Sports Reference Blog » Suggestions:2007

January 12, 2007

Suggestions:2007

Filed under: Uncategorized — Sean @ 4:17 pm

If you want to add suggestions for the site put them here. We may split this if it becomes too messy.

242 Comments

I’ll add them here, so they don’t get lost:
- batter v pitcher: show the batting or pitching hand of listed player

- player main page: show the % of PA against LH … useful for
platoon/loogy players, or guys who became platooners

Comment by tangotiger — January 13, 2007 @ 10:52 pm
BABIP should be calculated with SF in the denominator. I would also include RBOE in the numerator.

How is DER calculated? It should be outs per BIP. BABIP = 1-DER.

Comment by tangotiger — January 15, 2007 @ 9:08 am
“Clutch” stats.

I suggest using Leverage Index.

Comment by tangotiger — January 17, 2007 @ 12:26 pm
RUNS CREATED / 27 = RUNS PER GAME (more or less)

I think this would be a good way to compare batter’s

Any comments ?

Comment by William Springenberg — January 17, 2007 @ 2:51 pm
Splits based on times through the order (for both batters and pitchers). As we know from The Book, it makes a big difference.

It’ll also be nice to quiet some people down to show a pitcher’s career record the 4th time through the order actually be close to their overall average.

***

Sean responded in another thread, but I’ll repeat it here: splits for a league and for a team. I’ll also add: splits for a ballpark.

***

Also good would be splits for a player *with* a team. So, how did Raines did while with the Expos and with the Whitesox and Yanks, etc.

***

In the streaks results, show totals of the returned records.

Comment by tangotiger — January 20, 2007 @ 10:46 pm
Tango,

I’m not sure what you mean about show the totals of the returned records. I thought I did that?

Comment by Sean — January 21, 2007 @ 11:01 pm
What I meant is that if you return 30 streaks, then also give the total of those 30 records. But, now that I think about it, it probably doesn’t make any sense.

So, retract that very last suggestion.

Comment by tangotiger — January 22, 2007 @ 11:13 am
I was using the PI to see how many Quality Starts Roger Clemens had in his career when I realized I’ve never seen season and career records anywhere for Quality Starts, QS%, Tough Losses and Cheap Wins. ESPN has some data, but nothing comprehensive. Is there any way to include this type of information in the Leader and Record Board Index?

Also, it turns out that Roger had 455 Quality Starts in his career; however, to find that number, I had to scroll through 19 pages to see the total amount. Is there some way to give a total of returned hits for any given query on the first page?

Please understand that I’m nitpicking - this is a fantastic site!

Thanks

Comment by bigrhythm — January 23, 2007 @ 1:19 pm
Random thought:

You currently have annual leaderboards for a slew of stats. How ’bout some “loserboards” - the worst numbers at any/all rate stats in the league in a given season? I’m not saying that you automatically put it up on the main page of the league like you do with leaderboards, but offer it as an option like you currently do with expanded leaderboards.

Just throwin’ that out there for you.

Comment by Chris J. — January 25, 2007 @ 8:37 pm
One thing I don’t get about the splits stats: how come SB/CS isn’t available? Sometimes I can understand why it might be difficult, but why not be able to say what a player’s SB/CS info is in clutch situations or by inning?

Comment by Chris J. — January 30, 2007 @ 8:08 pm
Chris,

My database is not set up well to pull baserunning out of a play-by-play setting, so I just haven’t done so yet. At some point I’ll get that fixed, but until then, I’m afraid they’ll be lacking.

Comment by Sean — January 30, 2007 @ 9:28 pm
Fair enough.

Comment by Chris J. — January 30, 2007 @ 10:46 pm
Any reason not to show the full set of counts on the splits page? They are alot more interesting and diverse than the “clutch” categories of “within by 3,4,5″.

As well, for the years you have it, the “pass-through” counts as well. ESPN has great splits.

Also note the “vs P, 1st time in G”. I talked about this in The Book, and this is important. I would split it up by “vs SP, 1st time in G”, “2nd time in G”, “3rd time in G”, and “vs RP”.

The GB/FB splits are also important, as explained in The Book as well.

Grass/turf too.

Comment by tangotiger — February 6, 2007 @ 11:57 am
Is there anywhere you could post Picked Off stats? I’ve always found that most sites will post a player’s SB & CS, but the # of times that player has been picked off is no where to be found.

Comment by Rob L — February 8, 2007 @ 12:06 am
This is a very minor nitpick, but dammit, I’m picking this nit . .

Let me illustrate my point with an example - go to Steve Carlton’s splits page. On the bottom there’s the run support section. On the right side where it says “Other game totals” there is listed: “10 runs, 12 runs, 13 runs, 14 runs, 18 runs.” Technically true, but I fear that’s likely misleading. A person reading that without looking above could easily conclude that Carlton had five different starts of double digit run support. In fact he had eight such games - four of them exactly at 10.

I’d suggest either: 1) adding the extra games to it and making “10 runs, 10 runs, 10 runs, 10 runs, 12 runs, 13 runs, 14 runs, 18 runs,” 2) if that’s too long making it “10, 10, 10, 10, 12, 13, 14, and 18 runs;” 3) if that’s still too long expand the chart on the left side to include 10 run games or even 11 and 12 run affairs. From memory, most 10+ run games have 10-12 runs scored in them.

(Having written this, I’m struck by the fact that you likely don’t need the word “runs” after each individual double-digit mention. Mention it once and the end and people will figure it out from context).

FWIW, I should note that the ‘76 Carlton example is severe. I don’t think there’s a single other time in the 50 years you have splits for where a pitcher had that many double-digit days of run support. So it makes a good test to see how much length is too much in this regard. Go back to 1920s and Burleigh Grimes and George Uhle had 9 in a season. I think that’s the 20th century high.

A minor point, but I thought it worth mentioning because it is confusing. Heck, it threw me for a second — I thought I’d confused by Steve Carlton seasons — and I think I know more about run support than most people checking that info out.

Comment by Chris J. — February 9, 2007 @ 6:19 pm
Can you do the “spanning” over multiple seasons, like Pinto does here:
http://www.baseballmusings.com/cgi-bin/PlayerInfo.py?PlayerID=1406

So, we give the start/end dates and player, and you generate the totals.

Comment by tangotiger — February 13, 2007 @ 3:44 pm
How about this for a stat for pitchers & managers for the years where you have info availalbe: QH - Quick Hook. Number of times a starting pitcher was yanked before recording 10 outs.

Comment by Chris J. — February 14, 2007 @ 5:43 pm
James had a good definition for Quick Hooks… don’t remember what it was, but I seemed to like it.

Comment by tangotiger — February 14, 2007 @ 7:20 pm
Here’s his current definition:
http://www.actasports.com/sow.php?id=62

This one, I’m not too thrilled with, but, it is easy to remember.

Comment by tangotiger — February 14, 2007 @ 7:22 pm
http://www.baseball-reference.com/pi/psplit.cgi?n1=higuete01&year=c

I would suggest a “men on base” line (i.e., the compliment of bases empty), as well as the RISP line you have. As well, “any runner on 3B and less than 2 outs” would be a good line.

***

Post 2 bears further discussion. The “SF” really plays havoc when you look at men on third base. It inflates the rate stats, by not counting an out. If you go with the “3b, less than 2 outs”, I would separate it from the rest of the group, and count the SF as an AB for BA and SLG purposes.

Comment by tangotiger — February 23, 2007 @ 5:25 pm
Oh, and you are showing “111″ for bases loaded instead of “123″.

Comment by tangotiger — February 23, 2007 @ 5:25 pm
You have “Inherited Runners” for relievers. You should have the matching “Bequeathed Runners” for starters. STATS was tracking this in their Scoreboard.

They have alot of good suggestions in there, if you want more ideas.

When you get to baserunning and fielding, we should talk. You might want to consider a “think tank”, as I’m sure plenty of people will have some good ideas for you.

Comment by tangotiger — February 27, 2007 @ 3:53 pm
In the same spirit as “inherited, bequeathed” runners, we have the same for wins:
http://actasports.com/sow.php?id=120

Comment by tangotiger — March 1, 2007 @ 12:36 pm
Ruane includes “reaching base on a FC, with all runners safe” in his ROE column. I’m not sure if you do or don’t. I think it’s a great category, but preferably as two columns.

***

You don’t have Balks for pitchers. As noted in The Book, I would include them all: SB, CS, PK, BK, WP, PB, DI, and for both pitchers and catchers.

***

BABIP is only on the pitchers page. It is just as interesting for hitters.

***

When you revamp the main page, I’d put “% of Lefties seen” for pitchers and hitters. It shows if the player is being platooned.

Comment by tangotiger — March 1, 2007 @ 5:12 pm
One place where Retrosheet trumps b-r.com (so far) is in aggregate totals, like here:
http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/2006/YS_2006.htm
and here:
http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/2006/YT_2006.htm

I would like b-r.com to aggregate everything that it shows individually, including pitch data, hit types, hit direction, etc into team-totals on a single page, added up to league-totals, added up to MLB totals.

