BR.com's Sports Reference Blog

Greg Dobbs 2007 Batting Gamelogs - Baseball-Reference PI

I added team record in games started to the batting gamelogs (currently just 2007, the rest of the years tomorrow). I also moved the player’s season summary to the top of the page as I’m guessing it was getting lost at the bottom of the page. I may do the same thing to the pitcher pages at some point.

1951 New York Giants Schedule, Box Scores and Splits - Baseball-Reference.com

I did some revamping as people suggested to these pages and also added a few additional things. If a team is in first the games back now has “up 5.0″ for a 5.0 game lead. I’ve also added more summary stats to include, days in first, most games over 500, most games under 500, biggest lead, and farthest behind the leader, along with the date the last time these stats occurred.

Milwaukee Brewers Pitching Register - Baseball-Reference.com

The batting and pitching registers available through the main team franchise indexes now have a toggle option. Clicking the red text above the team stats now brings up the team’s rank in the league for each statistical category. For instance, you can quickly and easily see the last time the Brewers staff ranked second or better in walks allowed (1993). Clicking again takes you back to the regular team stats.

Same thing appears on the batting registers.

May 19, 2007 Atlanta Braves at Boston Red Sox Box Score and Play by Play - Baseball-Reference.com

So far this is only for the current season box scores. I narrowed them somewhat and added a link to games from that day, so if you are looking at say yesterday’s games you can get them all in one place. I’m open to suggestions as always.

Baseball-Reference.com Play Index - Baseball-Reference PI

I made some changes to the Play Index forms today. I cleaned them up a little bit and tried to make them more uniform. The forms no longer stretch from one side to the other of the screen.

I also linked the team streak finders to the team gamelogs as had been done previously with the player streak finders.

From 1998 to 2007, as Starter, In team’s first 40 games, (requiring IP>=7), sorted by greatest Team performances matching criteria in a single game - Baseball-Reference PI

I added some new features to the team and player game finders today. We’ve always had the option for finding the player with the most 10-so games in a year or a career, but I just added the option to find it by Team/Year, so you can do things now like find the team whose players had the most multi-HR games, or the team with the most golden sombreros, or like the search linked above, find the team with the starters going consistently deep into the game.

As part of this, I’ve also added the Ind. Games link to both this output and to the matching outputs for the team game finders, so clicking on that now gives you this report, showing the 20 starts out of 40 where the Red Sox starters had at least 7IP.

On the team gamelogs you can now find out things like the 1963 Mets had 39 games with 4 or fewer hits, and quickly use a link to see all such games.

I’ve upgraded the search engine to include a number of team related searches. The following searches now all return the expected results. I also added in all of the common directory names.

BOS 2007

Teams

awards

franch NYY

Mets 2001

1919 CHW

1970 Expos

Franchise Dodgers

ff Dodgers

ff is an alias for the Franchise Pages.

If something appears to be missing let me know.

NYY 2007 Batting Splits - Baseball-Reference PI

I added a couple new batting splits today (thus far just for 2007, but I’ll add it for past years by the end of today or tomorrow). The defensive position splits now have summary lines for Infield (C,1B,2B,3B,SS) and Outfield (LF, CF, RF). The sOPS+ columns also work for these splits as well. For instance, for the Yankees, their infield has an OPS+ of 132 compared to all other ML infields and their outfield has an OPS+ of 80 compared to all other outfields.

Likewise, I have some simple grouping for the lineup position. Table Setters: 1-2, Table Clearers: 3-6, and bottom of the order 7-9 (which excludes pitchers).

2007 Toronto Blue Jays Schedule, Box Scores and Splits - Baseball-Reference.com

Team schedules now have two new columns, one for the team’s rank at the end of games that day and their games back at the end of games that day.

I finally sat down and did some apache configuration tonight. I enabled mod_deflate which makes the server compress the file before download and then the user receives the compressed file faster and their browser then uncompresses it for viewing. It was so easy to do, that I feel a bit dumb for not doing it much, much earlier.

