BR.com's Sports Reference Blog

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?”

2008 International League Standings and Statistics - Baseball-Reference.com

Apologies for it taking two weeks, but we now have 2008 minor league data updating daily on the site.

Enjoy.

I think this does it for things that needed to get up and running for the start of the season. Now I’m hoping to focus a bit more on new stuff for the foreseeable future.

Hockey-Reference.com Blog » Blog Archive » Welcome to Hockey-Reference.com

In December we acquired a large database of hockey data and then we put Justin Kubatko on the job creating the pages. In my biased opinion he has created the best hockey statistics site on the web. I hope you’ll agree. Be sure to tell all of your hockey fan friends about the site as well.

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

In case any front office types are scoping out managerial talent for next year, my 1986 Tigers team is up by 2.5 with 19 to play and also are the owners of the best record in baseball (replayed 1986 baseball).

It took a bit longer than I wanted, but the splits have now been updated on the site. I re-wrote the split engine to much more easily handle the addition of new splits (and their inclusion for teams, players, careers, etc.). It’s a big job. For example, I’ve got a db with over 4.5m split lines for the 52 years of batting stats alone (just for players). Here is a rundown of the improvements. I hope you enjoy them.

Update: Platoon splits for 1999 are messed up, they will be fixed tomorrow morning.

• We now have 1956 splits
• 2008 splits are now updating.
• Leverage (low, medium and high) Clutch hitting and pitching splits have been added. (about wpa)
• For team splits, we now show splits by month and half for starters and relievers.
• Pitchers now have splits for save and non-save situations.
• We now have splits for runner on third and less than 2 outs and runner on third and 2 outs.
• Day’s Rest splits are now divided between Games Started and Games Relieved. GS splits are day’s rest before a start and GR are day’s rest before a relief appearance. The previous appearance could be a start or a relief appearance.
• For games from 1988 to the present we have added splits for Ball Location: To the Infield, To the Outfield, Ball In Play, Ball Not In Play (Including HR over the fence, think 3 True Outcomes), Fair Territory, Foul Territory, Pulled, Up the Middle, or Opposite Field (as RHB or LHB), Ball Trajectory (Ground Balls, Fly Balls, Line Drives or Bunts).
• For batters, splits in team wins and losses, as a starter or as a sub.
• We cleaned up the handling of players who PH for a DH.
• We added a split for Leading off the Game.
• For splits where the player’s context can’t change after they reach base (like defensive position, leading off the inning, inning, etc.) runs scored now is shown and is the number of runs scored eventually by that batter from that time at bat. So the leading off an inning split now shows how many times the leadoff batter scored, not just how many home runs they hit. For example, Tim Raines led off the game 1398 times and scored 285 runs (just 16 leadoff home runs). (Runs aren’t shown for things like scoring margin or clutch stats because the score may change from when the batter batted to when they finally scored.)
• SB and CS totals are now given for context splits. These are accurate for the actual player and do not represent the SB and CS totals of others on base. For example, Jose Reyes has stolen 178 bases against RHP and 56 against LHP. He is 34 of 42 when the count is 0-1. He is 26 of 31 when stealing third with no one on first. He is 73 of 88 when there are 2 outs. (Here’s Rickey. Unfortunately, his 1999 stats will be updated tomorrow.)

There are likely errors, please let me know when you find them.

My stats provider has not yet provided me with stats for the play-by-play for Saturday’s games, because of this we have not been able to update the site yet. I apologize for the error and hope we can get this sorted out next week. We may need to add some redundancy to the system to make sure everything works, every day. Sorry.