Comment by tangotiger — March 5, 2007 @ 3:01 pm
Sean, as long as you invented the stat, why not put Missed Pitches up on catchers’ defensive records?

Comment by Chris J. — March 15, 2007 @ 2:53 pm
In post #24, I mentioned showing PB and WP (along with the other nonPA events) individually. I don’t see any reason to aggregate things, unless necessary.

Comment by tangotiger — March 15, 2007 @ 4:07 pm
I have long thought about the Hall of Fame. While I have no real objections to the way members are selected, it leaves a lot to be desire because players can be included or excluded due to popularity and other factors not directly related to their performance in the field. There for, I believe that another Hall of Fame should exist. I call this Hall of Fame the “Baseball Players Statistical Hall of Fame.” At one time I started createing it, but the task was too large for me. In it, I separated the players into servel categories: Inmortals, Generational Icons, Super Stars, Stars, Honrable Mentions and Also Noteworthy. Later I though, however, that the fans should have an input in voting for this Hall of Fame. My idea was that they could give the players a vote from ten to zero. The ten being for the very best; the zero for an average player that was a regular, or should I call it “journeyman”? Inmortals would be those players averaging nine points or more in the voting. Generational Icons would be those averaging 8.00 to 8.999. And so on down the line. Thus, an “Also Noteworthy” would have to average 4.00 to 4.999. There would be a buttom on the player’s page that would allow the fan to vote, and the visitor to the page will be able to see if the player belongs to this fan-based statistical hall of Fame. I think fans would greatly appreciate such a thing, although the parameters for entrace could be drawn somewhat differently. Yet categories are a must to separate the Babe Ruth quality players from other good ones who are not really in the same class but who deserve recognition.

Comment by Gonzalo Leon — March 17, 2007 @ 2:24 pm
You can google “Hall Of Merit”.

Comment by tangotiger — March 20, 2007 @ 11:00 am
On the splits page, in the “Pitcher role” section, add:

Pitches per game

This way we can see how many pitches per game Pedro or Wakefield had as a starter and as a reliever in any year.

And if you don’t have it, put that on the leaderboards (pitcher per game, as starter, as reliever).

***

This might be too off-the-wall: you know how on the main page, you have the year-by-year summary for the player’s seasonal totals. How about the year-by-year summary for the player’s splits? So, have the same page layout, but limited to only his performance at home. Then, another page for only his performance on the road. Then, another page for only his performance as a starter. Then, another page for only his performance at Fenway.

The scare of course, for you, is that your page volume will now be 300x more. But, maybe just take a few of the important ones, like home/away, left/right, starter/reliever, and in those cases, you can keep both splits on the same page. So:

2000 home ….
2000 away ….
2001 home ….
2001 away ….
etc

(maybe highlighting all the homes a different shade)

I don’t know about others, but I constantly navigate split-year to split-year, and it’d be nice to have it on the same page.

Comment by tangotiger — April 5, 2007 @ 9:36 am
Tango,

If you go to the career page and then click on a split name it will show you the year-to-year totals for that split.

For example, go here and then click on the red text Home

http://www.baseball-reference.com/pi/bsplit.cgi?n1=bondsba01&year=00

Comment by Sean — April 5, 2007 @ 12:08 pm
Holy sh-t. That’s wonderful. Before being a member, I never bothered to click on the “red stuff”, and had forgotten about it. I’ll take back the second half of my post #30. Thanks…

Comment by tangotiger — April 5, 2007 @ 2:47 pm
Bug: If you expand the “vs neutral”, you get back two records per year.

Comment by tangotiger — April 5, 2007 @ 2:50 pm
Bug: If you expand “vs. SP, 3rd+”, you get back nothing.

Comment by tangotiger — April 5, 2007 @ 2:55 pm
Bug: Expanding his 1-1 count (among a few other counts) on this page:
http://www.baseball-reference.com/pi/psplit.cgi?n1=marshmi01

Comment by tangotiger — April 5, 2007 @ 2:59 pm
Suggestion: this came from someone else… show a split on the pitchers page by whether the batter’s fielding position is “P” or not. This way, we can see how many Ks Pedro got against pitchers.

I suppose you can even break it further:
Starting 8
DH
PH
Subs
Pitcher

We found a huge PH penalty in The Book, which Andy describes here:
http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=5404&mode=print&nocache=1172518606

We found a DH penalty as well, about half as much as the PH.

And of course, we know the pitcher is not even close to anyone else.

Comment by tangotiger — April 5, 2007 @ 3:24 pm
Change: http://www.baseball-reference.com/pi/gl.cgi?n1=hershor01&year=1988&t=p

I just noticed that the inning/score entered includes appearances by starting pitchers. You should definitely put that in a separate line. While somewhat interesting that Hershiser entered a few games with his team already in the lead when he took the mound, it makes no sense to lump that in with any relief appearances he might have in the 2nd, 3rd, 4th innings. Something like:
SP

4-
5
6
7
…

would make more sense.

Comment by tangotiger — April 11, 2007 @ 6:03 am
the nats have not led entering any of their 557 plate appearances or 71.5 innings this season (with the only win coming in walkoff fashion). are these numbers records (either for the start of a season or in general)?

Comment by daver4646 — April 11, 2007 @ 8:38 am
Do you have stolen bases against and caught steals against anywhere? That would be nice to have.

Comment by Chris J. — April 13, 2007 @ 5:57 pm
Right here:
http://www.baseball-reference.com/pi/psplit.cgi?n1=pettian01

Also include PK. I’m hoping WP, PB, BK, DI get added to there.

Comment by tangotiger — April 13, 2007 @ 9:23 pm
Thanks, but I was looking for team-wide stuff. I was looking through my Palmer/Gillette, and they have OSB/OCS for teams, so I was surprised I couldn’t find it here.

Comment by Chris J. — April 13, 2007 @ 10:16 pm
On the 2006 league standing pages, could you provide a link to next year, now that you have ‘07 up?

Comment by Chris J. — April 16, 2007 @ 10:01 am
Chris,

That should be done soon. The 2007 updates and the sitewide updates are on parallel, systems, so I need to run the sitewide update to get the old pages updated.

Comment by Sean — April 16, 2007 @ 10:58 am
Until Sean gets the team and league pages running, you should stick with Retrosheet. They’ve got a great layout for them here:
http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/2006/YT_2006.htm
http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/2006/YS_2006.htm

Comment by tangotiger — April 16, 2007 @ 5:01 pm
Bug: http://www.baseball-reference.com/pi/inning_summary.cgi?year_game=2006&team_id=ANY

Comment by tangotiger — April 19, 2007 @ 4:48 pm
Thanks, Tango, I’ve fixed that.

Comment by Sean — April 19, 2007 @ 6:37 pm
Cool. Suggestion: I think percentages would work for just about everything on that page (except for the “#”). The point of the page would be for comparison purposes, and you really get nailed from the 9th inning on. And, if someone wants the actual numbers for whatever reason, they can multiply the percentages by the # column.

Comment by tangotiger — April 19, 2007 @ 9:41 pm
Similar to what you did on the League batting splits: just have a link that lets the user toggle between the actual numbers and the percentages.

Suggestion: when you do team fielding splits, please, also do one for PARKS (home and visiting team, together). I want to see how Fenway LF affects putouts. Also, on team fielding splits, show the total BIP (which is of course more important than innings).

Comment by tangotiger — April 20, 2007 @ 10:08 am
Sean,

Noticed a bug (well, someone else at btf did, but checking on it, I have the same problem):

Go to the 2005 postseason, click on where it says “Go to a box score for this game” and it instead you go to the retrosheet mainpage instead of a box score. No idea if the problem exists only for ‘05 or going further back.

Also, there’s no boxscore option up for the ‘06 postseason yet.

Comment by Chris J. — April 20, 2007 @ 10:04 pm
Any plans to add anything on umpires based on retrosheet?

Also, random thought — any idea on adding a website A-Z link on the main page? For example, I want to look up umpires and check a few different slots, but ain’t sure what’s the best place to go. Maybe an A-Z, not that includes every player pages, but all categories & subcategories of pages that you list on the main page underneath the yellow bar.

Comment by Chris J. — April 24, 2007 @ 10:18 pm
Along the same lines, the amount of features is now overwhelming. It’s like MS Word. I’m a power user, and I’m having a tougher time than I should in terms of navigation. I think what might help is to show examples (like you do at the bottom of the PI page), but right next to each link. So:

batting streak finder ……. textual description
……………………….. example 1
……………………….. example 2
……………………….. example 3

team streak finder……….. textual description
……………………….. example
……………………….. example 2

etc

Something like that

Comment by tangotiger — April 25, 2007 @ 9:06 am
Sean, a while ago I said something about showing “totals” on a certain page, and then I retracted it. Here’s a good example of showing totals:

http://www.bb-ref.com/pi/shareit/hnhj

This shows me all the Yanks hitters that were hit by a pitch by Redsox pitchers. I’d like to see the total for the whole group.

