BR.com's Sports Reference Blog

Sports-Reference: All the statistics one could ever want « Sports Tech Now

An e-mail interview I did a couple of weeks ago.

And he shall be called… - The Boston Globe

Another use for Baseball-Reference.com. Clear your baby names with us. The B-R mention is that the end of page 3.

Flickr Photo Download: [Joe Jackson, Cleveland AL (baseball)] (LOC)

Kudos to the library of congress. They just uploaded 1000’s of photos to flickr.com. Included are a lot of baseball photos from the Bain News Service. These are the same photos I use on the play index.

BR Bullpen - Today in Baseball History

Through the work of tireless volunteers the B-R Bullpen has one of the best baseball datebooks on the web. I’ve created an RSS Feed with this data, a permanent link (the link for this post), and a script that pulls some of this data onto the front page of the site where it now appears at the bottom of the middle column.

Sports-Reference.com - Sports Statistics and History

Back in December at the winter meetings there was one transaction that didn’t make any news broadcast. Sports Reference LLC was formed.

For the first 8 years of Baseball-Reference.com the site was owned by me (Sean Forman) and then by a corporation I formed in 2004. On December 4th, that corporation, Justin Kubatko’s Basketball-Reference.com, and Doug Drinen’s Pro-Football-Reference.com officially became part of a single company (Sports Reference LLC). It is something we had talked about for about 15 months, but after lots of false starts and too many legal bills, we got it done. The other reference sites were always hosted on my server and used some of my software, but the arrangements had been informal, and this formalizes our collaboration and creates a single company for all of the sites.

Also joining the company is Jay Virshbo who is the former president of Howe Sports Data. Jay knows a lot of folks in organized baseball and has a lot of experience running a company devoted to sports statistics. I’m very happy to have him onboard.

At the moment, the company has two full-time employees, Justin and me. I’m serving as the company president and Justin is the v.p. I can’t tell you how gratifying it is to have other people want to work with you and come on board. It has been a great experience.

As for how this changes the site, not much will change. I will do some more of the business aspects of the site and may do some work on other sites. I did most of the Pro-football-reference.com redesign, but I also get some help as Justin was able to do the minor league site for B-R.

We are also now able to share some work and make use of the same infrastructure to speed up our development process. Next on the docket is a hockey site. Justin will likely handle most of that while I get ready for baseball season.

The Baseball-Reference.com Play Index is open for a free trial until Friday, January 11th. http://www.bbref.com/pi/

Dig through 8 million baseball plays and 2 million game logs from 1957-2007 (updated daily in-season) to find things like:

* Derek Jeter’s batting average against the Red Sox with two outs. (event finder)

* The date of the first home run Grady Sizemore hit off Johan Santana. (pitcher vs. batter)

* The longest consecutive games with an extra-base hit streak of the 2000’s. (streak finder)

* The pitcher who gave up the most triples in All-Star game history. (all-star game event finder)

* The two pitchers with the most multi-HBP games between 1957 and 2007. (game finder)

* The starting pitcher with the most career starts without a complete game. (season finder)

In fact, send us an e-mail to: free-pi@baseball-reference.com
with:

* Your Name, and
* the correct answers to these six questions above

and we’ll enter you into a drawing for three free Play Index subscriptions. You must use the e-mail address listed above. Current Play Index subscribers aren’t eligible. Subscriptions are $29/year and $5/month.

Winners will be named next week on this blog.

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

We’re running a free trial of the Play Index through Jan. 11. Settle those HOF arguments once and for all.