Find some cool statistics and charts about baseball players on the Internet.
If you have a quick question about baseball (such as, “What was Reggie Jackson’s batting average in 1977?”), some great web sites out there can help you. Even if you have the data in other places (I have more than 2 GB worth of baseball databases on my computer and a dozen phonebook-size statistics books), you might still want to look up player statistics on the Web.
There are many good web sites for finding statistics on current players. Here are a few of my favorites:
- Major League Baseball
The best place to start is MLB.com (http://www.mlb.com), the official web site of Major League Baseball. Here you’ll find the “official” statistics (as tabulated by the Elias Sports Bureau) for all current and past players. MLB.com lets you look at spray charts (diagrams showing where every ball was hit by a player) for all major league players. If you’re curious why the defensive players shift positions for certain players, this can help answer your question.
- ESPN
Like most web sites, ESPN.com (http://www.espn.com) has current statistics on every baseball player. But ESPN adds a unique twist: it includes a number of sabermetric stats, including park factors and DIPS. (I explain a lot of these statistics in Chapter 5.) If you subscribe to the web site, you’ll get access to more content, including commentary from scouting agencies and a print subscription to ESPN The Magazine.
- Baseball Reference
The Baseball Reference web site (http://www.baseballreference.com) is one of my favorite sources for information. This web site is based on the data from the Baseball DataBank (see “Get a MySQL Database of Player and Team Statistics” [Hack #10] ), so you will find that its statistics are consistent with the stats in this book. This site includes all the basic, familiar statistics, plus some sabermetric stats like ERA+, OPS+, RF, and similarity scores. I like the straightforward user interface and the simple, text-format results. (According to this site, Reggie’s AVG was .286 in 1977, in case you were wondering.)
- Retrosheet
The best source for information on baseball games is http://www.retrosheet.org. You’ll find some statistics on players, but the best stuff here is the box scores going back 100 years, and play-by-play information going back almost 50 years.
It seems a little silly to list a set of blogs in a book, but many of these sites have been around for years and are very well produced. The best have evolved into subscription services, and they offer some pretty good content for the money.
- Baseball Prospectus
This is the most entertaining source for forecasts and commentary on baseball, with good resources for the fantasy player. The web site, http://www.baseballprospectus.com, has many good articles and statistics available free of charge and a lot more good stuff for subscribers.
- Baseball Graphs
One of my favorite independent web sites is http://www.baseballgraphs.com. This site presents groups of statistics graphically, looking at statistics in ways that you’ve never seen them before.
- Baseball Musings
Check out http://www.baseballmusings.com, the blog from David Pinto, the former lead researcher for ESPN’s Baseball Tonight. This is a great source of commentary from a really knowledgeable fan. In particular, look at the “Defensive Charts, Probabilistic” analysis.
- Thorn’s Blog
John Thorn wrote or edited some of the best books ever written about baseball, and he has a terrific blog at http://thornpricks.blogspot.com.
- Most Valuable Network
There is a great set of blogs at http://mostvaluablenetwork.com, including a few devoted to specific teams.
- Baseball Think Factory
You can find a really good web site for discussing baseball statistics at http://www.baseballthinkfactory.org.
- Tango on Baseball
Check out http://www.tangotiger.net, a site that provides a great collection of essays and analysis.
Tons of great baseball sites and analyses are available, and here are a few ways to discover new places for insights. A lot of fans frequently read and post to Usenet newsgroups like rec.sport.baseball and present their own analysis. You should check out http://groups.google.com if you want to find some of this stuff. Posters will often mention interesting places to explore.
A number of mailing lists for baseball fans also are available. The most active mailing list is probably SABR-L, which is open to SABR members. You will also find several newsgroups on Yahoo! Groups. These newsgroups and mailing lists are an interesting source for information in itself, but readers often explain where they find data for analysis. Try following their tips for both this and later chapters.
Another neat trick is to search for sites that link to ones you know you like, by using the link: command in Google. For example, to search for sites that link to Retrosheet, search for link: http://www.retrosheet.org.
Get Baseball Hacks now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