As well, how can I get the totals by players (rather than by player-game)?

Comment by tangotiger — April 27, 2007 @ 11:27 am
http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/BOS/BOS200207231.shtml

Layout problem:
http://www.tangotiger.net/temp/br1.jpg
http://www.tangotiger.net/temp/br2.jpg

This happens when you start with a partial-open browser window, and then maximize. Clicking the “Favorites” or “Search” icon (so that you have a split screen), also causes problems.

In short, the image ad is floating, and the rest of the data doesn’t adjust to its position.

Comment by tangotiger — April 30, 2007 @ 10:38 am
Suggestion: You do a great job of treating pitchers and hitters as flip side of the same coin (by showing pitcher’s stats in hitting-form). They have alot of the same split stats, but not all, like GB/Airball, and highBB+K and lowBB+K. I don’t see any reason not to show these splits on the pitchers pages too.

***

Technical question: do you really mean “groundouts” or “groundballs”. That is, are hits included or excluded? Clearly,they should be included, but I can see data gaps. However, HR are almost-definite airballs (excluding those inside-the-park HR that originate when they go past the 1B/3B down the line), and I don’t see a reason to exclude those.

Comment by tangotiger — April 30, 2007 @ 4:02 pm
Help: Sean, I want to see how Roger Clemens did in games that his team won. In the “Game Outcome for Pitcher”, the split is based on *his* record, rather than his team’s. I thought that I could get it by doing this:
http://www.bb-ref.com/pi/shareit/yAq9
So, this is another example of where I would have liked to see a sum of all records, rather than just each game. Now, I can keep clicking “get next 25″, and I get 425 team Wins (and 265 team losses using a similar search), but that’s a pain.

By the way, the total is 690, and he pitched in 691 games (1 relief). I did not limit by start/relief. Can I presume there was a tie game? (In that case, you should probably add that as well.)

Comment by tangotiger — May 2, 2007 @ 3:29 pm
How ’bout adding run support to pitcher splits where applicable (Home/Road, Day/Evening, in Wins/Losses/ND, etc)?

Comment by Chris J. — May 3, 2007 @ 5:46 am
Is there anyway, using the PI, to figure out what the best pitchers duel of 1968 was? That’s a semi-random example, but is there a way to figure out a way to determine the best (or worst) combined game scores by opposing starters under X criteria? That would be neat to see.

Comment by Chris J. — May 3, 2007 @ 9:21 pm
Not at the moment, but that is a good idea. I’ve also thought about doing something allowing you to search for most HR in a game regardless of the team and this could be done with that as well.

Comment by Sean — May 4, 2007 @ 12:03 am
Sean, can you check out my question in post 54? Thanks…

Comment by tangotiger — May 4, 2007 @ 9:28 am
On BBTF: “b-r.com is the fastest site on the ‘net, and its not an accident.”

I thoroughly support this approach. Don’t change it, keep it fast and lean. And toolsy!

Comment by boteman — May 4, 2007 @ 11:28 am
Does the Play Index and/or Streak Thingee list length of game as an option? I just noticed the ChiSox have had five straight games take 2:30 or less and is there anyway to look up when the last time that happened was?

Comment by Chris J. — May 5, 2007 @ 7:56 am
Is it possible to have a game tracker? Meaning that we could run queries based on dates, size of leads, and amount of games won. Like say running a query where we could see how many teams had a 6 game lead by May 6th and what their final win total and standings in the league were. Or how they did over the next month or 30 games.

Comment by ubiquitous — May 5, 2007 @ 10:32 am
Ubi, this probably handles half your request:
http://www.baseball-reference.com/games/streaks.shtml

Comment by tangotiger — May 5, 2007 @ 2:45 pm
Suggestion: since you have PO, A, E in the boxscores, how about putting them in the player game log page as well?

Comment by tangotiger — May 6, 2007 @ 3:43 pm
(And part of the summable feature.)

Comment by tangotiger — May 6, 2007 @ 3:43 pm
For the pitching season PI finder, how about adding unearned runs? Or RA/9IP?

Comment by Chris J. — May 6, 2007 @ 10:34 pm
Few other random thoughts for the event finder:

If I want to find out what day of the week Barry Bonds has hit the most homers on (Wed. or Thur. or whatever), is there a way to find it out currently?

Also, is there a way to figure out what date Bonds has hit the most homers on? July 3 vs. August 18 vs May 14 or whatever.

Or is there a way to figure out who has hit the most doubles on June 3? Or which pitcher has the most saves on Tuesdays?

Stuff like that.

Comment by Chris J. — May 7, 2007 @ 11:53 am
For player transactions, do you still update non-trade transactions? Having checked players like Ted LIlly & Craig Counsell it looks like their transaction history is out of date.

Comment by Chris J. — May 11, 2007 @ 10:31 am
I’ve never seen the Bill James Batting Game Score. Interesting.

As to LOB, I follow a simple rule: I consider the runner LOB if he did not move from his position. Generally speaking, a runner will advance roughly 0.5 bases per PA. So, if you walk with a guy on 2B, you didn’t do your “moving over” job, though you obviously did your “getting on” job.

If we look at the 1 out, man on 2B situation here:
http://www.tangotiger.net/RE9902event.html
we see how the run values of all events pretty much double, compared to the bases empty situation, except for the walk, which stays constant (obviously).

So, while all other events get huge pluses for moving runners over, the walk stands still.

Comment by tangotiger — May 11, 2007 @ 10:44 am
I just ordered PI and I was wondering if we can compare statistics to generate results.

For example, I want to see what players have hit more HRs then SOs, so I’d like to set the value to HR > SO. Is there a way to do this?

Comment by shaftr — May 11, 2007 @ 8:21 pm
Shaftr,

I’m hoping to do that at some point. I just haven’t been able to do so yet. I need to think through all of the issues because I think there may be some queries doing that that could cause problems for the db and slow down the service for everyone.

sean

Comment by Sean — May 12, 2007 @ 12:51 pm
When did you make the career leaderboards go to 1000? That’s some fantastic stuff right there. Knocks out a main reason for me to buy the ESPN ‘cyclopedia.

Also, since this is the suggestions pages, any chance on adding Isolated Power to the leaderboards?

Comment by Chris J. — May 14, 2007 @ 3:08 pm
You know that Team scoring by inning summary you blogged about on 2/26? Maybe you could add a link to it on a team’s page. I just spent 15 minutes trying to figure out where it was located (I looked in splits, not PI). Could just be me, though.

Comment by Chris J. — May 16, 2007 @ 9:29 am
I’m having a tough time doing the navigating too, but that’s more because I’ve been spoiled (by this site) as to how everything related should be linked.

What I end up doing, more often than not, is to go to this blog, and accessing the links directly.

Comment by tangotiger — May 16, 2007 @ 11:43 am
Sean,

I see that draft information is available in player profiles. Is there any way that could be sorted by draft year, say when you visit David Wright, you can click on “2001 draft” and get a list (preferably with stats - like as in ‘born this year’) of all players from that draft?

Comment by rallymonkey5 — May 16, 2007 @ 11:46 am
Sean -

Is there some way to create PI leaderboards for season and career leaders in Average Game Score?

Comment by bigrhythm — May 17, 2007 @ 8:58 am
Never mind, I’ve got it. This site never ceases to amaze me….

Comment by bigrhythm — May 17, 2007 @ 11:38 am
My posts are being blocked when I have a URL. This page will get you what you want:
thebaseballcube.com/draft/2001/Round-1-1.shtml

Comment by tangotiger — May 17, 2007 @ 4:21 pm
The “random” option on the main page — does that really serve any purpose? Are there any users that really like that? Maybe, I dunno.

I was thinking, if you want to avoid excessive clutter on the main page, and eventually include a link to the videos on page one, you could dump random & replace it with link to the videos.

Comment by Chris J. — May 18, 2007 @ 9:28 pm
People LOVE the random feature. It gets 1000’s of hits a day. Though it may not need to be on the front page.

Comment by Sean — May 18, 2007 @ 11:59 pm
Well I’ll be damned.

Live & learn.

Comment by Chris J. — May 19, 2007 @ 8:15 am
Random thought - for the PI searches, could you add an option limiting searches to only 9 inning games?

Comment by Chris J. — May 19, 2007 @ 8:19 am
I’d like to see a starter rotation page for each team/season, that would be tabular in format, with dates on the lefthand side. A day with no game would still have a record, but would be blank across. So, somethign like this:

Apr 1… Rogers…………………..
Apr 2…………Lea……………….
Apr 3……………………………
Apr 4…………….Gullickson…………………
Apr 5…………………………………..Smith
Apr 6… Rogers……………………………….
Apr 7…………Lea(1)……….Grimsley(2)……….

The order of the columns is based on number of starts for the season. In this case, Smith had fewer starts than Grimsley, and Rogers had the most. Apr 7 was a double-header.

This way, we can instantly see what the rotation order was.

A similar one for relievers would be nice, so we can see if there’s a patch where the bullpen was really tapped.

