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July 23, 2007
Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Baseball - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is a little bit of inside baseball, but the wikipedia switch to nofollow external links in January has chapped my hide for a few months now. Someone at WP asked me today whether he could copy about 2500 pages of stats from my site onto WP, and he then posted the ensuing discussion we had (unbeknownst to me).
For those who don’t know how the web works. Google is a VERY big deal. They probably drive 40-50% of the traffic on the internet in one way or the other. They rank sites based on the number and quality of incoming links. Wikipedia has a lot of people linking to them, which benefits them and is why they show up in the top two or three for most any fact-based search you make on google. However, they don’t repay the favor. They add a nofollow tag to their external links that renders them invisible to google’s page ranking algorithm. They did this because spammers were trying to game the system. That’s a valid concern, but this turns WP into a giant pagerank vacuum. They take, but don’t give anymore, so their pages climb the charts and the sites (like B-R) that they use and cite in building their pages fall–even though the authors at WP who have linked to me (probably numbering in the 100’s) thousands of times know I’m not a spammer and use my site because it is a great place to find baseball stats.
Perhaps I was overly dramatic in my discussion with the Wikipedian, but doggoneit, my hide was chapped. I’m not close to going out of business (at least I hope not), but the effect is real and it does have bottom line consequences. And from discussions with other webmasters, I know that some are paying the price. And the sad thing in my mind is that this hurts the small to mid-level operators the most. They do something cool, it gets recreated on wikipedia and then no one finds their site on google, because WP comes up first.
Just to be clear. I like the wiki concept and use it in the bullpen. It is just the nofollow policy that I’m most upset about.
July 20, 2007
My next big project (along with a lot of little projects) is to re-vamp the player and team pages on B-R. Some of this code hasn’t been touched since 2000 and it is looking a little musty. Part of the project will be to refactor the code to use the STATLINE software we’ve written and is in use on the Play Index pages.
The other part will be to roll out the Retrosheet data and other data to the player pages, so let me have it what do you want to see? Don’t worry about fitting it all onto a single stat line, I’ve got a plan for that.
My brainstorming list after the jump.
(more…)
Justin Kubatko and I will be manning the Baseball-Reference.com booth at the SABR convention. If you are at the convention stop by to see a demo of the Play Index and other B-R features. Assuming my t-shirt guy makes his delivery today, we’ll be selling t-shirts and hats with the B-R logo and some other things on them. We may roll a few of these out to a website store as well if it appears to be a moneymaker.
Been working on the backend this week. It was getting a little flabby and needed some improvements.
A long while back we upgraded to a big database server with 6GB of RAM and dual processors, etc. I only recently realized that since we were using a 32-bit architecture, that the largest a MySQL process could be was 2.8 GB rendering 3.2 GB of our precious RAM completely moot. I won’t tell you what a waste of money that was. Anyways, to more fully utilize the machine, I’m now running three different mysql processes on the machine. Baseball-Reference and the Play Index, morning B-R updates, and everything else (basketball, football, bullpen, and various blogs). This should speed everything up a little bit and give the machine a better workout.
Also, due to an increase in things like images, css and js files on the site, the site is now serving on average 28 files/second (this isn’t page views, for example loading ESPN’s front page loads 1 page, but 160 different files or hits). This is doable with our current server, but given that we may double that next week when the HOF induction happens, I’m a bit concerned, so I’ve split off the images, css and js from B-R onto a different server running lighttpd, which by the way is serving 10 files/second so easily that it doesn’t even register as using CPU my system monitor half the time.
The Baseball Cube Blog: 1978 to 2006 Minor League Statistics
Congrats to the Baseball Cube on this big upgrade. Wonder where they got all of those stats.
July 12, 2007
Baseball-Reference.com - Major League Baseball Statistics and History
I apologize for the partial outage today. Our database crashed and then wouldn’t come back up and when the server was restarted the webserver and database server decided not to speak to each other. The good folks at Peer1 got it figured out and we were back up around 8pm EDT. Hopefully, we can go another few years without a significant outage.
Batter vs. Pitcher: Barry Bonds
Before everything was sorted in descending order, but now you can choose the direction and also choose a second stat to sort on. This makes finding things like the most hitless at bats much, much easier (set first sort to H Ascending, and then AB descending). Chris Peters owned Barry Bonds.
Reference Madness!
A good interview with B-Ball Reference’s Justin Kubatko.
July 9, 2007
NL 2007 Pitching Splits - Baseball-Reference PI
As always red text means more info is available. Clicking on the split name in the league clicks brings up a sorted list of all of the team results for that split sorted by OPS+ or ERA. For instance, want to see what teams hack on 3-0 counts, click on the 3-0 count splits and you can quickly see which teams are swinging on that count. This goes back for the splits back to 1957.
I still want to do this on the team pages and have it show the team roster with that split, but I haven’t gotten that done yet.
July 8, 2007
In honor of Mr. Bush, we beg your pardon
By George, I think he’s got it
George Brett has a new passion: Baseball-reference.com.
The Hall of Fame third baseman obviously knows a lot about baseball, but he didn’t discover the stat-packed Web site until Friday, after a Daily News reporter pointed it out during an interview. Searching for his own stats, he pored over his first full season in the bigs in 1974 and of course, that magical year of 1980 when he chased .400 late into the season, finishing at an absurd .390.
“I reached as high as .407 that year,” Brett remembers, then confirms with the exact date. It was Aug. 26; Brett’s Kansas City Royals were on the road at Milwaukee’s old County Stadium. Brett went 5-for-5 off Mike Caldwell and Bill Castro, raising his average from .398 to .407. His memory was right on the money.
The Royals won, 7-6, in front on 16,824 fans.
“I was going to go to the gym,” Brett tells The Score. “Now I can’t stop looking at this site. It’s amazing!”
Brett was also amazed to see he could find how he fared against every pitcher he ever faced. Who did you hit the best, George?
“Ed Figueroa,” he says without even clicking his mouse.
Brett batted .778 vs. the former Yankee in 1980. He went 7-for-9.
If you’re ever down in the dumps, Georgie, you can always go back to 1980.
“That’s always a good time,” says Brett.
Well at least one Hall of Famer now uses the site.
July 6, 2007
Baseball-Reference.com Previews - powered by FeedBurner
For those who are interested in such things there is now an RSS feed for the previews. Should update each day when the previews are generated. (at least I expect it to).
July 5, 2007
July 12, 2005 All-Star Game at Comerica Park Box Score and Play by Play - Baseball-Reference.com
I hadn’t had the reserves on these pages before and I really should have, so I took a little time to add them here.
2007 National League (NL) Expanded Standings - Baseball-Reference.com
I’ve been remiss in not adding this, but they are up and running now. I also have them historically as well.
Baseball Prospectus | Unfiltered
Will Carroll reviews the iPhone. I looked through my server logs yesterday, and I got 122 hits from an iPhone yesterday. Mostly through google searches. I’d love to hear from someone who has used the site this way to give me their impression of how the site looks. Actually, now that I look at it, I see 146 hits from smart phone users. Does the site work in those mini-browsers?
July 3, 2007
National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum: Home
The Hall of Fame just re-launched their MLBAM-run design. It appears some things have disappeared or have moved behind a membership wall. For instance, our links to the Dressed to the Nines exhibit no longer appears on the site. Looks pretty sharp though.
July 2, 2007
NFL: Video: McClain, Anna-Megan try to avoid breaking 45-second rule
For those who believe only MLB makes strange moves with regards to their fans. I’m a little surprized that McNair agreed to go along with that.
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