I’ve also installed lighttpd on another server and may offload things like images, js, and css to that server, so I can turn off keepalive on the main server. I’m not a sysadmin, so I’m kind of feeling my way through this, but I think that having the main server do all of the scripting and main page generation and then having another server do all of the serving for the files that are included in the page (images, css, jss) could allow traffic to expand a good deal before hitting our upper limit for the current hardware, which we probably aren’t to far away from right now. We’ll see. Expanding the hardware would require us to add more servers and do some sort of DNS round robin or worse. That is a big step up. We’re probably serving about as much traffic as you can with a single standard server and a single standard db server. By standard I mean hardware costing less than $4000/unit. But I’m just guessing.

B-R Video Tutorial

OK, please go easy on the commentary. Harry Kalas, I ain’t, and I was still a little sick when recording this, and I apologize for the lips smacking and breathing noises or whatever the heck that annoying sound is. Hopefully, the production values will improve with practice and perhaps a better microphone.

With that lowering of expectations, here is a couple minute flash video that shows some of the features we have created for the B-R box scores. This video highlights the clickable elements within the pages. I hope to add these for all of the various Play Index tools that we’ve created as well.

Let me know what you think.

On a sidenote, I’m using amazon’s s3 service to serve the videos, so for pennies a video, I don’t use up my server bandwidth sending out large files.

2007 MLB Baseball Player Rankings - Most Overpaid and Underpaid Players and more! — WorkLifeWizard

A look at the most under and overpaid players by the folks at the Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program.

BOS 2007 Batting Gamelogs - Baseball-Reference PI

In addition to team gamelog items like the opposing starter’s handedness and name on the batting and the pitchers used (with Game Score and Day’s Rest) on the pitching, we now have more interactivity on the team gamelog pages.

I rolled out the same goodies on the player gamelogs to the team gamelogs. Here is a rundown of the player gamelog goodies rolled out a while back.

Clicking on the team game number (the red number in the leftmost column) now gives you the team’s cumulative season totals through that game.

If you have the checkbox at the start of the games selected, you can now sum any span of games. Click on the first and second row (on something not a link or red text) and a popup will sum the games selected for you. Clicking on share gives you a link like what I linked below.

The last ten Red Sox pitching lines highlighted and summed. Amaze your friends and make your point about the Tigers for the last 20 games.

These features are on the team gamelogs for the last 50 years.

Baseball-Reference.com - Major League Baseball Statistics and History

I made some minor changes on various pages. The front page now has a quick index at the very top for folks who like the high up navigation from before. Also, you can get all of the yesterday’s starts by clicking on the red text in the list of top and bottom five.

I also cleaned up some park names. PNC was showing as 3 Rivers in the box scores and I didn’t have the Marlins, Rangers, or D’Backs names updated. I fixed those and also handled the new Orlando park, so you’ll see the proper park names on these pages.

At some point, I need to handle the name changes more gracefully. What I have now is a real mess for situations like

The Ballpark at Arlington
Ameriquest (sub-prime mortgages) Field
Rangers Ballpark at Arlington
soon to be Whataburger Park (that’s a joke before you google it.)

LinkedIn: Sean Forman

I’ve posted the myspace page before, so I might as well throw this out there as well.

Baseball-Reference.com - Major League Baseball Statistics and History

Well, I’m hoping this is the final tweak of the front page. Sylvia helped me work out some of the issues that were bothering me about the other versions. She suggested I line up the black modules in a row. I think the switch to the leaderboard ad unit from the rectangular one is the right move on this page. This also has the added benefit of everything working when you have a 800 pixel wide screen.

I also have gotten some feedback on linking the team names to the franchise index and I agree with them that these sorts of standings always point to the current season and not an uber-index, so I’m changing that link in the standings back to the 2007 team. However, due to the redesign I have a little more space in there, so I’m adding a column with “F.I.” which links to the franchise index, so we get the best of both worlds (IMO).

Here is a retrospective of various front pages.

Aug 16. 2000
April 5, 2001
May 30, 2002
March 20, 2003
June 5, 2004
Unlaunched First try at redesign
First launch of redesign
Yesterday’s version
Current Version

I realize it looks a little amaterish to run three different front pages over the last three days. However, I definitely subscribe to the “Release Early and Often” method of web development. You folks give a lot of good feedback and I don’t have the resources to do a lot of user testing and expensive design work, so I just hash it out in public instead. Hope you enjoy the results.

Baseball-Reference.com - Major League Baseball Statistics and History

I’ve been tinkering with this for weeks now, but I figured I might has well make it live. There will be additional changes, I’m sure at some point.

