Archive for the 'Stats' Category

MLB Milestone Watch: Hits - Baseball-Reference.com

I'm a few weeks late for the countdown to Jeter's big hit, but don't miss another milestone as our Milestone Watch points out all of the batters, pitchers and fielders as they cross major statistical milestones and move up the career leaderboards.  This new feature will be linked on the front page just below the standings.

Any suggested additions will be welcome.  These pages should be updated daily as the site updates.   Please note that we include National Association stats in our leaderboard stats.  Thanks to Justin Kubatko, who had this on <a href="http://www.basketball-reference.com/">Basketball-Reference.com</a> quite awhile ago.

Thanks to Dave Davis and lots of bug reports from users we've updated the photos on the site with about 4,000 new images. This includes some previously missing images and some corrected images for players that were previously incorrectly identified.

As I've stated earlier I use pre-1960 images for copyright reasons, though I'm always looking through our options as head shots for every player would be a wonderful addition.

Just for fun, here are the HR per AB and Isolated Power (Slugging % minus Batting Avg.) numbers for each HR Derby contestant:

Park-Adjusted numbers were calculated by applying ESPN's 2011 Event Park Factors to the player's home statistics. Odds via Bodog Sportsbook.

Tug Hulett Statistics and History - Baseball-Reference.com

On the major league player pages we are now including summary minor league lines for each season in the minor leagues for this player.    By default, they are hidden, but clicking the "Show Minors" tooltip above the Standard Batting or Standing Pitching tables will cause them to be shown.

For now, you'll be able to see this just for active players, but I'm rerunning everything and you'll be able to see them on all player pages later this evening.

Here are Brett Gardner's career big league stats, to date:

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Note his Slugging Percentage the last three seasons. Pretty consistent, huh?

2011 New York Yankees Batting, Pitching, & Fielding Statistics - Baseball-Reference.com.

Last year in August, there was a bit of a debacle when I started incorporating 2010 season stats into the park factors. Yankee Stadium III had been a much better hitters park and SafeCo a better hitter's park and adding in the 2010 season stats swung the AL pitcher WAR race (temporarily) in Sabathia's favor.

To avoid a similar problem this year and in future years I am going to begin updating the park factors around Memorial Day.

UPDATE: The Win Probability Added calculations for 2011 will also be updated daily to reflect the 2011 park factors and run scoring environment.

The Park Factors on B-R are 3-year factors when appropriate, so 2000's park factor relies equally on 1999, 2000 and 2001.

So now for 2011 since it is underway, we start with the PERCentage of the season played and

PF_2011_3yr = (PERC*PF_2011 + PF_2010 + (1-PERC)*PF_2009)/2

PF_2010_3yr = (PERC*PF_2011 + PF_2010 + PF_2009)/(2+PERC)

This should prevent violent swings in the park factors and at the end of the season we will end up with PF we were going to have throughout the offseason.

2011 pages will of course be updated daily. 2010 pages will be updated less often. To see what goes into each team's park factor you can look at the various one-year park factors listed on their team/year pages.

A quick note to let everybody know that we now list WHIP and ERA+ on the Cy Young Award voting tables:

2010 NL Cy Young Voting

1969 AL Cy Young Voting

Special thanks to B-R user Brendan for the suggestion!

B-R reader Nash noticed something interesting about Mordecai Brown's black ink this weekend:

"Everyone talks about unbreakable records (DiMaggio's 56, Cy Young's 511, etc.), and I know that this is in the context of the 'dead ball' era, so I don't know how relevant this is -- but in 1910, Mordecai Brown led the league in CG, SHO, and ... SAVES.

Don't think that anyone will pull THAT off again anytime soon!"

Keep in mind that the save policy we're using for pre-1950 seasons is the so-called "encyclopedia rule" (a pitcher who finished a game his team won, but did not get the win himself, is awarded a save). Still, Brown is just one of four pitchers since 1901 to lead his league in complete games, shutouts, and saves in the same season:

Like Nash says, this is one club that's unlikely to expand beyond its four current members anytime soon.

2011 Wins Above Replacement data is now live on the site and will be updated daily throughout the season. This includes the league pages, player pages, team pages, and Play Index, among other locations.

In the very early going, here are your 2011 WAR leaders:

Position Players

Pitchers

A B-R user recently wondered about the source for our pre-1910 batter strikeout data (example), given that those stats were not officially kept track of until 1913 in the AL and 1910 in the NL. I posed the question to Pete Palmer, stat legend and season-data provider to Baseball-Reference, and here was his reply:

"The strikeout data came from Jonathan Frankel, who did a tremendous amount of work with a number of helpers checking box scores in various newspapers. He identified about 90% of NL batters and 80% of AL batters from 1897-1909. The results were then prorated for the remainder of the season. Work is continuing on digging up more boxes and also on 1910-12 AL.

I was surprised that Jonathan was able to find so much data. What happened is that the local papers often carried the strikeouts for their games, so it required volunteers all over the country to check the papers, plus some inter-library loans. It was a terrific undertaking."

It turns out that Jonathan has a blog where he posts updates about the progress of his batter strikeout research. He says the 1910 AL is 89% complete right now, and that he has begun work on the 1912 AL as well.