Archive for the 'Tutorials' Category

In Andy's "Every starter has 2 or more hits" thread last night, Statboy asked the following question:

"Has there been a game where one team had no zeros in the box score (every player with at least one hit, run, and RBI)?"

While finding all of the games that meet this criteria is quite a challenge, there is a subset of these games that make an interesting PI exercise. The difficulty in a search like the one that Statboy is proposing is that generally we do not know how many players appeared in each game. Therefore, even if we find the games with the most players with at least one run, hit and rbi, there still can be many players who appeared in that game that did not meet the criteria. That being said,  it is possible to limit a PI game finder search to games in which there were only nine players, by searching for players who both started and finished a game.

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There seems to be a recent  increase in the number of how to questions regarding PI usage. Since there are constantly new users, I thought that it might be good to have a single place for people to posts questions and answers regarding PI searches. This way people can read up on old questions and the answers to new questions won't  risk being lost in the comments of another post.

I can't stick this to the top of any page or even tag it, but a search for "PI help"  should help find this thread. If comments on the thread ever closes, please send me an email and I'll reopen it. You can find my contact information (along with all the other bloggers) on the right bar of this page.

Anyway, here is the thread. Ask away.

As the last installment of this series, here are a few more things you can do with Baseball-Reference's draft search tool:

• Search by Player Name - For instance, where was Ken Griffey (Sr. or Jr.) drafted? ... Or how about Jim Rice?
• Search by School Drafted From - This can apply to Colleges, High Schools, or States

Picking up where yesterday's post left off, here are some more features of Baseball-Reference's draft search tool:

• Search by Type of School Drafted From - For instance: JuCo 1st-rounders in 2008 ... 1st Overall Picks from 4-year colleges ... High Schoolers drafted by the A's in the 1st round ... etc.
• Search by Position and Draft Round - 3rd Basemen drafted in the 2nd round ... 7th-round Pitchers ... Catchers taken in the 1st round of the January-phase draft ... etc.
• Expansion Drafts - 1997 ... 1976 ... 1961 ... etc.

In honor of the 2010 MLB Amateur Draft starting today, here are some things you can do with Baseball-Reference's Draft Search Tool:

• Search by Overall Pick# - For instance: Every #1 overall pick in the June draft ... Every #50 pick ... #2 picks in the (now-defunct) January draft ... Top picks in the June secondary phase draft ... etc.
• Search by Round and Year - 2007 1st-round picks ... 1997 5th-rounders ... the 3rd round of the 1976 June secondary draft ... etc.
• Search by Franchise and Year - All Nationals picks in 2009 ... 2000 Braves picks ... 1972 Red Sox January picks ... etc.
• Search by Franchise and Round - Yankees 4th-round picks ... Giants second-rounders ... January-phase 1st-rounders by Oakland ... etc.
• Search by Position and Year - All Catchers drafted in 2009 ... OF drafted in 1991 ... SS drafted in 1969 ... 1974 January-phase Pitchers ... etc.

(Note: All of the data in this post was obtained from the new Baseball-Reference Fielding Stats.)

Sometimes a player has a season so magnificent that it becomes truly legendary. A batting example would be Babe Ruth's 1920, when he had more home runs by himself than any other team in the American League. For basestealers, Rickey Henderson's 130-steal 1982 campaign has gone down in history as the most prolific in modern history. And for pitchers, you have Pedro Martinez's 2000, when he posted a 1.74 ERA in a league where the average was 4.91. All of these feats have been justifiably lionized over the years for their brilliance, but where's the love for the greatest fielding performance of the postwar era?

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(Note: All of the data in this post was obtained from the new Baseball-Reference Fielding Stats.)

A month and a half into the 2010 season, the L.A. Dodgers' defense has been one of the biggest disappointments in baseball. Among NL teams, they current rank a distant last in both Fielding +/- and TotalZone Runs Above Average, and they're quite a bit below average in Defensive Efficiency as well:

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Today, I show you how to use the Win Probability graphs in box scores:

If you haven't had a chance to look at it yet, the Bio section of the site (which is tucked away under the "more [+]" drop-down menu) got a little bigger when we updated the site last week.

In case you're unfamiliar, on that page we break down every player by their place of birth, and using the links at the top of the page, you can sort the batting, pitching, and managing totals for those born in every U.S. state and every country. You can also see more detailed breakdowns for each state/foreign country/territory, including a sortable list of every player born there and his career MLB stats.

In addition, we still provide the same tools/breakdowns for each player's place of death -- and since you may have noticed that deceased MLB players now have burial data on their profile pages, we've also added a new section to the Bio page that gives the breakdowns described above for players based on their place of burial. So if you ever wanted to know which players were laid to rest in Wyoming (hint: there's only 4 of them), this is the feature for you.

Also, I should note that the death and burial data is not complete, so if you come across someone with missing data and you have citable documentation regarding their correct info, please let us know via email.

(See more Baseball-Reference Tutorials here.)

We get a lot of requests for fielding leaderboards, but not many people realize they can actually create their own using tools we already have on the site. With that in mind, today we're going to take a look at some questions you can answer using the fielding stats pages we have for each league.

To get to a fielding stats page, first start at a league's main page. Underneath the banner ad, there's a navbar with tabs that will drop down to give you more options when you roll your mouse over them (denoted by "[+]"). One of them is for fielding, so roll over "Fielding [+]" and click on "Standard Fielding". This page has traditional fielding stats for every team and player in the league across all positions, and you can sort the tables by clicking on the header of the column you want to order the teams/players by. If you want to see a breakdown of games by position for the league, mouse over Fielding [+] again and click "Appearances". And if you want to break down player and team fielding stats by position, mouse over Fielding [+], then click the position you'd like to see. There you'll find traditional stats again, but also advanced categories that use play-by-play to dig into a deeper level of detail.

Now that you're armed with this knowledge, here's a quick quiz to test your ability to find specific pieces of information on the fielding pages:

(See more Baseball-Reference Tutorials here.)