The Where's Where Of Baseball Stats

Tuesday, February 03 2004 @ 07:39 AM EST

Updated 03-15-05: Repaired all outdated links.

This article is a review of web sites offering Major League Baseball player statistics in the form of individual player cards. Fifteen distinct sites are compared on the basis of which stats are presented and what features they include (such as split stats, minor league stats, transaction information). Individual site summaries give a brief overview of what is notable and unique about each site.

Table 1 – Quick Reference Guide

	1	2	3
Historical	Baseball-Reference	Retrosheet	Baseball Prospectus
Minors	The Baseball Cube	Sports Forecaster	Baseball America
Sabermetrics	Baseball Prospectus	Baseball-Reference	ESPN
Salaries	Dugout Dollars	Baseball Almanac	Baseball-Reference
Splits	ESPN	Bigleaguers.com	Retrosheet
Transactions	Baseball-Reference	Sports Forecaster	Retrosheet

Note: Baseball America and Dugout Dollars are not included in the site summaries as they do not offer Major League player cards.


Individual Site Summaries

Baseball Almanac
It won’t win any beauty pageants, but Baseball Almanac contains a valuable selection of information, ranging from the trivial (players’ nicknames, uniform numbers, All-Star stats) to the sabermetric (AB/HR, K/9, ZR). This is a site dedicated to the history of the game, and indeed the biggest selling point here is that all historical players are included, with the same level of statistical detail as current Major Leaguers. The Almanac is also the only site reviewed to contain any pre-1985 salary info. The index is bad enough to note as a negative, and stats are not updated during the season.

Another interesting feature of the site is a tool called the Statmaster, which will give you a chart showing stats of your choice for any team in history. Teams available are not just those currently in the American and National leagues, but also defunct Major League teams and teams from the Union Association, the Players League, the Federal League, and the American Association.

The Baseball Cube
The source for the numbers on (almost) every minor league baseball player in the known universe emanates from Montreal: The Baseball Cube. This site is rarely stumped, and includes stats all the way down to such levels as US college ball and the Dominican Summer League. But the Cube is by no means one-dimensional. It also includes historical players, a good selection of useful info (salary histories back to 1985, including MLB rank if greater than 100, playoff stats), and notable trivia (All-Star and spring stats, career teammates for each player). There are a few warts on the Cube, specifically an inordinate amount of intrusive advertising, page load failures, and server sluggishness. Don’t blame me; I’m the proud new sponsor of Roy Halladay’s page.


Baseball Prospectus
Baseball Prospectus does not offer split stats, game logs, batter vs. pitcher info, or any biographical information at all besides birth date. What it does provide is a tremendous number of unique advanced measures and translated statistics, and this makes it an indispensable player card site. To simply list the various stats here would be a meaningless gobbeldy-gook of acronyms to most readers, and to explain them all properly would be a huge article in itself. Instead, I’ll simply point to the Baseball Prospectus Statistics Glossary.

While BP does not have cards for minor league players, it does have Minor League Equivalent Averages, extremely useful for comparing prospects across different levels and leagues. This is also one of a very few sites on the internet to provide park effect information.

Baseball-Reference
Baseball-Reference does what it does extremely well. If you want seasonal breakdowns, scouting reports, minor league stats, or pretty graphics, keep moving. If you want a comprehensive reference guide to players past and present without any superfluous fluff, bookmark this site immediately. For quick context, B-R supplies league averages of key rate stats for every year of a player’s career. For more perspective, each player has lists of most similar players (as told by Similarity Scores). Appearances on leader boards are covered in great detail, and this is put in context as well, comparing how a player’s career stacks up next to an average Hall of Famer. The transaction log is excellent, and salary history is given back to 1985. All this without any pushy advertising. Impressive. The only significant negative point here is that stats are updated on a yearly basis, rather than continuously through the season.

Bigleaguers.com (Yahoo! Sports)
In typical fashion, Yahoo! does a very solid job of providing player stats, though the Bigleaguers.com site. It’s not a site for advanced metrics or even a wide array of counting stats, but it does break down the stats with the best of them. By that, I mean the splits, game logs, and especially the Batter vs. Pitcher info are excellent. The layout is refreshingly simple, and the site servers are always speedy.

