Sports Reference Blog

Users, your voices have been heard! After much clamoring, we have added a Player Batting Comparison Finder and a Player Pitching Comparison Finder to the Baseball Reference Play Index. With these new tools, you can compare the statistics for any season or set of seasons for up to six players at a time. For instance, here's the top six vote getters in the 2017 AL MVP race.

Read the rest of this entry

We just wanted to quickly announce that we have added 2017 stats for the Pecos League and the Pacific Association. You can see all 35 leagues we have 2017 coverage for here.

Thanks to recent additions to our historical box scores, we now have full points and rebounds for every career meeting between Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain. See all of them here, via our Head2Head Finder.

Read the rest of this entry

We are thrilled to announce the addition of two incredible new tools to the Baseball Reference Play Index:

The Team Batting Season Finder and the Team Season Pitching Finder.

These new tools will allow Play Index subscribers to create customized leaderboards for all team pitching/batting stats in Major League history.  In addition to standard team stats, we've also opened up searches for value stats, advanced stats, win probability stats, ratio stats, baserunning stats, situational stats, and stats in various pitch counts.

Read the rest of this entry

Thanks to the tireless efforts of SABR, we have recently added a new Major League baseball player to our database. However, you won't find this player on our list of recent debuts. That's because this "new" player was actually a player in the 1884 Union Association.

Read the rest of this entry

This article assumes a lot of prior knowledge about the discussion of Wins Above Replacement, you can catch up here

• How Baseball-Reference.com calculates WAR and how others do:
  WAR-Wins Above Replacement Explanation
  WAR-wRAA explanation
  WAR-Position Players
  WAR-Pitchers
  WAR-Runs to Wins (this is especially relevant)
  Competing WARs Comparison Chart
• My Answer to “I Don’t Like How Complicated WAR Is and How It Is Constantly Changing.” “WAR is Like GDP for Baseball”
• Bill James: Judge and Altuve, and then
  Bill James: MVP Followup
  Joe Posnanski: More on WAR, following up on Judge and Altuve.
• Dave Cameron's reply to James: Putting WAR in Context: A Response to Bill James
• Jonathan Judge at Baseball Prospectus wrote an excellent piece on variability in WAR: Prospectus Feature: Bill James vs. The Noise
• Bill James and I discuss on twitter what I think is the crux of the matter
• Rany Jazayerli on how WAR should handle luck

First off, none of us are here without Bill James. We are all at our very best merely Chaucer or Joyce to his Shakespeare. All sabermetrics predating him flowed into his work and all sabermetrics after him carries echoes of his work.

To the discussion at hand.
Read the rest of this entry

We're happy to announce that we've added a page that should answer one of our most frequently asked questions.

No, we haven't penned a detailed description of why we hate your favorite team (yet).

Rather, we've added a page with every no-hitter and perfect game in MLB history. You'll find the list is sortable, contains a leaderboard and also has a separate table for the 11 combined no-nos (where the no-hitter was a combined effort).

Read the rest of this entry

On Twitter, I've noticed one question come up over and over again:

https://twitter.com/4rest4rest4rest/status/897972938195976192

Read the rest of this entry

With tonight's World Series Game 7, we thought we'd post quick links to Play Index searches showing every championship round Game 7 in MLB, NBA and NHL history. The lists are searches for home teams in Game 7s, sorted by date. If you click the date, you can see the box score for the game (when available). Enjoy!
Read the rest of this entry

Sports Reference LLC is searching for a data developer to join our current group of seven employees for work on our group of sites: Baseball-Reference.com, Basketball-Reference.com, Pro-Football-Reference.com, Hockey-Reference.com, and Sports-Reference College Football, College Basketball, and (someday) FBref.com.

If you are advertising the position, please use this url: https://www.sports-reference.com/data_dev.html

View the Job Ad: Data Developer Job at Sports Reference