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2023 MLB Rule Changes Page Live on Baseball Reference

20th April 2023

Exciting news! We've created a new page for 2023 on Baseball Reference to track the impact of the rule changes that MLB implemented for this season.

As a baseball fan, you're likely aware that every plate appearance now includes a pitch clock and limits on timeouts to keep things moving, the bases are slightly larger to encourage more base stealing, and the shift has been banned to create more balls in play.

But are these changes having the designed impact? That's what this new page is designed to show. For example, with pace of play, here's a look at some of the stats on game time, baserunning, and the shift ban, as of today. Read the rest of this entry

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Additional Baseball Reference Updates from Seamheads

13th April 2023

Last month we added updated coverage of Negro major leagues from Seamheads to Baseball Reference. A summary of those additions can be found here. We have recently added some other new data from Seamheads featuring competitions from outside of the seven established major Negro Leagues, which we will highlight below.

Read the rest of this entry

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Updated Play-By-Play Data on Baseball Reference

30th March 2023

We have run an update on our data from our friends at Retrosheet on Baseball Reference. Retrosheet, which provides box scores and play-by-play covering most of AL/NL history, has significantly expanded the availability of play-by-play for the 1921, 1922 and 1923 seasons, and, for the first time, added play-by-play for 1914 season. Thanks to their efforts, we now have play-by-play for 65.41% of 1914 games (53% in the AL and 79% in the NL), 97.72% of 1921 games, 97.35% of 1922 games and 93.35% of 1923 games. Additionally, 38 other seasons between 1917 and 1971 have seen smaller improvements in play-by-play coverage. This is our first play-by-play for the 1914 season, so many of our statistical tables that need play-by-play in order to be calculated (win probability, situational batting/pitching, base-running/miscellaneous, batting against, etc) will now have rows for 1914 for the first time. The 1921-23 seasons previously had ~80% coverage and are now very nearly complete.

Check out our full play-by-play data coverage map.

The additional play-by-play is also available in Stathead. For example, we now have 9 walk-off home runs from 1914. Two of those were hit by Gavvy Cravath of the Philadelphia Phillies. On Cravath’s Home Run Log, you can see we now have play-by-play data (and therefore win probability added) for 18 of his league-leading 19 home runs. The most important of these 18 home runs (by WPA) was his walk-off home run on June 11 against the Reds. In the bottom of the ninth with two outs and the bases empty, he ended the game with a deep blast to center off Earl Yingling. It had a WPA of .468.

The one Cravath home run from 1914 that we’re missing (August 4) was also a walk-off home run. We know this thanks to the Tattersall/McConnell Home Run Log, a database of all homers hit in the major leagues since 1876. This third walk-off home run is not in the Event Finder because we do not have any other events for that game.

Cravath’s season WPA is 4.3, tops in the NL and second in the majors to Eddie Collins’ 4.7. On the pitching side, Jeff Pfeffer of the Brooklyn Robins leads the way at 6.4. You can check out the complete WPA stats for the AL and NL. These are subject to change as play-by-play for more games is added.

This new data, along with our recent Seamheads update, will also allow us to re-run our WAR numbers, so keep an eye out for that update this week.

Posted in Announcement, Baseball-Reference.com, Data | 1 Comment »

Updated Negro Leagues Data on Baseball Reference

28th March 2023

Thanks to our partnership with the Seamheads Negro League database, we have released our second annual update of the dataset. Our last update, in April of 2022, was covered in this blog post. Like last year, this update includes thousands of incremental improvements. The most significant new data revolves around expanded statistics for the 1940 and 1941 seasons in the Negro American League and the Negro National League II. Additionally, lots of new biographical data has been added. Here's a rundown of some of the improvements Baseball Reference users will now see:

Read the rest of this entry

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Changes to OBP, OPS in 1920s & 1930s

31st January 2023

From time to time Baseball-Reference receives updates to the historical record from trusted sources. These are transmitted to us via the Chadwick Baseball Bureau, which obtains updates from the legendary sports researcher Pete Palmer.

