BR.com's Sports Reference Blog

Front page mockup

Here is a preliminary mockup of a new front page for the site. Any comments will be greatly appreciated. Many of the links in the left column are for features that don’t yet exist, but will be added this summer. Any other additional suggestions as to things you would like to see will always be considered.

Johan Santana 2007 Pitching Splits - Baseball-Reference PI

I just added a couple new splits to the player splits pages. Both batters and pitchers now have splits for the Last 7 days, the Last 14 days, the last 28 days and the last 365 days. For example Johan Santana is 22-5 over the last calendar year.

New Jersey Attractions - Baseball-Reference.com

I hadn’t realized that I had broken the league and state maps on the travel guide, but I had. They are back now. Here is the International League page with a map of all of the teams.

International League Teams - Baseball-Reference.com

These pages are two years old, but I’m going to have them updated this spring.

Main Page - BR Bullpen

I only set this up. Dozens of people have contributed however and the Bullpen is now over 40,000 pages of content. Truly a remarkable effort and growing resource. It isn’t quite two years old yet either.

Here are a couple of fun things and some informative things on the site.
http://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Joe_Shlabotnik
http://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Nippon_Pro_Baseball

Svenska Baseboll och Softboll Förbundet

Part of our international outreach effort!

If you sent me an e-mail about the Stat of the Day blogging position, I haven’t lost it. I’ve either been sick or harried by the daily updates, but I will be dealing with the many e-mails I got about it later this week. Sorry for the delay.

NL 2007 Batting Splits - Baseball-Reference PI

I think I can now say that the league splits are production worthy. What you see above is the league splits adjusted to a 650 PA setting roughly that of a full-time player.

For example, if the NL pitcher was a full-time player, he would hit: .125 /.169 /.171, with 3 HR, 11 doubles, 217 SO, 63 SH, and 26 BB in 550 AB’s.

ATL 2007 Batting Gamelogs - Baseball-Reference PI

ATL 2007 Pitching Gamelogs - Baseball-Reference PI

I’ve added gamelogs for team pitching and batting for the Retrosheet era. In the batting gamelogs I should the opposing starter and also at the bottom summarize the team against righty and lefty starters.

In the pitching gamelog, I show the pitchers who appeared for the team and then show the game score for the starter and the days rest for all of the pitchers.

I don’t have links from the pre-2007 pages yet, but the gamelogs have been generated and will be uploaded soon. I also should have the team and league splits live fairly soon.

Grady Sizemore 2007 Batting Splits - Baseball-Reference PI

ML 2007 Batting Splits - Baseball-Reference PI

BOS 2007 Batting Splits - Baseball-Reference PI

A couple of new additions to the splits will be coming out sometime this week. Here is a preview. Feedback is suggested.

The first link is to Sizemore’s splits you’ll see the last two columns now adds LOPS and POPS.

LOPS = League-Adjusted OPS+ for this split. For instance if you look at his as CF split LOPS=245, so compared to all other as CF splits in the Majors his OPS+ is 245.

POPS = Player-Adjusted OPS+. This is is the player-adjusted OPS+ for this split. Basically, I’m comparing his split OBP and SLG to his Total OBP and SLG. Notice that for many of them the value is 100, but for his platoon split he is better against lefties and worse against righties.

The next link is for the league splits. This is for all players in the majors and you can also look at the league splits individually.

Finally, we have team splits that also include LOPS and POPS (should be TOPS). Here LOPS is especially useful for looking at the defensive position and batting order position splits. You can see that the Red Sox catchers have a .653 OPS, but that is actually right at the league average (LOPS=99).

*touch* ‘em all

I might ask MLB to turn off comments if I was Alyssa Milano and I was blogging on MLB.com.

Paper of Record

I was looking for something on the 50th NL Jubilee in the Feb. 11, 1926 Sporting News and came across this quote by Commissioner Landis.

Pardon any transcription errors.

Landis Pleads for “Kids”.

“There has been much in newspapers and magazines lately about baseball interest waning,” said Judge Landis, commissioner of baseball. “I happen to know attendance figures of the last few years and they give such statements the lie.
“Cities are building so fast that playing space for the boy has been overlooked,” continued the judge. “I know what you are against here, Mr. Mayor,” he said tapping the Honorable Jimmy Walker on the shoulder. “You can’t tear down 20-story buiding to make room for kid ball fields.
“But the same condition exists in Chicago, Detroit and other great cities. Unfortunately, it does not end there, but extends to the towns of 10,000 people. In my time, every town of this size had its common where boys could play ball. I regret to say that towns of the present era are too busy making money to remember that the boys used baseball fields. It isn’t that the boys don’t want to play baseball. They haven’t the place to play. Some day those boys will feel they have been cheated out of something; if they do, it won’t help make them the kind of citizens, who much carry on our work.”

