Entries Tagged as 'baseball reference'

B-R.com tool: Totaling up a range of seasons

Maybe this is common knowledge but I just came across another useful tool at BaseballReference.com.  It now allows you to total up range of years’ stats of any particular player on fly.  Very handy!

It’s done just by clicking on the first year in the range then the last year in the range.  By doing that, a stat window pops of with the range totals you wanted. 

Here’s an example using Hank Aaron.

You do need to enable this feature and it’s done at this page.

Another reason why Baseball Reference is as good as it is.  Sean and team there continue to make it better.  And another reason I don’t hesitate to throw a couple bucks their way every year.  As much as I use it, it’s worth it.

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Take part in Baseball Reference’s survey

The invaluable stat resource Baseball-Reference.com is conducting a survey now on how they can improve their site.  If you use B-R, I encourage you to hop on over there and fill out their survey form. 

I just took it myself.  It took me just 5 minutes to fill out but it does ask some great questions especially in terms of what areas you would like for them to focus their energies on in the future. 

So, if you can spare five minutes of your busy day, take Baseball Reference’s Survey.

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I just love Baseball Reference’s new SHARE feature

Kudos to Baseball Reference again, this time for their “Share” feature that they just implemented in their stat pages. 

The Share feature does what it implies… it allows people to share any stats on almost any Baseball Reference stat page in a variety of formats. 

The formats available are html table, bbcode, a javascript widget, an html iframe, pre-formatted text, comma delimited file or just simply a hyperlink.  Those baseball bloggers, forum posters and stat hounds who frequently cite baseball statistics will find this very useful. 

Just browse to the stat page you want to quote and click the “Share” link. Since Clyde Vollmer was born today, I’ll use his batting stats as an example.  The “Sharing Toolbox” will then come up. 

sharing toolbox

This is where the best feature comes up.  Don’t want to display the CS stats?  Not interested in the age of the player?  Not to worry, BR has allowed for us to customize the display of the table by deleting columns or rows that you want.

Just click on the red X of any unwanted column or row and it won’t appear in the final result.  There’s also a red X within an arrow on each row and column that will delete trailing ones. 

redx

In Vollmer’s case, I’m going to make his table a simple one with just homeruns and rbis.  I’ll click on the red arrow on the rbi column deleting everything to the right of it.  I then deleted every other column except Tm, Lg, HR, and RBI.  Not being interested in per team stats I deleted every row below his career stats, too.

Don’t forget, stat tables in Baseball Reference allow you to click on stat column headers to sort by stat categories.  In my example with Vollmer though, I’ll keep it in chronological order.

Once you get the stat table the way you want it, click on the format type you want.  A window will then pop up giving you the code or link you need. 

In the Vollmer case, I clicked html table and was given html code for a table. 

Here is the result for Clyde Vollmer’s homerun and rbi totals for his career:

 

Year Tm Lg HR RBI
1942 CIN NL 1 4
1946 CIN NL 0 1
1947 CIN NL 1 13
1948 TOT MLB 0 0
1948 CIN NL 0 0
1948 WSH AL 0 0
1949 WSH AL 14 59
1950 TOT AL 7 38
1950 WSH AL 0 1
1950 BOS AL 7 37
1951 BOS AL 22 85
1952 BOS AL 11 50
1953 TOT AL 11 74
1953 BOS AL 0 0
1953 WSH AL 11 74
1954 WSH AL 2 15
10 Seasons 69 339
Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table
Generated 9/24/2009.
 

There you go.  A reasonably good looking table that was easy to generate (probably easier than I made it sound).  It’s easy enough to go into the code and remove the link to B-R but why be a tool?  It’s the least I could do.

It should be emphasized that this feature works from almost any stat page in Baseball Reference.  Splits, Game logs, team stats, you name it. 

Oh managers pages too.  I just used it in a recent post about Bobby Cox.

In this day and age when MLB is trying their best to lay claim to baseball statistics as a commodity, it nice to see Baseball Reference making it easy to share them.  Keep up the good work, B-R!

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B-R is a’twitter

Baseball Reference is now on Twitter

From what I can tell they’ll be including updates to the B-R blog and their always interesting Stat of the Day blog.

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Helpful search tip on Baseball Reference

Sean Forman has implemented a new search modification to his Baseball Reference database. 

For those searching on a common player name (or part thereof), you can put the word “the” in front of the search term and the database will bring up the most popular searched player.

From B-R’s blog:

I just added a mod to the search box on the site. With the addition of all of the minor league pages, getting to someone like Alex Rodriguez’s page via a search “A Rod” returns like 50 people. Now, if you type in “the A Rod” it looks through our db and returns the most popular major league player who matches the search “A Rod”. Adding “the ” to the front of any player search will send you to the most popular player matching that search.

I did my own test.  I searched for “ramon martinez” and got back three results including two minor leaguers.  When I searched for “the ramon martinez”, it took me directly to the page of Ramon Martinez who pitched for the LA Dodgers.

This trick works with initials too though your mileage may vary.  “the jason v” did return Jason Varitek as I intended it too.  For that matter, so did “the j v”.

Anyway, this mod might save a few mouse clicks for those of us who search Baseball Reference’s database on a frequent basis. 

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Progressive Leaders

If you’re reading baseball blogs and baseball web sites in general, you most likely have visited Baseball Reference. It’s one of the best resources out there for baseball stats. There are stats for every player and every team since stats were kept.

What some may know about is their Progressive Leaders feature in their Leaders section. It’s quite cool.

For any given stat, Progressive Leaders displays for each year, the career leader, the single season leader, the active career leader, and the leader for that particular year.

Let’s take Homeruns, for example:

It shows (as we all know) that Roger Connor held the career HR record with 138 when he retired in 1897. Ned Williamson held the single season mark with 27. A quick look shows that when Ruth began hitting dingers, he quickly vanquished Williamson’s mark in 1919 with 29 and it wasn’t long before he broke the all-time career record. What’s great about the Progressive Leaders feature is we can quickly find out that it was 1921, when he hit 59, that Ruth passed Connor HR mark.

By the same token, we can tell that when Ruth retired, Lou Gehrig became the active career record.
On a side note, it’s interesting to note the progression of players who held the active career HR title. They include:

Foxx
Ott
DiMaggio
Mize
Williams
Musial
Mantle
Mays
Aaron
McCovey
Stargell
Jackson
Schmidt
Dw Evans
Murray
McGwire
Bonds

And that’s just a start… take a look at runs scored and hits and doubles an so on and so on… :-)

Followup: I read somewhere that Roger Connor died not knowing he was the all-time leader in homeruns for 25 years.

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