Mike Myers 2006 Pitching Gamelogs - Baseball-Reference PI
Nothing too earth shattering, but I’ve added holds and blown saves to the pitching gamelogs and fixed up some issues with the run support and days rest outputs at the bottom of the page. I will look at adding them to the main pages when I revamp those. Retrosheet has also added a few more pbp accounts to their files, so I’ve incorporated those into the db’s as well.
I have added a lot of new splits, but those will not be on the site until next week sometime. It takes about 50 hours to regenerate all of the splits tables.
VisiBone SQL Products
Over the course of a year, this thing might save me hours of time looking things up in my mysql books (date_format, group_concat, date_add and sub and countless other functions I can’t remember). I have the Web design one as well and it is money well spent.
Opening Day Complete Games - Baseball-Reference PI
Here is an example of the sort of questions that become very easy to answer with the Baseball-Reference.com Play Index. This took about five seconds using the Pitching Gamelog Finder. You can even get the most recent one for free.
If you sent an e-mail about the Co-blogger slots, I got a bunch of responses, so I need to sort through them and pick some people. Thank you for the interest.
Philadelphia Phillies Opening Day Starters and Results - Baseball-Reference.com
I’ve added a new feature showing the opening day starters for the last 50 years for every franchise. It also shows the results from the games and if you hold your mouse over the box score link the opposing starter.
As part of this, I’ve also added a page of links listing each franchise with links to the various summary pages I provide. Here is a list.
Team-by-Team Summaries
Starters: Positional / Pitching - Players: Batting / Pitching
Leaders: Batting / Pitching - Managers - Attendance/Age/Parks
Amateur Drafts - Hall of Fame Register - Opening Day Starters
One of the things that always falls by the wayside when I’m doing things on the site is marketing the site properly, which is really, really bad. Marketing (not in the tv ad sense) should always be a high priority. For instance, I think that one of the issues that the play index has is that people have a hard time seeing how this might apply to there needs when using baseball stats.
So, I would like to start a stat of the day blog. The idea is to have a daily post that would layout some things the Play Index can do. I’m looking for 2-3 bloggers or interested folks who in exchange for a free Play Index subscription could post 2-3 times a week an interesting list or report they created using the Play Index. You’ll get a comped annual subscription and links to your blog from this blog.
I’m not looking for anything ridiculously thorough. I could see this taking 10 minutes a day.
If you are interested, e-mail me, sean-forman@baseball-reference.com with a link to your blog and three ideas for interesting reports you would do, could be topical, historical or a combo.
BR Gadget.xml
To add to our list of sidebars and search plugins, I’ve added a Google Homepage Gadget. Just a search box and links to main pages on the site. Nothing too fancy.
I’m working on season updates these next two weeks, so probably not a lot of new stuff will be rolling out until after the season starts.
Ducksnorts 2007 Baseball Annual by Geoff Young (Book) in Sports & Adventure
If you are a Padres fan, this should be high on your list of books to read.
2007 Picks
This is something I’ve done for awhile now. I use the sagarin ratings and run a million (yes, a whole million) simulations and track who wins what. Given Sagarin’s love of NC, North Carolina is an overwhelming favorite (nearly 50% of the time). That is of course way too high, but in the interest of science here are the picks.
Sandy Koufax Statistics - Baseball-Reference.com
I’ve rolled out expanded and revamped pitch data based on some feedback from users. The reports now have a total and an average line, so you can compare the numbers to the average of the majors for those years. I’ve also grouped things together a little better. Also by default the report is hidden and you have to click a tooltip to view it.
I also decided to look at all 16,500,000 pitches in the database rather than just the last 7 years. For instance, you can now find out that Wade Boggs made contact on 96% of all swings one season. The data is mostly complete back to 1988 (90-95%) and prior to that there are a few years where there is data including most of the Dodgers during the Allan Roth era.
I still don’t see how having major leaguers cheating encourages college and minor league players to cheat. Players cheat because they want to get ahead of their opponents and the incentive to cheat to get to the majors will remain regardless of whether the majors are completely clean or not. I can see some argument for high schoolers as who knows what the heck they are thinking half the time, but a minor leaguer doesn’t give a hoot as to what Bonds or Matthews did. They just want an advantage for themselves.
Current count on google news Gary Matthews (who?) vs. the 2006 Super Bowl Champion Pittsburgh Steelers
Gary Matthews Steroids: 258
Pittsburgh Steelers Steroids: 276
ESPN.com front page:Report: Matthews, Holyfield linked to steroids ring
ESPN NFL page top story: “Eye-popping athleticsim in Indy turned what used to be considered a winter fiasco into the most successful NFL combine yet.”
Headline: “Prosecutor: Athletes received illegal roids in online ring” (article linked from NFL page mentions the 2006 Super Bowl Champion Steelers Doctor buying $150,000 of PED’s on a personal credit card about 12 paragraphs down).
Here is a quote from Clayton’s article on the NFL combine:
“Winners: Where do you start? Calvin Johnson is clearly the best athlete in this draft; at 6-foot-5 and 239 pounds, he was still able to run a 4.35 in the 40. That’s freakish. Wisconsin left tackle Joe Thomas thought the track was a little slow but, weighing 311 pounds, he ran an impressive 4.92 40 and had 31 lifts at 225 pounds.”
Note the hubbub when a baseball player gains 15 pounds in the off-season. This is a freaking joke.
ESPN MLB front page second headline: “Report: Matthews, Holyfield linked to steroids ring”
I’m not arguing that they shouldn’t be covering the MLB stories, but where is the equivalent coverage. We now have evidence that in two of the last four years that large numbers of players on Super Bowl teams were actively using PED’s.
Like I’ve said, it is clear that the NFL is a two bit sport.