In essence, this is an extension of the starting lineup you currently have. You have “SP” as one column. The above presentation, whether as an extension to the current page, or on its own page, would make it clearer.

Comment by tangotiger — May 21, 2007 @ 10:12 am
Any possibilty of adding win shares? Either in general or broken down as fielding/pitching/hitting win shares?

Comment by Chris J. — May 21, 2007 @ 10:49 am
Also, I really like tango’s idea in post #82. Maybe include the opposing team if possible. You might need to put the date on both sides though, for teams like th ‘06 Cubs that use 163 different starting pitchers over the course of the season.

Comment by Chris J. — May 21, 2007 @ 1:09 pm
I don’t know if this has been mentioned previously, but it would be cool if you could add functionality on the team splits much like on the player career splits where it breaks the split down by year when you click on it. However, I’d like to be able to see the team split broken down by the players. So if I wanted to know how a team’s individual 3B are doing, I could click the split and it would show me who makes up those numbers, for instance.

Comment by Joel — May 23, 2007 @ 12:53 pm
Random thought: managerial stats. Especially from 1957-2007, you could have stats like SH called, relievers used, and so forth. I know PBP data ain’t available for all games, but retrosheet does have the boxscores, so you could add in a bunch of the stats from the Bill James Guide to Managers, or the Annual Handbook, or the ‘07 Prospectus. And ejections.

Then again, I really don’t know how feasible any such plans would be.

Comment by Chris J. — May 23, 2007 @ 4:14 pm
Ooooo, great ideas in 86/87.

Comment by tangotiger — May 23, 2007 @ 4:56 pm
I have two things that I don’t think have been incorporated or suggested. Apologies if I’m wrong.

1) Is it still not possible to tally up career totals by position? For example, most career HR by a CF or most triples by a catcher, etc.

2) It would be neat if I could sum up seasons the way you can sum up games in gamelogs. Like how I can highlight A-Rod’s gamelogs to see what he’s hit in his last 7 games, it would be cool if I could highlight seasons on the player’s main page in the same way to see, for example, what Brian Giles’s SLG was from 1999-2002.

I’m a computer science student and I cannot even begin to imagine how complex your database must be. Cheers to making one of the best websites on the web, Sean.

Comment by Morky Mig — May 24, 2007 @ 3:14 pm
Morky,

You can get the career totals by position using the season finder. I do it this way because I don’t have pbp past the last 50 years, so I can’t say definitively who is the all-time leader in home runs in LF because I don’t know exactly what position they were playing when they hit the home run.

On the season summing, I agree. I’m going to add that in at some point this summer.

Glad you like the site.

Comment by Sean — May 25, 2007 @ 8:14 am
For the Player Index, is there a way to look for a specific time span? I know I can compare players across their 1st - 4th seasons or their age 28-35 seasons, but can I just look for highest SLUG% in any 4 year span? For example, in the PI example you have most home runs in 1960-1969 is 393 by Killebrew, but what if I wanted to see the most home runs in a 10 year span by a player?

Comment by shaftr — May 25, 2007 @ 12:37 pm
Random thought — if you do add more managerial stats, how ’bout record in 1-run games. Technically, that one could be done from 1871-now.

Comment by Chris J. — May 27, 2007 @ 6:34 am
A link back to the original form with data filled in where stuff like this is generated would be useful:

http://www.baseball-reference.com/pi/shareit/YzEp

Comment by tangotiger — May 28, 2007 @ 11:12 am
On the team schedule page, could you add in records vs. .500+ or .500- teams?

Comment by Chris J. — May 28, 2007 @ 2:00 pm
http://www.baseball-reference.com/games/head2head.cgi?teams=WSN&from=1994&to=1994&submit=Submit

Can you add a text that says “head-to-head”, so that if I click Atlanta, I’ll see Atlanta’s head-to-head that season?

Also, in the “you are here”, the text “Head-to-Head Records” should be hyperlinked, so that we can go back to that main page. As it stands, you have to go to “games” and the head-to-head. (Back button works too, but only if you are the one who initiated the request.)

Comment by tangotiger — May 29, 2007 @ 9:11 am
More random thoughts:

On the team page, you could add average hitter age (PA * Age for all, added up and divided by team PA, rounded to the tenths decimal), and average pitcher age (IP instead of PA).

On the team splits hitting/pitching pages (as well as for the league splits pages), you could add a breakdown for production by age - how 26 year olds hit, how 27 year old hits, etc.

Comment by Chris J. — May 29, 2007 @ 9:22 am
Chris, the team ages are there on the team total line under the player ages in the batting and pitching stats.

Lots of good other suggestions.

Comment by Sean — May 29, 2007 @ 11:51 am
Shazam! Awesome. Thanks for the heads up.

Comment by Chris J. — May 29, 2007 @ 11:57 am
For “age splits”, I usually find a 26-and-under, 31-and-over, and in-between (or somewhere along those lines) to be a good split.

Depending how you calculate age, and which years you use historically, those would roughly be equal in terms of PA.

The extra benefit is that if you see that the 26-and-under PA for a team is more than the 27-30 and 31+, then you know you’ve got a young skew.

The “average age” could hide those teams that have both a young and old skew.

You could also do the “age split” at the player level. Again, the extra benefit is really shown here. A guy like Carlton Fisk will have a sh-tload of PA in the 31+ (where the league average would be around 33.3%).

Comment by tangotiger — May 29, 2007 @ 1:11 pm
Your reliance on Bill James equations is alarming. While James has a bunch of great ideas, some are in desperate need of updating. Sim Scores for example. I follow a fairly straightforward process to do sim scores, which you can gather from this post:
http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/comments/the_four_horsemen/

Comment by tangotiger — May 29, 2007 @ 1:17 pm
I meant to add also: the sim scores, like the Marcels, are controlled by recent history. PECOTA follows this approach as well. A sim score for Cesar Cedeno, circa 1983, should be heavily weighted by his 1981-1983 seasons, and should barely contain his 1972-1973 seasons. I follow the 80% rule for hitters (70% for pitchers). So, his 1983 counts as “1″, 1982 counts as “.80″, 1981 counts as “.64″, etc. Once you get down to 1971, that year will count as “.07″. While a straight sim score would give you an equal weighting for 1983 and 1971, my process gives 15x more weight for 1983.

Even if the career-version of James (which really should be adjusted for era) is what some people want, this “on-going” version is what most people really care about (i.e., forecasting). That’s why PECOTA follows this sort of pattern.

Comment by tangotiger — May 29, 2007 @ 1:23 pm
I think it would be awesome if users could choose players he wanted to see listed and the stats given for those chosen players… so that tracking those players desired would be much easier (all under one page in a 600 by 600 or so pixel area). This could include both major leaguers and minor leaguers. These statistical charts could also be embedded on to websites, web articles, message boards, signatures on messageboards, and whereever else people input statistics. That could be a pretty useful advertising tool… if actually used; though perhaps it would also mean less navigating through baseball-reference.com and hence less money earned from advertisements.

firstinning.com allows users to follow players throughout the major and minor leagues after you’ve registered with a username and password. But it only lists basic stats from the day before for batters and the last five days for pitchers and doesn’t list BA or OPS or ERA or any other cumulative stats… just basic stuff like H, BB, ER, IP, ect.

Comment by ultxmxpx — May 29, 2007 @ 8:58 pm
It would be cool if eventually OPS+ could be corrected for handedness since ballparks like Safeco are pretty gentle on LHB but kill RHB. Similar for ERA+ too.

Comment by Bryan — May 29, 2007 @ 11:37 pm
Not so much a comment as a question. A question that I can’t find the answer to anywhere on the internet, and it’s killing me. It has to do with the home field advantage in the LCS.

Did the determining factor for home field advantage shift sometime between 1985 and 1987? The Blue Jays had the home field in the 85 ALCS, the Red Sox in the 86 ALCS, and the Twins in the 87 ALCS. So it went AL EAST, AL EAST, AL WEST. It could not have been by best record, as the Tigers won more games than the Twins in 1987. Similarly, the A’s won 104 games in 1988, the Red Sox won 89, and the Red Sox had HFA. So HFA seems to alternate starting in either 86 or 87, but could not have prior to that.

Comment by stolchin — June 1, 2007 @ 8:58 am
When you get around to putting up team splits, can you put up basic stuff from the pre-1957 era that aren’t dependent on retrosheet? I’m thinking L/R hitting splits, and L/R pitching splits. That you can do with what’s available. (checks) OK, that might be the only team split you can do for now, but it’s something, and as near as I can tell it’s available nowhere else.

Comment by Chris J. — June 3, 2007 @ 11:00 pm
Chris,

What do you mean when I get around to team splits?

http://www.baseball-reference.com/pi/bsplit.cgi?team=BOS&year=2007

Comment by Sean — June 4, 2007 @ 7:35 am
Man, I’m not having a good week here noticing stuff. I thought I’d seen those before. (thinks) Did I just check pre-1957 for splits or was post #104 an example of why I shouldn’t offer suggestions just before going to bed? I dunno. Ah well, either way, if you can offer R/L splits for pre-1957 that would be neato.

