Updated 03-15-05: Repaired all outdated links.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
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:
MSNBC Sports
If Microsoft has plans to monopolize the baseball player card business, they haven’t started to implement them yet. The one thing this site does quite well is fielding stats, breaking them down by position for each player and providing league averages for fielding percentage, range factor, and catcher’s caught stealing percentage. Overall, this is the weakest in site in the study group.
Retrosheet
Retrosheet is a non-profit organization, a group of volunteers dedicated to computerizing play by play accounts of as many pre-1984 major league games as possible. The cards here are exceptionally useful for research purposes. Other sites can provide stats for historical players, but only Retrosheet offers splits for any year prior to 1987, and the oldest player game logs you’ll find elsewhere are from the 2001 season. The years currently available here are 1972 to 1992, with some earlier years available for some players; I assume, given the nature of the site, that this is a work-in-progress. Both the splits and the game logs are also supplied for postseason and All-Star games. Oh yeah, and there are fielding game logs too. No kidding. The navigation is recently much improved, now the thing I’d most like to see here is the 2003 season stats.
The Roto Times
As you might expect from the site’s name, the information given here is primarily useful for fantasy ball purposes. This means projections for next season, latest notes on injuries and transactions and the like, and split stats limited to how a player has performed against each opposing team. A player comparison tool can be used to display the stats for multiple players on a single page.
This site’s cards are re-produced verbatim at USA TODAY.
The Sports Forecaster
Note: The Sports Forecaster is licensed as an add-on to other sites. Current customers that I know of are WayMoreSports (Toronto Star), TSN, and The Score. These sites are not separated in this discussion as they all carry the same content. (Curiously, it’s the Star player pages that tend to get linked through this and other Blue Jay sites, despite fact that TSN does a significantly better job than the others of presenting the data in a nice clean format.)
The Sports Forecaster sites contain a smallish selection of stats, but they more than compensate for that by including minor league numbers for all big league players and a small selection of those yet to taste major league coffee. (I haven’t determined what rhyme or reason dictates which minor leaguers are included.) Another incentive to visit a Sports Forecaster site near you is the unparalleled logs of trades, awards, and injuries. The scouting reports are concise, which is a good thing, except when concise means "non-existent", as is the case for some younger players. The game logs are not as informative as most, but they do include a useful unique feature: a few words describing what type of ailment caused a player to miss a particular game.
Sports Illustrated
Sports Illustrated could really benefit from some sort of marketing campaign for their player cards. I’d rate the value of their offering just a touch below ESPN overall, but while ESPN is easily the most-linked site for player cards, SI is pretty much unknown. The selection of stats is quite good, as are the splits and the game logs. The batter versus pitcher info is second only to Bigleaguers.com (granted, it’s a fairly distant second). The info for historical players is very good. If you’re all about the long ball, SI is a great place to get your fix; for the current season, every home run is broken down for both hitters and pitchers, including date, opponent, inning, distance, and which field it was hit to.
Sportsnet
I suppose it’s a good thing, from the perspective of being a Jays fan, that Rogers Communications does a far better job owning & operating a baseball team than it does in providing baseball player stats. There is no direct link to their player cards; using the link I’ve provided, you have to point to ‘MLB’, then pick ‘Stats’ from the Flash menu, and the player index will come up in one of those annoying pop-up windows that don’t have the normal browser navigation buttons. That hassle is not rewarded, as the selection of stats is mediocre and features like game logs and split stats are non-existent.
I did find something positive to say about this site, although it’s not a feature of the player cards. Included in the aforementioned annoying stats pop-up are a number of interesting features, and after a brief learning curve they can be navigated fairly easily. Just one example is a ‘League Stats’ section, wherein you can quickly look up various splits for either league for each year back to 1989. For instance, in 1996, National League third sackers hit .268/.332/.432. Meanwhile, the average American League pitching staff gave up 195 home runs, 25 of them in "Close & Late" situations.
Site Feature And Stat Comparisons
Table 2, below, rates each of the sites on a variety of features. Ratings range from 1 (Bad) to 5 (Good), with a dash indicating that the feature is not offered. All rankings are relative; for example, all of these sites can be navigated with some ease after a brief learning curve, but two are rated "1" simply because they are relatively that much less intuitive and less direct than the others.
Table 2 – Feature Comparison Chart
Note: Copy & Paste, in Table 2 above, refers to the relative ease with which data can be transferred to Excel and manipulated.
Tables 3, 4, and 5 detail the exact stats provided by each site. Only the most obscure acronyms are explained in the table footnotes; I recommend the glossaries at ESPN and Baseball-Reference (batting, pitching, fielding) if you are unfamiliar with any others. As noted in the site summary, Baseball Prospectus contains a wealth of unique batting, pitching, and fielding measures. These are not included in the tables below and cannot be quickly explained: the Baseball Prospectus Statistics Glossary is recommended.
The following batting statistics are available across the board, and as such are not included in Table 3: G, AB, R, H, 2B, 3B, HR, RBI, BB, K, SB, CS, AVG, OBP, SLG.