Couple things about the new front page.

I really want to bring out some of the new updated stats we have on the site, so the entire left column is now just 2007 data. This will revert to something else during the postseason and offseason, but during the season this will be updated each morning between 7am and 8am.

The 2007 area has the standings, scores with links to box scores for all games. Hovering over these will bring up the W-L-Sv info for the game. A schedule of today’s games. The top and bottom five starters from yesterday and the top and bottom batters from yesterday. I’m open to other things to add over there. I’m also planning more pages summarizing the games from yesterday.

The middle column now contains all of the site sections and the ad unit (gotta pay the bills). The right hand side will now feature some special features and some of the old right-hand side content. I’m also hoping to do a rotating “Have you seen?” feature to highlight things users maybe haven’t noticed while on the site or I’ve unintentionally managed to hide.

We’ll be working on a logo at some point. There may be some news to report on the site this summer and a logo will be related to that.

As always, I’m open to suggestions from users.

Update: Spent today working on some feedback from users and making it a little better looking (IMO). Also, if you don’t want to register to post, you can use our feedback area to send an e-mail directly to me.

Touching Base: Fantasy Baseball File

A nice example of the sorts of things you can do with the play index.

Baseball-Reference.com - Major League Baseball Statistics and History

Version 4 of the new front page.

2007 Chicago Cubs Franchise Pitching Stats and Depth - Baseball-Reference.com

I’ve finished the pitching depth chart and minor league stats. I’ve also added some league and team context to the pages.

BOS: 99 Plate Appearances in 2007, vs. LHP and Home Games - Baseball-Reference PI

It is possible to do infinitely deep splits for teams and players using the Play Index. Just go the event finders and then select all PA’s for the events. Clicking of the red headers for in the summaries will then allow you to select any variety of additional criteria to search on. A summary line is always given, so you can find things like Phillies Clean up hitters against RHP in the sixth inning. Not necessarily meaningful, but nice to know its there if you need it. All of this is also available for individual players through the links to the event finders on the player pages.

2007 Philadelphia Phillies Franchise Batting Stats and Depth - Baseball-Reference.com

I’ve added some minor league stats to the site. I’ve tried to do something different with these. At the bottom of the page are the standard registers for each team in an organization. I figured that typically fans are checking out their team’s prospects, so they don’t want to hunt from the IL to the EL to the Carolina Lg etc, so I’ve grouped the teams by Franchise rather than minor league.

Next, I’ve attempted to create a depth chart for the franchise here. At the top I group by position (broadly) as catcher, corner IF or DH, middle infield, outfield and utility.

When I get to the pitchers, I’m going to do RH and LH starters and then the same for relievers and maybe closers, but probably not.

Comments and suggestions are always welcome.

It is probably going to be awhile before I roll out minor league stats to the player pages.

As most know the Phillies are approaching 10,000 franchise losses.

The actual number they currently have is up for dispute. In 1890, there was a game against the Cubs on May 23rd, in which with the score 10-8 Cubs, the game was disputed. The 1891 Reach Guide did not include this game in its season totals giving the Phillies 53 losses (and a franchise total of 9,955 entering the season), while the Tattersal encyclopedia included it giving them 54 losses (and a franchise total of 9,956 entering the season). This error has been carried forward in most sources for all these years.

I believe (and Pete Palmer agrees) the 53 losses is correct, but I am not going to make the change until following the season since no other major source shows the 53 loss total (that I’m aware of).

So Phillies fans can “celebrate” twice. Once on the 44th loss of the season and again on the 45th loss of the season.

Also, for those who think the Phils already passed 10,000 losses, this is almost certainly not true. The Worcester seasons that are included with the Phillies seasons should not be. The Worcester franchise had no tie to the Phillies and actually the Phillies were granted a franchise to replace the Troy team rather than Worcester. Recent research by a SABR member reading the New Orleans Picayune of 1883-1884 found a passage that the franchise for the Giants was actually granted when Worcester was dissolved and the Troy-Philly swap occurred weeks later.

2007 American League (AL) Expanded Standings - Baseball-Reference.com

Working out some ideas for expanded standings. These have a lot of the team W-L splits you can get elsewhere and then I’ve added a head-to-head w-l and scoring grid along with a grid showing the games left to play for a team. Here is the NL.