Subscribe to the Play Index!
Posted by Neil Paine on September 13, 2010
It's the final month of the season, and that means it's time for me to share with you some features of the Play Index (PI), a set of research tools that allow you to create customizable queries on our database, save the results, and share them with others. Using the PI, you can:
- Search full-season or multi-year totals to find your own custom leaderboards - Look at the entire history of baseball from 1871-2010 with every year, team, and position available, or filter the results in a vast number of ways: by specific years, by age, by first six seasons or last ten seasons, by American League only, by Cubs only, by switch-hitters, by catchers, by outfielder or infielder, by year of debut, but active or retired, by Hall of Famer, by height and weight, by living or deceased, or by a range of common statistical categories. Then sort the results by any common statistic, by the teams with the most players matching that category, by players with the most seasons matching that category, or by most recent, youngest, oldest, final year, or year of debut, and others.
- Search player game totals - Filtering on any of a dozen or more choices, search for games on a single player level, or on any batter from 1920-2010, or on any pitcher. The same can be done for Team Batting or Team Pitching Totals.
- Search player games looking for the most consecutive games matching a particular set of criteria - This can be done either on a single player level or on any batter in the last ninety years or on any pitcher. The same can be done for Team Batting or Team Pitching Streaks.
- Search the records of a specific player - Output a detailed summary and play-by-play list of all events of a specific type from a single year or an entire career. For example, you can see all of Harmon Killebrew's triples or even his outs to the second baseman.
- Search Batter vs. Pitcher Matchups - This tool presents a complete sortable list of batter or pitcher with totals for every opponent they faced by career or by year. Clicking on the player's name will lead you to a detailed output of their head-to-head plate appearances.
- ...And more!
Personal Subscriptions to the Play Index cost $36 for a year, $6 for a month, or $2 for 24 hours. Subscriptions may only be used by a single user, and there are discounts for users sponsoring at least $35 in pages.
Organizational Subscriptions can be set up for either an unlimited number of users ($600/year, this includes three hours of custom programming and reporting to be used at your discretion), or for up to five users ($125/year, this includes one hour of custom programming and reporting to be used at your discretion).
There are Two Steps to Subscribe to the Play Index:
- Login to or create a Sports-Reference.com account (the same account used to sponsor pages).
- Already logged in (or just created an account)? Go to our subscription page to sign up.
Our Always-Available Free Trial: Non-subscribers can use the PI's features as much as you like. However, your outputs will be restricted to a limited number of results.
The Play Index comes with a money back guarantee. We will gladly return the unused portion of any Play Index Subscription should you be dissatisfied with the Play Index.
So go ahead, give the Play Index a try -- we're confident that once you start using it, you'll wonder how you ever got along without it.
September 13th, 2010 at 5:56 pm
What follows is the beginning of a message I posted yesterday in the Jose DeLeon entry that has now gone to the 2nd page. It's in comment 24 of 24, probably posted just before the entry went to page 2 and thus off the radar of most people here. In case even the administrators missed it, I hope you don't mind if I repost this portion here, since it is an administrative matter, and this is an administrative entry. If it is not appropriate, please feel free to delete it. Thanks.
I want to say something off-topic - I hang out at an online forum on a completely different subject where people are required to register to be able to post. New messages are pre-populated with our registered email addresses, but we are allowed to blank them out (but not allowed to blank out our user names) before messages are posted. I appreciate that we are no longer required to register here, and I understand why we still need to supply a name and email address each time. This is made simpler by the fact that my name and email are "remembered" (probably due to cookies) each time, so they are still pre-populated for me.
But this is both good and bad news. Sometimes, before I start my message, I forget that I'm not on that other site, and I blank out the pre-populated email address here. Once I finish my message and hit the Post button, though, I go to an error page that tells me I didn't supply the required material. This would be an OK reminder, except that, when I hit the Back button to go put it in, MY MESSAGE IS GONE!
This has happened to me twice now, including after I posted a message in this topic [the Jose DeLeon entry] on the day the blog entry was made, September 9. Can something be done here to "save" already-composed messages so that if we forget to put in a required field, we can have the whole message back? Or is forgetting to enter one of these fields such a bad transgression that it is deemed to be a suitable punishment to make the person start the message all over again?
September 14th, 2010 at 12:10 am
Where's the "Mark for Spam" button when you need it?
September 14th, 2010 at 1:33 am
I've been meaning to mention this a couple of times when I see the Subscribe to the Play Index Topic.
On Point 2: Search player game totals there is a (excluding 1940-1951)
it's repeated again on:
Point 3: Search player games looking for the most consecutive games matching a particular set of criteria
there is a (excluding 1940-1951)
I figure you would have fixed this by now.
Or does the exclusion still exist for these 2 points???
September 14th, 2010 at 8:39 am
Re: #3 - No, it was an oversight on my part when it came to the template. The PI now covers all 90 years, including 1940-51.
September 14th, 2010 at 5:42 pm
@2 - I am sorry to have posted what you consider to be "Spam". Most of us who post here do not have topic-starting privileges, so if we want to post something that is close to relevant but still off-topic, we need to find someplace to put in this comment where it won't stray too much from the intended subject matter. I did invite the Administrators to delete my comment if they considered it to be off-topic. I see that, since I posted mine (and you posted your response), Neil Paine has posted in response to something else in the comments for this entry. He has topic-starting privileges here, although I don't know if that gives him the capability to delete comments. If so, he chose to leave my comment alone.
I realize that I should have taken my issue to the "Found a bug or have a suggestion?" page here, and I will probably still do that. But one reason I posted it in the public forum where I put it is so that if others have also fallen victim to it, they can also see that they are not the only ones.
I will try to stay on topic and, if I have any more comments regarding the Administrative aspects of this blog, I'll take them to the "Found a bug or have a suggestion?" page. Again, I'm sorry that you chose to think of my comments here as Spam.
September 14th, 2010 at 7:01 pm
@ 5 DoubleDiamond:
The post that @2 Jeff referred to was an "actual Spam".
Jeff's post was actually @3 but the Original @2 was Deleted moving the following posts up 1 number.
It has been deleted, but to prevent confusion, the Web Master should have left the Number @2 up and just mentioned it was deleted as Spam (etc.), rather than leaving you to believe your Post @1 was Spam.
As you can see your actual post is still up in it's rightful position @1.
September 14th, 2010 at 7:35 pm
Also as an additional note:
The Spammer was able to register his "Screen Name" with BB-Ref as a Clickable Link:
Thus ("I guess"), they had to delete the whole post rather than just deleting the text like they do on other deletions where they just add a Note that the Post was Deleted.
September 15th, 2010 at 7:17 am
Mike Gaber, thanks for the explanation. Right after I posted my second comment, I did go to the "Found a bug or have a suggestion?" and reported the problem I had, even though I knew that the time I took to do this would make me a few minutes late for an appointment.