Francisco Rodriguez, Ryan Braun and Carlos Pena have always been difficult cases for our linker. We've now come upon a solution for that.

Previously we would link Ryan Braun's name with the following.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/player_search.cgi?search=Ryan+Braun

This is now updated to:

http://www.baseball-reference.com/player_search.cgi?results=braunry01,braunry02

The id's in the results parameter are for the Pitcher Ryan Braun (Braun the lesser, braunry01) and the Brewers' Ryan Braun (Braun the greater, braunry02). Someone like Francisco Rodriguez has 8 results or so. The results are ordered by last_year played descending and length of career descending (I figure I would weight it towards active guys who have played awhile).

If you do nothing, these links will auto-forward your readers to the most popular player (as measured by all-time page views as a major leaguer) among the players with id's in that list. If there are only minor leaguers or just one player listed in results it will send you to the player page for the first id listed (which is ordered as above).

Now if you want to link directly to Ryan Braun the lesser, just delete the other Ryan Braun's id (braunry02) from the link.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/player_search.cgi?results=braunry01

And now the link sends you to the other Ryan Braun the lesser (braunry01). This will require a bit of memorization of id's, but really you will only need to do that for cases where you are linking to the lesser player with that name.

This has been rolled out already. I also added an html comment at the beginning that states the above more succinctly. The comment can remain in the post as it won't show up when published.

Sometime later today or next week, I will start using these in the page feeds, so Ryan Braun will finally have his own page feed. This may cause some players to show incorrect page feeds (mismatches of Ryan Braun news, etc), but short of artificial intelligence scanning of writer intent, I don't see a way around that.

Apologies to Braun the Lesser. I'm sure he is a better guy than the other one in every way except baseball ability. 🙂

This entry was posted on Friday, June 3rd, 2011 at 11:52 am and is filed under Announcements, Insane ideas, Power Users. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.