Comment by Chris J. — June 4, 2007 @ 10:35 am
How about “league era” and “team era” splits? Have a 10-yr window for splits. Undoubtedly, once you look at 2007 splits, you’ll also look at 2006, 2005, etc. Why not then have a 10-yr window of splits. 1998-2007, 1997-2006, 1996-2005, etc…

This way, I can look at Fenway 1972-1981 and compare it to 1998-2007.

Comment by tangotiger — June 4, 2007 @ 1:05 pm
In the Play Index, is there anyway to add a feature: most consecutive series won by a team, won or tied, tied or lost, and lost?

Comment by Chris J. — June 8, 2007 @ 12:41 am
Can you add grandslams to the game log finder?

Comment by Chris J. — June 8, 2007 @ 10:10 pm
For the gamelog finders & other parts of the PI, maybe include an option - where it sorts for teams with winning records, losing records, 100 or more wins, 100 or more losses, etc. Some sort of team quality option where the user can set up his/her own perameters. What’s the longest stretch of sub-50 game scores a pitcher ever had for a 100 win team? How often has a 90 loss team had a player get 8 RBIs in a game? Stuff like that.

Comment by Chris J. — June 9, 2007 @ 7:48 am
Anyway to use PI to do something like: create a list of players with more K’s than hits, and at least 1000 hits?

Comment by Chris J. — June 16, 2007 @ 5:15 pm
112: that was asked and answered earlier, or on another thread: Sean has it limited to comparing columns to literals. However, I don’t see the reason for the limitation, as there would be no extra performance hit, unless I’m missing something.

Comment by tangotiger — June 16, 2007 @ 8:56 pm
Can you add a team choice to the Batting Season Finder Option? Say you want to know who had the most homers by a Brave during the deadball era, or something else like that. Pitching Season Finder, too. I’m aware that it could be more troublesome with all the dead teams, but perhaps it could be split up into two search options - one which looks only through active teams & another for dormant ones. Just throwing it out there.

Comment by Chris J. — June 17, 2007 @ 10:55 pm
BUG: http://www.baseball-reference.com/pi/psplit.cgi?lg=ML&team=TOT&year=2007

You have an extra ballpark section at the top, with only one park.

Comment by tangotiger — June 19, 2007 @ 12:03 pm
I probably missed it, but what about position data.

For example, I would like to see all 1B stats in a particular year.

Thanks!

Comment by qudjy1 — June 21, 2007 @ 3:35 pm
Sean,

Random question — your average batter ages for teams — does that include pitchers or no? I know in your misc. glossary you say “each player” but I’m not sure if you mean offensive players or pitchers also. (This actually does relate to a project I’m working on).

Also - random bug - in your hitter glossary, you say you plan to add OPS+ to player pages shortly. That’s dated as you’ve made that update.

Thanks,

Chris

Comment by Chris J. — June 21, 2007 @ 11:50 pm
Suggestion: Pitch count

In the main page where you have pitch counts, and specifically for these:
30% - Percentage of PAs that resulted in a 3-0 counts
30c - 3-0 counts seen
30s - Plate Appearances Swinging 3-0

I would make something like “30i - 3-0 count that resulted from at least one intentional ball”. After all the “30s” should really be compared to the “30i” PAs, that is, the PA that are potentially swingable.

Comment by tangotiger — June 22, 2007 @ 1:03 pm
Uhh, I guess I should have said that 30s should be compared to the 30c minus 30i.

Comment by tangotiger — June 23, 2007 @ 2:56 pm
Two thoughts:

1) Add record in blowouts to the expanded standings?

2) Say I want to look athow the Cubs offense has done in extra innings this year. No problem - just check their splits. No, say I want to compare them to other teams in the league. That can be a problem. I’d have to click up all 16 teams splits. Is there any way to get how on all teams do by the same split on the screen at the same time? I figure many people who come who would like to see that.

One thought: in the given example of Cubs extra innings offense, make “Ext innings” a hyperlink so that all teams splits pop up for that split. Similar to how clicking on a team name on a player page will get you the team stats, clicking on a split name will drag up that split for all teams in a given league. Last time the Cubs played an extra inning game, the announcer mentioned the squad’s woeful extra-innings offense (even gave b-ref a plug as the site he got it from). Might be even cooler if that extra step got added in. Just throwin’ that out there.

Comment by Chris J. — June 24, 2007 @ 11:26 am
BUG:

Currenty, the site has no expanded standings for the 1890 NL.

Comment by Chris J. — June 25, 2007 @ 9:18 pm
REQUEST:

http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/comments/intentional_walks_as_leadoff_hitter/

How can I figure out the Retrosheet career leader in IBB from the leadoff slot?

Comment by tangotiger — June 26, 2007 @ 2:21 pm
Minor Bug:

1924 Expanded Standings, AL: The A’s W/L record against RHP plus their W/L record against LHP pitchers doesn’t add up to their overall W/L record. There’s a missing loss & a missing win. I know some pitchers’ handedness is unknown, but I don’t think that’s the case for anyone in 1924.

Comment by Chris J. — June 26, 2007 @ 2:41 pm
SUGGESTION:

Expand the base situations as:
aggregate by base/out (24 lines)

aggregate by base combos (as you have already, 8 lines)
aggregate by RISP (as you have, 1 line)
aggregate by men on base (as you have, 1 line)

aggregate by outs (as you have, 3 lines)

aggregate by single bases (3 lines)
aggregate by 3b, less than 2 outs (1 line)

That last one is the most interesting one, and can be in the “Clutch” section.

Comment by tangotiger — June 27, 2007 @ 12:15 pm
Do you mean in the player splits? Also, I’m not sure what you mean by single bases.

Comment by Sean — June 27, 2007 @ 1:01 pm
Yes, player splits.

You already do “SUM … GROUP BY OUTS” (3 lines). I’m suggesting “SUM … WHERE ON1ST” (1 line), “SUM … WHERE ON2ND” (1 line), “SUM … WHERE ON3RD” (1 line). So, “how did Ichiro do when there was a runner on 1B, regardless if there was another runner on base?” The Book clearly shows a skill for a hitter to take advantage of the hole on 1B.

Come to think of it, since I proposed runner on 3B and less than 2 outs (SF situation), you should have runner on 1B and less than 2 outs (DP situation).

Comment by tangotiger — June 27, 2007 @ 1:33 pm
Re: Splits.

“Power pitchers strike out or walk more than 28% of batters faced, Finesse pitchers strike out or walks less than 24% of batters faced.”

Wouldn’t it work better to base it off of the K-rate & W-rate of a given season rather than assign one number throughout? Looking it over, unless I’m missing something, you’re using the same % throughout.

Comment by Chris J. — June 27, 2007 @ 9:31 pm
Power/finesse:

1. Chris is *may* be right that you want to normalize to the year. However, pitchers, relievers today, are especially harder throwers than the 70s. Maybe we don’t want to normalize. You can debate it either way.

2. For the years that you do have pitch-by-pitch data, use those. Rather than relying on K and BB, why not look at the array of ball and strike counts? A finesse pitcher will not have alot of called strikes, while a power pitcher will. So, just called strikes per all strikes would likely be an excellent indicator.

Comment by tangotiger — June 28, 2007 @ 2:48 pm
Minor bug:

When looking at team batting splits — say you go from the 1958 LAD team back a year. It takes you to 1957 LAD, and a blank screen pops up. They were in Brooklyn that year. With the team page, it adjusts and sends you from ‘58 LAD to ‘57 BRK (or whatever abbreviation actually used). But not with splits. The same thing happened with the Mil/Atl Braves. I didn’t check any others.

So you know.

Comment by Chris J. — June 28, 2007 @ 4:26 pm
Chris is *may* be right that you want to normalize to the year. However, pitchers, relievers today, are especially harder throwers than the 70s.

Yea, but my thinking is that what is considered a hard thrower - power vs. finesse - depends on context. I’ve heard several say that if you look at Walter Johnson’s wind up and throwing motion, there’s no way he could throw it 90 MPH or more. Yet he was regarded as blazing fast. What’s considered a power pitcher depends on context. That’s why I’d support normalizing.

Comment by Chris J. — June 28, 2007 @ 6:36 pm
Like I said, you could argue either way. If you had a style of baseball overrun by Vince Colemans, would you need to group them differently than if you had a style of baseball overrun by Cecil Fielders? It all depends on the question. You can have two different questions that necessitates two different approaches.

Comment by tangotiger — June 28, 2007 @ 11:14 pm
Actually, I think my argument might make even more sense for G:F ratio. As it, it’s set at 0.83 and 1.08 (that’s from memory), which aren’t equally distant from 1.00 and thus (I an only assume) are set in a manner to get both sides fairly equal. Once that principle’s been introduced, may as well make it work for each season.

My main concern with the Power/Finesse thing is that at some the site’s splits will (hopefully) go way back to the 1920/30s/and early. Then, as it currently stands, power pitchers is Dazzy Vance and almost no one else. The split loses its meaning.

