and team pitching. Here is the Batting Streak Finder I finished earlier in the week. As part of the Play Index, I’m rolling these out one-by-one and once done they’ll become part of the service.

Trevor Hoffman 2006 Pitching Gamelogs - Baseball-Reference PI
Hank Aaron 1974 Batting Gamelogs - Baseball-Reference PI

I’ve rolled out a number of new features for the player game logs.

1. Pitching gamelogs now have a column for days rest and a run support summary at the bottom of the page
2. Both pitching and batting game logs have the team’s record in games for which the player appeared at the bottom of the page.


3. The player’s career games and the team’s games (first two columns in both) are now red text which means you will get an informational tooltip when you click on it. Clicking on the career game number brings up the player’s career stats through that game. Clicking on the team game number brings up the player’s seasonal stats through that game.


4. By altering the address bar, you can cause a span or series of games to be highlighted and summed, perfect for those arguments over Ryan Howard vs. Albert Pujols in September, Description here
5. But you don’t even really need to mess with that because the best addition (to my mind) is the selection feature. Using your mouse to select a range of seasons will cause a tooltip showing the player’s performance for just those games will appear. Note that when you release the mouse button your mouse MUST be in the browser window. If not, nothing will happen. If you want to turn this off there is a checkbox near the top of the page for turning this off. Here is a screenshot of it working.

Hope you enjoy the changes. Any additional suggestions welcome. Note: I haven’t tested this on a Mac, so let me know if there is a problem there.

Orel Hershiser 1988 Pitching Gamelogs - Baseball-Reference PI

OK, I think I got this working. If you use your mouse to select (highlighting with your mouse) any number of rows (two or more), the page will reload and the rows you have selected will be highlighted and the cumulative sum of the rows selected will be displayed. I need to tweak the UI for this tool, but I believe the basic functionality is there.

UPDATE:
Here is a second iteration of the selection tool. In this case, you select a span of rows that you wish to have added up (be sure to keep the mouse within the browser window. Then a tooltip generates the cumulative stats for you without reloading, and a permanent link is provided. There is also a checkbox up top that allows you to turn this feature on and off as needed.

UPDATE, UPDATE:
Here is a screenshot of the selection tool in use.

Jim Thome 2006 Batting Gamelogs - Baseball-Reference PI

UPDATE: I’ve posted another entry outlining all of the improvements made to the gamelogs.

I feel a bit sheepish after disparaging javascript for so long, because I’m figuring out that there are a lot of interesting things you can do with it. Did you know that Jim Thome started the season scoring runs in 17 consecutive games. Clicking on the link above takes you to his gamelog and highlights those 17 games. This can be accomplished for any single or span of games by the following.

For a single game, adding ‘#career_game_number’ to the end of the url will cause it to be highlighted.

For a span of games, use the first and last games of the span you wish to highlight. Adding a ‘:sum’ onto the end of that causes a tooltip with the player’s stats for that span to be generated automatically. For a series of games put commas between the game numbers and an ‘,sum’ on the end sums the games.

Some examples:

Ichiro’s First 50 games
Pete Rose’s 44 game hit streak
Willie Harris’s 8 games without a PA
Aaron’s 715th HR
Hershiser’s Scoreless streak
Pedro Martinez in 1999 vs. the Yankees

I’ve implemented this in the streak finder tool, so when you click from the list of longest streaks to the player’s gamelog the streak of games is highlighted and when appropriate the results from those games are given.

Of course, this falls down a bit when you talk about things like the longest streak of games with a hit against the Padres as it will highlight and sum all of the interim games against the Cubs or whoever as well.

Sandy Koufax 1965 Pitching Gamelogs - Baseball-Reference PI

A couple of improvements have slipped into the gamelogs and will be rolling out site-wide this week. PItching gamelogs now have the same tooltip as for batters that shows the player’s season and career totals through any date. Clicking on the career game number or the season game number activates brings up these totals.

I’ve included a column for day’s rest for pitchers (a -1 indicates they pitched both ends of a DH).

The bottom of the page now has the team’s record for the games the player appeared in. This will be on the batter’s pages as well.

I’m open to other additions to these pages as well.

Update: I’ve also added a run support summary to the bottom of the page for the pitchers.

Hank Aaron 1974 Batting Gamelogs - Baseball-Reference PI

All of the player game logs are going to get a new, little feature this week, but here is a prototype until then. When you click on the player’s career game number you get a tooltip with the player’s career totals through that game. When you click on the team’s game number you get a tooltip with the player’s season total through that game.

Also, I’m going to be adding the team’s record in games for which the player appeared as well at the bottom of the pages.

Major League Baseball hits a Web site home run - Network World

An article on how MLB handles its infrastructure. I’ve been nothing but impressed with their work over the past few years.

Regarding the leadoff pinch hitter, why not pre-serve all fifty players on each roster to improve speed and smooth out the traffic? I’ve had pretty good success with that on BR. Every image used on the site appears on the front page in 1×1 pixel form.