This was preceded by comments from a senator that the Supreme Court’s Anti-trust exemption “saved baseball”.

Longest Streak with S=1 From 1957 to 2007, (requiring Hold=0) - Baseball-Reference PI

I’ve added Save Opps, Holds and Blown Saves to the pitching game logs, so now you can do streak searches on those values. We will roll these stats to other areas in the not too distant future. If a pitcher has a save opp and gets a hold that will break the streak, so we require Holds =0 in the “Additional Criteria area”.

Longest Streak with BB=0 and HBP=0 From 1957 to 2007, At least one plate appearance, To start career (non-pitcher) - Baseball-Reference PI

I just added a new feature to the PI. You can now search for player batting and pitching streaks that begin with the start of a season or begin with the start of a player’s career.

Most Consecutive Decisions won to start a career
Most Consecutive Decisions won to start a season

From 1957 to 2007, Playing for BOS, as Starter, In first 1 games, sorted by greatest game_score in a single game - Baseball-Reference PI

Matsuzaka’s 70 isn’t the best in the last 50 years, but it is pretty good.

Fungoes » Blog Archive » Edmonds ready to switch-hit in opener

You know you’ve made it when people are including you in their April Fools articles.

15 more persons of baseball influence - USATODAY.com

I’m a little overwhelmed and a lot flattered to be included in this list. Here is the top 50.

Miguel Cabrera 2006 Batting Splits - Baseball-Reference PI

John Smoltz Career Pitching Splits - Baseball-Reference PI

Pitching and batting splits have been expanded dramatically. For both I’ve added:

1. Splits for every count and the splits for after a count, such as after a 3-0 count.


2. Splits for grouped innings, 1-3, 4-6, 7-9 innings.


3. Splits for Grass/Turf and Open/Closed for domed stadiums.


4. A general split for men on.

For the batters I’ve added:

1. Splits for the number of times facing the starting pitcher in a game then vs. relievers.


2. Vs. Power/Finesse pitchers and vs. GB/FB pitchers

For the pitchers I’ve added:

1. Splits in no decisions


2. Split for the first batter faced


3. Splits for the times facing a batter in a game


4. Splits based on the pitch count in the game


5. Splits based on the number of days of rest for the pitcher


6. Pitcher splits based on the Catcher who caught them

Alex Gordon Statistics - Baseball-Reference.com

Well, it appears that I finally got all of the program to work the whole way through. The site has been updated with stats through April 3, 2007.

Our goal is to update each day by 8am, but I think that I’ll be happy with noon for the first week as the kinks are worked out. This site has a lot of nooks and crannies and some of them haven’t been dusted in awhile.

Issues that I know about:
The season log finders aren’t yet including the 2007 stats.

The splits aren’t updating yet for the 2007 season which may cause the occasional problem. I’m planning a big rollout of new splits and I wanted to get that all done at once.

Some of the language is wrong (like “finished 1st” for partial season stats). Help me catalog these.

Please let me know if you find any additional errors.

Ted’s Take - Fuzzy Math

Ted Leonsis makes an interesting point about the use of leverage (as in leveraged buyout) in the purchase of the Tribune Company and the upcoming sale of the Cubs.

From 1957 to 2006, Top Opening Day Games for the Mets - Baseball-Reference PI

Here are the opening day starts for the Mets ranked by Game Score.

All of MLB: 5386 Home Runs in 2006 - Baseball-Reference PI

When you go to the event finders (Batting and Pitching) now, you can select ANY team as an option and this will generate reports for the entire major leagues for a season. For something large like PA’s, this may be too large and may terminate before completing. Also, I’ve disabled, download all for this option when using all teams.

The main interesting thing you can do with this is drill down for special events. Clicking on red-text in the summary adds this output as a special output. For example.

All Grand Slams in 2006
Drilling down further.
All Walk off Grand Slams in 2006.

Hope you enjoy it.

June 14, 1959 Milwaukee Braves at Chicago Cubs Box Score and Play by Play - Baseball-Reference.com

I’ve re-run the box scores and fixed a few bugs. The cumulative player error totals are now correct and the pitching special summary (balks, wp, etc.) should now be showing up correctly. This game I’ve linked to is a new game that retrosheet recently added the pbp for. There are a number of other games where a few innings are missing, but they are able to deduce what happened from the game results.