Table 3 - Batting Stats By Site
A - Current season only
The Baseball Cube, Baseball-Reference, and ESPN all provide a number of unique batting stats which are not included in Table 3 above. These are as follows:
The following pitching statistics are available across the board, and as such are not included in Table 4: G, GS, CG, IP, H, R, ER, HR, BB, K, W, L, SV, ERA.
Table 4 - Pitching Stats By Site
A - ERA+ is ERA normalized for both park and league
B - G/F is ground ball to fly ball ratio
C - GF is games finished
D - Current season only
E - RPF is Relief Pitcher Failures
F - Career only
G - RS is total Run Support
ESPN provides a number of unique pitching stats which are not included in Table 4 above: #P/PA, #P/GS, 2B, 3B, RBI, IR (Inherited runners), IS (Inherited runners scored).
Table 5 - Fielding Stats By Site
A – Catcher’s ERA
B – 2000 season and on
C - Triple plays
Other Resources
This article, being devoted to player cards, has not detailed the abundance of other useful information available on all of these sites. Further, a number of invaluable sites have not been discussed as they do not offer player cards. To quickly name just a few:
Disclaimer: The internet is a big moving target. The big part means that I may have missed sites that really should have been included. The moving part means that some of the details here may already be outdated. Feel free to let me know about any errors or omissions, either by e-mail or in the comments section.
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.
MSNBC Sports
If Microsoft has plans to monopolize the baseball player card business, they haven’t started to implement them yet. The one thing this site does quite well is fielding stats, breaking them down by position for each player and providing league averages for fielding percentage, range factor, and catcher’s caught stealing percentage. Overall, this is the weakest in site in the study group.
Retrosheet
Retrosheet is a non-profit organization, a group of volunteers dedicated to computerizing play by play accounts of as many pre-1984 major league games as possible. The cards here are exceptionally useful for research purposes. Other sites can provide stats for historical players, but only Retrosheet offers splits for any year prior to 1987, and the oldest player game logs you’ll find elsewhere are from the 2001 season. The years currently available here are 1972 to 1992, with some earlier years available for some players; I assume, given the nature of the site, that this is a work-in-progress. Both the splits and the game logs are also supplied for postseason and All-Star games. Oh yeah, and there are fielding game logs too. No kidding. The navigation is recently much improved, now the thing I’d most like to see here is the 2003 season stats.
The Roto Times
As you might expect from the site’s name, the information given here is primarily useful for fantasy ball purposes. This means projections for next season, latest notes on injuries and transactions and the like, and split stats limited to how a player has performed against each opposing team. A player comparison tool can be used to display the stats for multiple players on a single page.
This site’s cards are re-produced verbatim at USA TODAY.
The Sports Forecaster
Note: The Sports Forecaster is licensed as an add-on to other sites. Current customers that I know of are WayMoreSports (Toronto Star), TSN, and The Score. These sites are not separated in this discussion as they all carry the same content. (Curiously, it’s the Star player pages that tend to get linked through this and other Blue Jay sites, despite fact that TSN does a significantly better job than the others of presenting the data in a nice clean format.)
The Sports Forecaster sites contain a smallish selection of stats, but they more than compensate for that by including minor league numbers for all big league players and a small selection of those yet to taste major league coffee. (I haven’t determined what rhyme or reason dictates which minor leaguers are included.) Another incentive to visit a Sports Forecaster site near you is the unparalleled logs of trades, awards, and injuries. The scouting reports are concise, which is a good thing, except when concise means "non-existent", as is the case for some younger players. The game logs are not as informative as most, but they do include a useful unique feature: a few words describing what type of ailment caused a player to miss a particular game.
Sports Illustrated
Sports Illustrated could really benefit from some sort of marketing campaign for their player cards. I’d rate the value of their offering just a touch below ESPN overall, but while ESPN is easily the most-linked site for player cards, SI is pretty much unknown. The selection of stats is quite good, as are the splits and the game logs. The batter versus pitcher info is second only to Bigleaguers.com (granted, it’s a fairly distant second). The info for historical players is very good. If you’re all about the long ball, SI is a great place to get your fix; for the current season, every home run is broken down for both hitters and pitchers, including date, opponent, inning, distance, and which field it was hit to.
Sportsnet
I suppose it’s a good thing, from the perspective of being a Jays fan, that Rogers Communications does a far better job owning & operating a baseball team than it does in providing baseball player stats. There is no direct link to their player cards; using the link I’ve provided, you have to point to ‘MLB’, then pick ‘Stats’ from the Flash menu, and the player index will come up in one of those annoying pop-up windows that don’t have the normal browser navigation buttons. That hassle is not rewarded, as the selection of stats is mediocre and features like game logs and split stats are non-existent.
I did find something positive to say about this site, although it’s not a feature of the player cards. Included in the aforementioned annoying stats pop-up are a number of interesting features, and after a brief learning curve they can be navigated fairly easily. Just one example is a ‘League Stats’ section, wherein you can quickly look up various splits for either league for each year back to 1989. For instance, in 1996, National League third sackers hit .268/.332/.432. Meanwhile, the average American League pitching staff gave up 195 home runs, 25 of them in "Close & Late" situations.