NEW POINT
With PI, it would be great if you could arrange it so that you could search for games in which a player reached Milestone X. Could be search for games in which a player won #300, and order by game score. What’s the most RBIs a player ever had when getting his 500th homer? And yes, given what Biggio did tonight, order all games where a batter got his 3000th hit by hits made in that game.

Comment by Chris J. — June 28, 2007 @ 11:25 pm
“Then, as it currently stands, power pitchers is Dazzy Vance and almost no one else. The split loses its meaning.”

Which, in one case, is fine. Really, if Sean had “fastball speed”, he would have used that. So, the split would show: “performance against pitchers with average fastball of 96mph”. If there actually weren’t any such pitchers, then so be it.

I don’t have any pony in the race here. There are two legitimate questions. Your question is: “of the guys 1 standard deviation and more, at each end, how did this guy do?”.

Someone else’s question is: “of the guys who pitch this hard, how did this guy do?”

Comment by tangotiger — June 29, 2007 @ 10:02 am
SUGGESTION:

“R”, as in runs scored for a batter in the splits. I can’t stand that the “R” is null. What is it that we would expect to see? Well, if Tim Raines gets on base with no runners on base, and ends up scoring, then we count that as the “R”. The “R” is always counted in the bin of when the batter reaches base.

Same with the handedness of the pitcher. Since a RH pitcher put him on base, and since he’s responsible for him, it doesn’t matter if a LH pitcher then came on to relieve him when he scored. All we care about is the context of the rest of the hitting line, and the rest of the line was against a RHP.

I know it’s extra work for Sean to track the eventual state of the runner (did he score or not), append a field on the event file to show whether he eventually scored or not, so that he can sum/group on it. But, leaving it null is not a solution for this site.

Other sites follow the incredibly ridiculous idea of looking at the base/state of the BATTER to determine to count the R for the RUNNER. For example:
http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/players/7311/situational;_ylt=Ap8wlxu4YN5HrLbaC4gkywuFCLcF
10 runs scored on 4 hits.

Null is a better solution than this, but there’s a better solution than null.

All you have to ask is: “Why do I want to have the R column here?”. And the answer will typically be: “I want to know how often he eventually scored, once he got on base in this state.”

Comment by tangotiger — June 29, 2007 @ 10:11 am
One pitching split I’d like to see: how pitchers do against each slot in the batting order.

For example: which hurlers pitched around the 3-5 hearts a la Tom Glavine?

Comment by Chris J. — June 29, 2007 @ 12:26 pm
Great point Chris. That was also in The Book. We show fairly strongly that a player does better in the #5 slot than in other slots, likely because the pitcher has to go through the 3/4 hitters. And, a player does worse in the #9 slot than he does in other slots, because the pitcher cruises through the 7/8 hitters.

There’s a whole bunch of splits that you can implement from The Book, especially on MGL’s chapter on the bunt.

Comment by tangotiger — June 29, 2007 @ 1:01 pm
I didn’t see the news on Biggio on the home page, but I see Bonds is there.

I think this link should be prominent:
http://www.bb-ref.com/pi/shareit/7Xud

Comment by tangotiger — June 29, 2007 @ 1:02 pm
re: 137, I’ve added that.

re: 134, Tango, that is not a little more work it is a lot of additional work. The splits take about 20 hours to regenerate now and I’m guessing they’ll take another seven hours if I try to do that. For each base-out situation, I have to look a ahead in the database to see if they scored or not. That would be very hard to do. I’ll mull it over, but it probably won’t happen anytime soon.

Comment by Sean — June 29, 2007 @ 1:41 pm
Bugs:

2006 AL expanded standings lists the Yankees playing 180 games - -92 vs. East, 35 vs. Central, 35 vs. West, and 18 vs. NL. I assume the interleague games were doublecounted. This isn’t just the case for the Yanks, but for the other teams as well.

Also, looking at the expanded 2007 standings, it looks like it says the Yanks have played 75 games and have 84 more to go. The 75 matches up with their record, but that means they should have 87 more to go.

Comment by Chris J. — June 29, 2007 @ 2:16 pm
Sean/138 re Tango/134:

One day, likely before the summer is over, I’ll be extending columns on the Retro event files, to include various “look ahead” columns (among others, “did he score”). Once I do that, I’ll be able to provide that to you, this way, all you have to do is join to it, 1:1, or even append directly to your own database.

Comment by tangotiger — June 29, 2007 @ 2:19 pm
The game preview for the Saturday 6/30 Dodgers vs Padres game lacks individual hitter vs pitcher data. It seems to be the only one.

Comment by btimmermann — June 30, 2007 @ 6:42 pm
With the batter vs. pitcher stuff, (or vice versa), is there any way to give secondary and third-order sorts? I’m thinking of how Excel works. This way if I want to look for most at bats aganist a pitcher without getting a hit, it pops right up how I want it.

Altenately, can there be an ascendeing/decending optino there?

Comment by Chris J. — July 1, 2007 @ 12:37 pm
Chris,

Try looking at the hits ascending.

Comment by Sean — July 1, 2007 @ 2:28 pm
BUG?

http://www.baseball-reference.com/pi/bsplit.cgi?lg=ML&team=TOT&year=2006

Sean, go down to the splits on GB/FB pitchers. The FB pitchers have an ISO (SLG minus BA) of .148, while GB pitchers are .177. Unless the league’s been overrun with high-quality FB pitchers or low-quality GB pitcher, this doesn’t seem right. The entire split-lines of the GB/FB pitchers are much too close to believe at first glance.

If your calculations are correct, then using “outs” in the ground to air ratio likely shows a selecting sampling problem. You really need to look at all contacted balls, not just those that are turned into outs.

Comment by tangotiger — July 2, 2007 @ 9:58 am
Sean has pretty much split the three classes of pitchers (GB, neutal, FB) as 33/33/33, or essentially setting it at around 0.4 standard deviations.

I like to set it at 1.0 standard deviations, meaning that I get half as many GB and FB pitchers. When we talk about GB pitchers, we talk about Lowe, Webb et al, guys who are 2+ SD from the mean. No reason for half of the “GB pitchers” to come from the 0.4 to 1.0 SD class.

Comment by tangotiger — July 2, 2007 @ 10:21 am
An idea for your offensive team splits pages: Starters & Bench.

Starters are the combined numbers for the 8-9 guys who led in G at the hitting position, and bench is everyone else. (Exception: for interleague era-NL teams, I’d make DHs bench. It’s only 9 stinkin’ games in AL parks out of 162 games on the year).

Submitting for your approval.

Comment by Chris J. — July 4, 2007 @ 9:36 pm
Regarding #123, the expanded standings and vs. LH and RH for the 1924 A’s. Clarence Winter is a pitcher of unknown handedness who presumably started against the A’s twice that year. He is the only one.

Comment by Sean — July 5, 2007 @ 9:40 am
http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/W/Pwintc101.htm
Retro has him as a righty.

http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1924/VBOS01924.htm
He was the starter for the two games against the A’s.

If you download the gamelogs, you should be able to get the hitting lineup for both games, and see if you had lefty/righty situations as a way to infer if he was truly a righty.

Comment by tangotiger — July 5, 2007 @ 10:47 am
Regarding #123, the expanded standings and vs. LH and RH for the 1924 A’s. Clarence Winter is a pitcher of unknown handedness who presumably started against the A’s twice that year. He is the only one.

Well, I’ll be damned.

Comment by Chris J. — July 5, 2007 @ 9:18 pm
http://www.baseball-reference.com/pi/psplit.cgi?n1=stanlbo01

Can you put in IP/G in the Starter/Relief section?

Comment by tangotiger — July 6, 2007 @ 10:18 am
Or (and?), even better, PA/g.

Comment by tangotiger — July 6, 2007 @ 10:18 am
Nice site–I have been looking for leadoff homerun leaders for lifetime and for each season. Did I miss it?

Thanks,
John

Comment by johnbroyles — July 6, 2007 @ 4:22 pm
Thought:

Add BABIP to the leaderboards.

Comment by Chris J. — July 7, 2007 @ 12:41 am
SUGGESTION:

Add IP (or batting outs) to the team hitting split pages.

Show runs scored per 27 outs or runs allowed per 27 outs wherever you can (team main pages, team hitting/pitching pages, team split pages, etc).

Comment by tangotiger — July 7, 2007 @ 9:52 am
For batter vs. pitcher can you include:

- See how they matched up over a multiyear period? Right now I can get career, or a single season, but not - say - a 3 year stretch of a career.

- You can currently get how a player did against guys who are currently members of a team, but what if you want to look up how George Brett did against Yankees during his career? Right now, there’s no option for that; at least not that I could find.

Comment by Chris J. — July 8, 2007 @ 11:36 am
Please Sean, I’m beggin’ ya, add in G:F ratios for pitchers. I just had to go to espn to look up Buehrle’s. Man that site sucks.

