BR.com's Sports Reference Blog

Mickey Vernon passed away last week before the Veteran’s committee had a chance to review his HOF credentials. Below the fold is a case (and a plea) for Mickey’s induction from Paul Wolfe.

(more…)

At some point tomorrow between probably 10-3. We will be doing a move to a new server. I don’t expect this to have more than a momentary glitch (famous last words). This only affects Baseball-Reference which is getting a new server of its own. Say a prayer to St. Isidore of Seville for me.

Manny Ramirez Batting Against Mike Mussina - Baseball-Reference PI

I’ve added a couple of lines to the batter vs. pitcher outputs in time for the postseason. As you can see there is now a regular-season total line followed by a postseason total followed by an overall total.

I’ve also re-run all of the postseason pbp for the Play Index, so it should be ready to go for this year’s playoffs.

250,000th Home Run Ever Hit - Baseball-Reference.com

Looks like today could be the day just 31 to go.

We’ll be keeping a running log at BaseballThinkFactory.org.

250,000th Home Run Ever Hit - Baseball-Reference.com

I noticed something kind of fun a few weeks back and decided to commemorate it on the site. Using SABR’s home run encyclopedia and our count for the last two years. We are almost to 250,000 home runs in MLB history. I’ve gone back and estimated other milestone home runs, but it isn’t really possible to know who hit which home run first on a given day. I’m hoping that we’ll be able to pinpoint it easily as we approach 250,000.

Also if you are in the media and reading this. Please feel free to publicize this fact to your readers. We’d just ask for an on-air mention or a link back to our website in print if you see fit to use this fact we uncovered.

We also set up a Widget at widgetbox if you are interested in including a tracker on your website.

My provider changed the file format on me unexpectedly today. The roster files came as dos files rather than unix files which caused MySQL to munge the data when using LOAD DATA INFILE. I’ve fixed the problem (just ran dos2unix on all of the files first) and things should be fixed by 1pm today.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

ESPN: SportsNation Polling - 3529 - SportsNation

Some fun stuff from ESPN.

Chris Forman Named Collegiate Water Polo Association Co-SID of the Year :: Navy tied with Michigan for best media guide

Congrats to my brother! The Forman’s love sports information.

2008 All-Star Game Preview

The update with all of the possible batter pitcher matchups is now up. Remember we run these for every game every day.

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

In honor of the all-star game, the Play Index is free through July 19th. Kick the tires and enjoy.

Official Google Mobile Blog: Searching on an iPhone can be fun

B-R hits the big time. Watch the video.

Sports Reference LLC Covers Olympic History

Press Release relating to the new site we’ve launched.

Olympics Blog at S-R » Olympics at Sports Reference Launches

I am VERY pleased to announce that the newest member of the Sports Reference family has launched. Thanks to a tremendous database to work with and 50 long days by Justin Kubatko we now have a site chronicling all things RINGS. Visit the link above to get a taste for the depth of information that is currently and will soon be available.

Main Page - BR Bullpen

This milestone was passed a few weeks ago, but it is remarkable nonetheless. This volunteer project has exceeded my wildest expectations with fantastic articles on things as varied as Yu Darvish, the 2005-2006 Cuban National League Results, Baseball Teams in Henderson, Texas, and This date in History for June 12th.

Baseball Draft: 1st Round of the 2008 June Draft - Baseball-Reference.com

Got the 2008 draft loaded into the site. The next project (and this is a bit off) will be to match these players up to their minor league id’s. It will happen! Someday.

Emerald Sports Guides - The Baseball Guide for 2008 and 2007

If you are like me, every year you would look forward to the Sporting News Baseball Guide appearing in your local bookstore. This book contained a complete record of the previous season, with box scores of important games, major and minor league stats and a concise summary of the previous season’s news, transactions, and major events. TSN published the last guide in 2006 leaving a void in my 60-year run of Baseball Guides.

Gary Gillette and Pete Palmer (producers of the ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia) have teamed with us to produce those missing editions both in a print and a pdf version under the name the Emerald Guide to Baseball. Samples, tables of content, and order information are all available on our website. Be sure to check it out.

Emerald Sports Guides website

Baseball Draft: 2nd Round of the 1989 June Draft - Baseball-Reference.com

I have cleaned up a number of issues with the draft data and now have some additional features.