Generally these sorts of updates are most numerous when our friends at Retrosheet release new seasons worth of data. However, earlier this month we loaded a smaller update that deserves a mention and some further reflection on our part on how to best proceed.
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Update to Historical Name Presentations on Baseball Reference

16th December 2022

In April of 2021, we announced a series of changes to player name presentations on Baseball Reference and Pro Football Reference in which we changed the main name presentation for many historical players who had been tagged with offensive nicknames decades ago. When we completed that task, we hinted that we'd perform similar work with less offensive nicknames, as well. Read the rest of this entry

Posted in Announcement, Baseball-Reference.com, Data, History | 1 Comment »

New Bot Filtering and Content Delivery Network for Sports Reference Sites

7th October 2022

Our devops department finished our move from AWS's Cloudfront Content Delivery Network (CDN) to Cloudflare's CDN this week. This will be undecipherable technical jargon to most of you, so I'll explain what it means.

When you request a page or file from the site, the request first goes to a CDN that is located geographically close to you and if a neighbor of yours (within several hundred miles) has requested the page earlier in the day, you'll get a cached copy of that page much faster than you would otherwise. If your neighbors are lame and don't use our site or just haven't visited that page, then the request will be passed on to our servers and we'll send you the page.

This has many advantages in that it takes a load off our servers and also makes things faster in general for our users the more the sites are used.

Cloudflare also includes bot filtering with this offering. It actively searches for badly behaved bots and proactively blocks them from our site. We are now utilizing this feature because we get scraped. A LOT. And if your bot is badly behaved then we don't want you impacting the performance of the site for our other users. We've gotten a number of emails around this this week as people who have been scraping us have found themselves blocked.

As of today, this filtering will remain in place for our:

  • Soccer/Football
  • Basketball
  • Hockey
  • College sites

We are turning off the active bot filtering on our baseball and pro football sites at this time. We will re-enable bot filtering the week after the end of their respective seasons.

What is a well-behaved bot? Please see our Data Use page and our Bot Traffic page for guidance. Note that if you are blocked by our servers, the blocks reset after 24 hours, so with some more polite settings on your bot you may be able to try again the next day.

We can not provide an API (per our data licensing agreements), and you should not view as a data provider (on par with SportRadar or Genius Sports). This is a role that we do not and can not support with company resources.

Posted in Announcement, Baseball-Reference.com, Basketball-Reference.com, CBB at Sports Reference, CFB at Sports Reference, Data, expire120d, FBref, Hockey-Reference.com, Pro-Football-Reference.com, Stathead | Comments Off on New Bot Filtering and Content Delivery Network for Sports Reference Sites

Postseason Stats Added to Stathead Baseball’s Team Season Finder!

18th August 2022

Exciting news! We've released a cool update to the Team Season Finder on Stathead Baseball. This tool allows you to look up team stats over a single season or multiple season. And now, it lets you search for Postseason stats too! Read the rest of this entry

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New World Series Appearances Data Update

20th July 2022

By Greg Harvey

Using the Elias Book of Baseball Records, we have updated all World Series banners from 1903 to 2021 to include players on the WS roster who did not appear in that season’s WS.

There are 822 occurrences of a player being on the World Series roster without appearing, with 719 of those belonging to distinct players. Read the rest of this entry

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Exciting Update to the Team Game Finder on Stathead Baseball

13th July 2022

We've rolled out a new update to Stathead Baseball, giving the Team Game Finder some cool new features.

The most exciting new addition to the Team Game Finder its a set of new search types that give you the ability to answer more questions than ever before. As with the Player Game Finder, we've added the option to search for combined statlines from all the games that match your search. You can now look up team stats in home or away games, wins or losses, and much more.

We've also added a search type that gives you the option to look for the most matching games from multiple seasons. Previously, you only had the option to look up matching games from a single season.

Want to give it a try? Here are some questions to get you started:
What team had the most road HRs in a season?
What team has the most all-time road wins?

Lastly, the new upgrade brings smoother performance and faster searching to the tool, meaning it's never been easier to answer your questions about team game stats. If you're a Stathead subscriber who hasn't tried to the Team Game Finder, give it a look. And if you've never tried Stathead, sign up today and your first month is on us!

Posted in Announcement, Baseball-Reference.com, Stathead | Comments Off on Exciting Update to the Team Game Finder on Stathead Baseball