Comment by Chris J. — July 8, 2007 @ 11:04 pm
Chris: Until Sean does his best Bill Gates, Retrosheet and Fangraphs still serve a purpose. You can get what you want here:
http://www.fangraphs.com/statss.aspx?playerid=815&position=P
And here:
http://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=all&stats=pit&lg=all&qual=y&type=2&season=2007

Comment by tangotiger — July 9, 2007 @ 10:25 am
SUGGESTION:

In the “saved and shareable reports” section, add a column that shows which PI engine we used (streak, game, event, etc), as well as date. That’ll make it easier to go through the ever expanding list.

As well, put all the Stat of the Day on their own “saved and shareable reports”. That is, create a list of bookmarks on a single STOD page, and again, add the engine column, and the date, with a link back to the original blog entry.

Finally, can we flag our saved searches as public or private? And put those on a page as well, so you can see an entire list of what people are searching for. Maybe even include the userid.

***

I’ll resuggest that saved searches should pass the query back to the form, with the form prefilled. STOD is only doing a bit of its capabilities (getting people to play around with the reports by tweaking the STOD parameters).

Comment by tangotiger — July 9, 2007 @ 1:26 pm
SUGGESTION:

http://www.baseball-reference.com/pi/psplit.cgi?n1=schilcu01

Why not also have sOPS in each category? For example, if you look at the By Inning breakdown, we all realize that the 1st inning has the better batters than the 2nd inning. If you show the pitcher’s split stats relative to the league split stats, this will be clearer.

Comment by tangotiger — July 11, 2007 @ 7:49 pm
ERROR:

On the home page, in the links under BLOG, the link for “Suggestions” is missing a letter g, and therefore, is a dead link.

Comment by tangotiger — July 11, 2007 @ 7:50 pm
SUGGESTION:

Any reason that OPS+ for pitchers (great idea!!) is in the sort list but not for the WHERE clause? (Same for the other hitting-type categories you have in the sort list. They should be a match.)

Comment by tangotiger — July 13, 2007 @ 6:46 am
SUGGESTION:

In the selection criteria, allow us to put the playerid. It would have been nice here:
http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/comments/buehrle#34

If I could have selected the pitchers I was interested in (Cone, Neagle, Viola, Radke, Hanson) to see how they did at age 29-32. As it was, I used their year of birth individually to come up with a list of pitchers, and then did a find for each one.

And if possible, increase the number of selection criteria, at least for PI subscribers.

Comment by tangotiger — July 13, 2007 @ 10:21 am
http://www.bb-ref.com/pi/shareit/MqUc

The above would be more useful if it can give us the totals (like you have for the Season finder that collapses into Career totals).

This is just another example of it being useful for the totals appearing for all query requests.

***

It is also very interesting that this query uses a different version for age, as used in the rest of the site:
http://www.bb-ref.com/pi/shareit/fNK5

Selecting “Age 30″ in this case means “Age 30, 0 days, to Age 30, 364 days”, and as such, spans seasons. So, this is actual Calendar Age.

I don’t have a problem with that, but “Seasonal Age” might be an extra appropriate search parameter to be consistent with the rest of the site.

Comment by tangotiger — July 13, 2007 @ 1:57 pm
Sorting 2007 NL Relievers by ERA, it goes from worst to best. Shouldn’t it go the other way around?

Comment by Chris J. — July 14, 2007 @ 8:07 pm
SUGGESTION:

On this report:
http://www.baseball-reference.com/pi/inning_summary.cgi?year_game=2000&team_id=ANY

Can you offer two improvements:
- select based on league, in addition to “ALL”
- range of years

As well, you have “innings” which includes partial innings as a count (that is, your total in innings exceeds the actual official innings, which is really outs divided by 3). Can you add “outs” as well; and if possible, runs per 3 outs and/or runs per 27 outs.

Comment by tangotiger — July 16, 2007 @ 9:45 am
SUGGESTION:

http://www.baseball-reference.com/games/situational.shtml

Can you add starting pitchers, so we can do the breakouts by pitchers as well?

Comment by tangotiger — July 20, 2007 @ 4:28 pm
INCONSISTENCY:

http://www.baseball-reference.com/c/clemero02.shtml

Pitch data goes back to 1988.

http://www.bb-ref.com/pi/shareit/B9zA

“We have these stats only back to 2000″

Comment by tangotiger — July 20, 2007 @ 9:17 pm
You have been nice enough to send me a personal link, but how bout putting a link to a random box score somewhere in the box score section? Also, how bout making the search field for more than just players, or putting another one up there that we can search for by putting in a date or a specific team?

Wicked cool as always!!

Thanks

Comment by mikeyjax — July 23, 2007 @ 6:27 pm
SUGGESTION:

Some type of gadget for folks to add to their iGoogle home page:

http://www.google.com/ig/directory?hl=en&root=/ig&dpos=top&cat=sports

How to:

http://www.google.com/apis/gadgets/gs.html

Comment by Kent Bonham — July 24, 2007 @ 10:50 am
SUGGESTION:

You have the “red tip” on the player and league pages, but not the team pages:
http://www.baseball-reference.com/pi/bsplit.cgi?team=SFG&year=2006

I’d like to see the player names come up as redtips.

Also, a “career” total for teams (preferably not franchises), just like you have for players. And, to coincide with that, redtip them as well (each line would be the season). Obviously, this will only go back to 1957.

Comment by tangotiger — July 24, 2007 @ 11:14 am
SUGGESTION:

http://www.baseball-reference.com/postseason/

A career register list would be nice (BattingPost table, min 50 or some such PA), and make those redtipped.

Comment by tangotiger — July 24, 2007 @ 11:23 am
ERROR:

Sorta. Valenzuela’s name is cutoff here:
http://www.baseball-reference.com/pi/shareit/hMTD

Would probably be worth adding a couple of characters of space in there. At the very least, initializing his first name, rather than chopping off his last.

Comment by tangotiger — July 24, 2007 @ 2:26 pm
SUGGESTION:

I’ll just keep adding non-hardcore user suggestions, I guess…

Add a prominent “Make Baseball-Reference My Homepage”-type tab/button.

Comment by Kent Bonham — July 25, 2007 @ 9:13 am
Yes, the “My B-R” page is critical I think.

And how about “My B-R Buddies” too. We should be able to share our links.

Be able to create “rosters” of players or teams, like “Favorites”. I’m always looking up Raines, Bonds, Pedro, etc. I just want to see them right away.

Comment by tangotiger — July 25, 2007 @ 1:20 pm
On the main page, put the division leaders and Wild Card team in bold.

Comment by tangotiger — July 25, 2007 @ 1:22 pm
I may have suggested this already:

http://www.baseball-reference.com/pi/psplit.cgi?n1=vanpoto01

OPS+ should be there, certainly more than the other sOPS+ and tOPS+ that are already there.

ERA+ too.

Comment by tangotiger — July 26, 2007 @ 7:29 am
Hmmm… interestingly, if you redtip his split line (like say his overall “batting style” line), you DO get his OPS+ (that is, under column sOPS+). So,i t looks like you are already doing what I want, except not at the career level (where you always show 0).

So, I guess this should be marked as “BUG” or “GAP”.

Comment by tangotiger — July 26, 2007 @ 9:30 am
INCONSISTENCY: ERA+ / OPS+

In every single stat, except one, we are always showing “performance divided by context”, whether context is league average, PA, opportunities, or what have you. That’s the commonly accepted way to do baselines or indexes.

Except for ERA. In that case, it’s the inverse: context divided by performance. This was done, I presume, for the “higher is better”, so that we can see Mariano Rivera with a 200 ERA+ instead of the 50 ERA+ that a normal calculation would show.

The problem is that this is not carried through with OPS+ for pitchers. To the extent that the decision made with regards to ERA+ still holds, then OPS+ need to be inversed for pitchers. To the extent that I’m annoyed, ERA+ should be inversed. I find it inconsistent to do one one way and one the other way.

The second problem is that people will average out various ERA+. So, if they see Pedro with an ERA+ of 300 and a league average pitcher with an ERA+ of 100, then the simple average of the two will end up looking like an ERA+ of 200. But, the true math way is to do 2/(1/300+1/100) = 150. That is, you’ve got to reset ERA+ to the right scale, then you can add it up (denominators now the same), and then re-inverse it back to the original scale.

That is:
Pedro: 1.50 ERA, lg of 4.50, ERA+ of 300
Other: 4.50 ERA, lg of 4.50, ERA+ of 100

Average is obviously: 3.00 ERA, lg of 4.50, ERA+ of 150

Many (most?) people would assume ERA+ of 200.

Comment by tangotiger — July 26, 2007 @ 9:53 am
SUGGESTION:

Include all the splits for the selection criteria in PI. I want to know the top OPS+ as a reliever (not “mostly reliever”), for example.

Comment by tangotiger — July 26, 2007 @ 2:57 pm
ERROR:

I think someone already reported this, but you show “undef” in the BABIP column when the number of BIP is zero. (You can see it in the count reports for Bonds’s shortened season).

Comment by tangotiger — July 27, 2007 @ 2:47 pm
You should have the player’s pictures from a baseball card or something on their individual stat pages.