Compensation and supplemental picks are all now notated. We also went back and handled the ninety or so voided picks or picks where a team didn’t make a pick (in the bathroom I guess). We also now allow you to search by state, so you can attempt to get all of the players drafted out of a particular state, but keep in mind that there are about 1500 entries out of 58,000 where no state has been entered yet. We’ll try to fix those next.

There aren’t going to be a lot of shiny new features over the next two months because I’m undertaking a major re-writing of the B-R architecture. Basically, I’m getting it onto the same platform as the other sports reference sites. This will speed up development (eventually) and also add a bunch of new features like snazzy in-place sorting and our new logo.

So if it seems a little quiet here, that doesn’t mean I’m taking the summer off. It just means I’m working behind the scenes.

Baseball Draft: 2007 Picks in the June Draft, with a listed position of LHP - Baseball-Reference.com

It only took 11 months, but I finally got the 2007 draft data added to the site. I’ve also added pitcher handedness to the tables for 99.1% of the pitchers selected in the draft. So you can now view all of the LHP, RHP or both.

The next order of business will be to add things like the state from which they were selected and to normalize the school names, add a HS, JC and College search feature, and then link all of these players up to their minor league pages as well.

SportingNews.com - Fantasy Games and In-Depth Fantasy Analysis

Six games to play and the Detroit Tigers (managed by yours truly) are a half game up on the Yankees. The Blue Jays would need a miracle to make it, but they are probably still alive mathematically.

Tigers have three with the Brewers and three with the Orioles.

The Yankees have three with the Blue Jays and four with the Red Sox.

Sports-Reference.com Front Page
Basketball-Reference.com Front Page
Pro-Football-Reference.com Front Page
Hockey-Reference.com Front Page

You may have noticed that most of the SR sites (sadly baseball does not yet, but will!) have a shiny new logo in the upper left-hand corner. We had been talking about getting nice logos for years, but the formation of the LLC this past December finally gave us the boost to actually get something done. In fact, when we got together at the Baseball Winter Meetings to sign the documents that offically formed the LLC, we met a graphic designer by the name of John Hartwell. John runs a company named Hartwell Studio Works. He has done a lot of sports-related work, including designing the logo of the Birmingham Barons, a minor league baseball team. We have been extremely impressed with John, not only the finished product, but also with the professionalism he displayed throughout the process.

Our hope is that these new logos further unify the sites. We want people of to think of our web sites as parts of a whole, not distinct entities, and we believe these logos are an important step in that process. Please feel free to let us know what you think (you’re never shy about that, are you?), and as always we thank you for your support of our sites.

B-R should be getting the S-R treatment this early this summer. We did a complete redesign of the guts of the other three sites starting in November and we left B-R for last. When you’ve got 100,000’s of lines of code already written you don’t undertake a re-writing lightly.

Here is what the logo will look like.

Sports Reference Store

If you were at the 2007 SABR convention in St. Louis, you were able to buy Baseball-Reference.com t-shirts and hats at a booth we had there. Now you can order the same t-shirts and hats via our Yahoo! Store.

There is also a data download available there. We may start rolling out more of these if there seems to be any interest.

One other note, we have been working with a designer on new logos to tie all of the Sports Reference sites together, so the B-R logo will be changing, so if you want the classic B-R on a t-shirt or a hat look now is your chance.

2008 Toronto Blue Jays Franchise Batting Stats and Depth - Baseball-Reference.com

The players on the depth chart are now linked to either their majors or minors pages. They are routed to the area that the most recently played with by year. So Vic Darensbourg would send you to his minor league page, Clay Buchholz to his major league page and Mike Timlin (who’s done both this year) to his major league page (ties go to the major leagues). Eventually all of the stats will be on one page some time this summer.

2008 AAA International League Batting Leaders for Runs Created/Game - Baseball-Reference.com

I’ve tweaked the minor league leaderboard to have common sense cutoffs for PA’s and IP’s for the leaderboards for rate stats. Before this readout would have been blank.

Also, SB-CS values for Catchers is now on the team and player pages for 2008 and I’ve added RF/9 to the team pages as well, rather than the very crude RF/G.

Holds are such a goofy stat. I had introduced an issue that caused cases where a pitcher had a decision to register as no hold. Well, turns out you can get a hold and a loss. Figure that one out.

Anyways, I’ve corrected the hold calculation, so it now gives hold in those “appropriate situations”. Derrick Turnbow had two such hold losses last year and they are marked in the gamelog with an HL, as in “What the HL is that?”