CBS SportsLine
CBS Sportsline provides one of the better live game trackers, but when it comes to player cards it’s a case of "Always the bridesmaid, never the bride", with other sites like ESPN and SI always a step ahead. I do exaggerate a little, of course; postseason stats for some players are given, which isn’t true of many sites, but the fact that it’s "some" drastically reduces the amount of credit I’m willing to give for this. If you know what a Relief Pitcher Failure is you’re a step ahead of me, and this site is the only place you can look them up.

ESPN
When it comes to net surfing, familiarity breeds comfort. I’ve been checking player stats at ESPN as long as I can remember there being player cards anywhere, and I rate their cards among the very best. The clean layout is easy to navigate, and the selection of stats is one of the most comprehensive on the net. ESPN may be the most popular sports site in the world, but it doesn’t cater to Joe Fan at the expense of Jack Sabermetrician. Included in the stats are such goodies as Isolated Power, Secondary Average, pitching game scores, and Zone Rating. You want a microscope? ESPN has game logs for each of the last three years, and for 2003 they include links to the recap, box score, play-by-play log, and GameCast for each game. The player cards for historical players stick to basic season totals, but they can be handy for quick reference. Beyond the player cards, ESPN also excels in providing sortable stats and team salary listings. The one drawback of the enormous popularity of the site is that the servers can be sluggish at times.

FOXSports
FOXSports claims the title of Replacement-level player card site. It offers a decent collection of stats, and handy standard features such as split stats and game logs, but nothing to really warrant a bookmark. One neat feature is that rows in tables become highlighted as the mouse pointer moves over them. Each player card has a link for fielding stats, but it seems they’re all missing at the moment.

MLB.com
In a way, the player cards on MLB.com are a microcosm of MLB as a whole. If you’re reading this you probably agree that Major League Baseball is a great product, in spite of the dolts who run it. Similarly, MLB.com offers some really cool features in the player cards, but whoever runs the show doesn’t have the foggiest notion about how to present them. This is easily the most convoluted site to navigate, confusing to a newcomer and very frustrating even after you’ve figured it out. For example, there are at least three distinct search tools. The one I’ve linked in the title of this section is the best for current players; but if you want historical players you need this one; yet another, the easiest one to find, is the least useful. It lands you at a player’s biography, where there is a stats tab which gives a spartan collection of stats that are text based, meaning they cannot be manipulated even if you figure out how to get them into your favourite spreadsheet program. Confused yet? Once you get to the useful stats, you may think that the stat selection is limited. It is, at first glance, but then you may notice the "Next Stats" links, which do indeed flip over to more stats; hope you didn’t want to see a player’s complete stat line all at once, that takes three pages for a pitcher.

But enough ranting about navigation, on to the really cool features:

• The aforementioned player bios are quite extensive for veteran players, and some minor leaguers are included.
  
• Split stats can be "doubled"; for instance, MLB.com can tell you that Roy Halladay was 1-4 with a 5.56 ERA in his five starts on the road last August.
  
• Team rosters can be perused in the form of a depth chart, laid out as a baseball field.
  
• A graphical hit chart is given for hitters, covering the past 5 years.
  
• The game log has a link for each game to the boxscore, recaps from both teams perspectives, and Gameday game webcast.

• The Baseball Cube: AB/BB, K/BB, PA/G, XBH%
  
• Baseball-Reference: RC, LG BA, LG OBP, LG SLG, LG OPS, OPS+ (OPS normalized for both park and league)
  
• ESPN: BB/PA, BB/SO, IsoP (Isolated power: SLG – AVG), SecA (Secondary average: [TB – H + BB + SB – CS]/AB), PSN (Power speed number: [2 x HR x SB]/[HR + SB])

• Baseball America, the biggest name in minor league baseball and the best source for current minor league stats, including fall and winter leagues
  
• Dugout Dollars, the best site I know of for current player contract info. MLB Contracts was also very good, but it appears to have been abandoned.
  
• Baseball Graphs, the only site I know of that provides Win Shares
  
• Dougstats.com, where a seasons raw numbers are updated daily, ready to be pulled down and manipulated in a spreadsheet. Doug also supplies the raw numbers for complete seasons back to 1994.
  
• The Baseball Archive’s Lahman database, raw statistics from 1871 to 2003, downloadable for manipulation in relational database software such as Microsoft Access

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