Comment by zdawson — July 30, 2007 @ 12:50 pm
SUGGESTION:

You show “Debut” and “Final Game”. If you are going to expand to minors, Japan, and maybe Negro League, you should note instead “MLB Debut”, “MLB Final Game”.

Comment by tangotiger — July 30, 2007 @ 4:39 pm
PI just went ka-blewie! on me. I ask for guys with SLG under .360 under certain criteria, and Mickey Mantle pops up. It noticed the criteria, but ignored the SLG I set for it.

Link:
http://www.baseball-reference.com/pi/shareit/uY3D

I was trying to get something for SLG & OBP, but everytime I tried to search for two things at the same time - full out ka-blewie! Nothing ever came up.

Comment by Chris J. — July 30, 2007 @ 11:02 pm
Sorry Chris, but you went kablooie. Don’t denigrate PI!

http://www.bb-ref.com/pi/shareit/mGF7

You used “360″ instead of “.360″ for SLG. Perhaps Sean can make the decimal optional?

Comment by tangotiger — July 31, 2007 @ 11:08 am
Oooohhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Well, that would explain why I couldn’t find anyone with a OBP over 350.

Thanx

Comment by Chris J. — July 31, 2007 @ 1:27 pm
On some player gamelogs when a player changes teams midseason, I get a message like this:
******* Player switched teams from %s to %s. ******************

This is for Wilson Betemit in 2006 and it shows up again in 2007.

Also players who have a catcher’s interference get a %s instead of a date.
Is this a problem with my browser? Does it need to read a different code set?

Comment by btimmermann — August 5, 2007 @ 12:59 pm
Is there anyway to look up a split to see how many RBIs a player/team has off of homers?

Comment by Chris J. — August 12, 2007 @ 11:36 am
The “days rest” feature for the Game Previews seems to be missing yesterday’s data.

Comment by btimmermann — August 13, 2007 @ 12:00 pm
Also in the game previews anytime you click on the links for “Game Logs Hit/Pitch”, you get Barry Bonds gamelog for 2007.

Comment by btimmermann — August 13, 2007 @ 12:03 pm
I’m a little confused by the new Batting Runs and Batting Wins columns. I assume that these are done in the spirit of Pete Palmer’s metrics from The Hidden Game and TB.

Anyway, it seems as if the conversion between BR and BW is off. Taking Ken Griffey for example, his career BR is 507.6 and BW is 81.4 That’s 507.6/81.4 = 6.24 runs per win, where we’d expect around 10 or so. Again, I’m not sure what methodology you’re using, but Pete’s RPW was 10*sqrt(runs per inning by both teams), with the batter or pitcher’s runs against average factored in as well (which shouldn’t make a huge difference).

http://www.baseball-reference.com/g/griffke02.shtml

Comment by Patriot — August 19, 2007 @ 10:15 am
Patriot,

That is a good catch. I’m a little embarrassed that I didn’t catch that. I was using runs/out rather than runs/inning. I’ll fix that now.

Comment by Sean — August 20, 2007 @ 9:19 am
Good job putting this up. How come no fanfare?

It should also be worth pointing out that it is the PythagenPat method that is the most accurate/simple in terms of converting runs to wins. At the level we are talking about here though, it’s probably not worth implementing.

Comment by tangotiger — August 20, 2007 @ 10:29 am
Do we really care about RC/g (or RC/27)? RC at least would correspond to a player’s R or RBI totals of that year (actually more like R+RBI-HR-AB/10). But, RC/game? It means nothing without the actual RC/game for the average player (in that park/league). Therefore, why not simply show RC+ ?

Comment by tangotiger — August 20, 2007 @ 10:34 am
I’m not sure that I agree about the RC/g. People have a feeling for how many runs a team scores in a game, so a player who generates 8 runs/g has a lot more value than a player with 5 runs/game.

Comment by Sean — August 20, 2007 @ 11:24 am
An RC+ of 160 would be clearer, wouldn’t it?

***

http://www.baseball-reference.com/y/yastrca01.shtml

In 1968, Yaz had 8.2 RC/g. In 1970, it was 10.4. That sure seems substantial of a difference. His OPS+ were 171, 178 respectively. His OWP were .831, .841 respectively.

His two AIR numbers (85,103) provide the OPS context for us (a difference of 21%). His RC/g (8.2, 10.4) are 26% apart.

RC/g means nothing without a context, much like ERA. Unlike ERA, RC/g has no basic value, which is why we report ERA.

I’d rather know that Yaz’ RC+ is 180 and 190 (or whatever) for the two seasons in question, than his RC/g was 8.2 and 10.4.

Comment by tangotiger — August 20, 2007 @ 12:09 pm
Modest request:

Say I’m in a player’s splits page. Can I get that little search box up top that let’s me look up another player. Right now I have to click back to the player’s page or click to the b-ref main page. It would be nicer if I could search from the splits page itself.

Comment by Chris J. — August 21, 2007 @ 10:16 pm
BUG:

At the bottom of this page:
http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/MON/MON198007250.shtml

You (very helpfully) provide a link to the equivalent Retrosheet page, except it shows “$yr”, instead of “1980″ in the URL. This would be the correct string:
http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1980/B07250MON1980.htm

Kudos for linking to the other sites on all your pages.

Comment by tangotiger — August 23, 2007 @ 2:19 pm
Could there be a static page/feed that includes links to all of yesterday’s boxscores? For those of us on slow connections who rely on offsite browsers and such, it’s difficult to parse through the main page and extract the boxscores. Something similar to the Previews page/RSS feed would be perfect. (If I’m missing something here, please educate me!)

Great site, and keep up the good work!

Comment by spycake — August 26, 2007 @ 2:22 pm
More color on the website

Comment by mjedgar97 — August 26, 2007 @ 4:45 pm
http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/comments/ned_yost_and_the_brewers#13

If you look at the first link in post 13, you will see the totals for “first batter faced in game”. If you red-tip, you will see the breakdowns by pitcher (FANTASTIC IDEA by the way). If you then save the report (the second link), you do NOT see the totals. I think the totals should be in that report.

By the way, a breakdown by starter/reliever for first pitch would be great. The contention on my blog from one of my posters was how the manager brings in his relievers. Are they too cold, etc. In addition to your main “first batter faced” line, have two additional lines “first batter faced, starter”, “first battter faced, reliever”, which each of those as red-tips, that’d be … uh, super-FANTASTIC.

Comment by tangotiger — September 5, 2007 @ 6:23 am
BUG:

http://www.baseball-reference.com/pi/gl.cgi?n1=youngmi01&year=1988&t=b

******* Player switched teams from %s to %s. ******************

Comment by tangotiger — September 5, 2007 @ 10:16 am
It’s impossible to put into words how awesome the Play Index is. There’s only one thing I can think of that might improve it, assuming it wouldn’t be too difficult to program: an option to search for stats in “official” rookie seasons. You can sort by players’ first seasons in the majors now, but that brings up a lot of cups of coffee, and leaves off players who may still have had rookie eligibility in their second or third years. Obviously, I wouldn’t expect it to take the roster time qualifications into account, just to filter out players who had more than 130 career AB or 50 IP going into a given season.

Comment by Danny Wind — September 6, 2007 @ 1:57 am
I love the PREVIEW feature for the games–it’s another amazing tool for increasing the understanding/enjoyment of the game.
I’d love to see a way to get the Preview for games to be printer-friendly. Not the whole thing, but maybe just the two charts with the Batters vs. Other team’s Pitching. Those would be fantastic if there was a way to get them printer-friendly.

Comment by Redsauce — September 21, 2007 @ 1:43 pm
Is there any way I could do a search for a guy who managed and played (like Stengel or Rose) and ensure that his manager page pops up first? Maybe allow a person to type in “Manager Pete Rose” and have that go directly to the managerial page or something.

Comment by Chris J. — September 22, 2007 @ 8:13 am
Is there any way to do double-splits? Like how right-handed hitters hit in Yankee Stadium?

Comment by joe484 — September 23, 2007 @ 1:42 am
BUG:

http://www.baseball-reference.com/pi/psplit.cgi?n1=riverma01&year=c

In the late&close, the split is only for 2007 (click on the redtip). Perhaps this is a known issue, so perhaps a note that this is only for 2007 for now may be in order.

Comment by tangotiger — September 23, 2007 @ 3:37 pm
For team pitching splits, can you add GS into the mix? It would come in especially handy with the days rest stuff.

Comment by Chris J. — September 23, 2007 @ 10:34 pm
BUG:

I can’t access MLB pitching splits from 1971-6.

Is there some sort of update or something going on with that info? This is the second time in about 24 hours I’ve had an error trying to access the info. I don’t get an error message this time, just a blank screen. The top header shows up, but no data drops down.

Comment by Chris J. — September 28, 2007 @ 3:46 pm
Question:

http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/CHN/CHN200709180.shtml

Are the GB-FB only outs, and not all BIP? If so, why? If not, why are the numbers so low? Are Line Drives included in FB, so that really it’s “air”

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January 12, 2007

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