Site Feature And Stat Comparisons
Table 2, below, rates each of the sites on a variety of features. Ratings range from 1 (Bad) to 5 (Good), with a dash indicating that the feature is not offered. All rankings are relative; for example, all of these sites can be navigated with some ease after a brief learning curve, but two are rated "1" simply because they are relatively that much less intuitive and less direct than the others.
Table 2 – Feature Comparison Chart
| Site | Navi- gation | Splits | Game Log | Bat. vs. Pitcher | Scout. Report | Minor Stats | Histor- ical | Trans-actions | Inj-uries | A-wards | Sal-ary | Copy & Paste |
| Almanac | 2 | - | - | - | - | - | 5 | - | - | - | 5 | 5 |
| Cube | 4 | - | - | - | - | 5 | - | 2 | - | 3 | 4 | 2 |
| Prospectus | 4 | - | - | - | - | - | 5 | - | - | - | - | 3 |
| B-R | 4 | - | - | - | - | - | 5 | 5 | - | 4 | 4 | 2 |
| Bigleaguers | 4 | 5 | 4 | 5 | - | - | - | 1 | - | - | - | 5 |
| CBS | 2 | 4 | 4 | - | - | - | - | 1 | 1 | - | 2 | 5 |
| ESPN | 5 | 5 | 5 | 2 | 5 | - | 2 | 1 | - | - | 2 | 5 |
| FOX | 5 | 3 | 4 | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | 5 |
| MLB | 1 | 4 | 5 | 3 | 1 | - | 4 | - | - | 2 | - | 1 |
| MSNBC | 1 | 3 | 1 | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | 0 |
| Retrosheet | 2 | 4 | 5 | - | - | - | 5 | 5 | - | - | - | 3 |
| Roto Times | 5 | 1 | 3 | - | - | - | - | 1 | 1 | - | - | 5 |
| Forecaster | 3 | - | 4 | - | 3 | 4 | - | 4 | 5 | 5 | 2 | 5 |
| SI | 4 | 4 | 4 | 3 | - | - | 4 | - | 2 | - | - | 5 |
| Sportsnet | 2 | 3 | - | - | - | - | - | 2 | - | - | - | 0 |
Note: Copy & Paste, in Table 2 above, refers to the relative ease with which data can be transferred to Excel and manipulated.
Tables 3, 4, and 5 detail the exact stats provided by each site. Only the most obscure acronyms are explained in the table footnotes; I recommend the glossaries at ESPN and Baseball-Reference (batting, pitching, fielding) if you are unfamiliar with any others. As noted in the site summary, Baseball Prospectus contains a wealth of unique batting, pitching, and fielding measures. These are not included in the tables below and cannot be quickly explained: the Baseball Prospectus Statistics Glossary is recommended.
The following batting statistics are available across the board, and as such are not included in Table 3: G, AB, R, H, 2B, 3B, HR, RBI, BB, K, SB, CS, AVG, OBP, SLG.
Table 3 - Batting Stats By Site
| Site | # PIT | #P/ PA | AB/ HR | AB/ K | AB/ RBI | Age | FB | G/F | GB | GDP | HBP | IBB | OPS | Outs | SB% | SF | SH | TB | TPA | XBH |
| Almanac | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | ||||||||
| Cube | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | |||||||||
| Prospectus | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | |||||||||||||
| B-R | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | |||||||||
| Bigleaguers | X | |||||||||||||||||||
| CBS | X | X | X | X | X | X | ||||||||||||||
| ESPN | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | |||||||
| FOX | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | |||||||
| MLB | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | |||||||
| MSNBC | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Retrosheet | X | X | X | X | X | |||||||||||||||
| Roto Times | X | X | X | |||||||||||||||||
| Forecaster | ||||||||||||||||||||
| SI | A | X | X | A | A | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | |||||||
| Sportsnet |
A - Current season only
The Baseball Cube, Baseball-Reference, and ESPN all provide a number of unique batting stats which are not included in Table 3 above. These are as follows:
- 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])
The following pitching statistics are available across the board, and as such are not included in Table 4: G, GS, CG, IP, H, R, ER, HR, BB, K, W, L, SV, ERA.
Table 4 - Pitching Stats By Site
| Site | #P/ IP | # PIT | Age | BAA | BB/ 9 | BK | BL SV | CS | ERA + | FB | G/F | GB | GDP | GF | H/9 | HB | HLD | IBB | K/9 |
| Almanac | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | ||||||||||||
| Cube | X | X | X | C | X | X | X | ||||||||||||
| Prospectus | X | X | X | ||||||||||||||||
| B-R | X | A | C | ||||||||||||||||
| Bigleaguers | X | ||||||||||||||||||
| CBS | X | X | X | X | B | X | X | ||||||||||||
| ESPN | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | B | X | X | X | X | X | X | |||||
| FOX | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | |||||||||
| MLB | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | B | X | C | X | X | X | X | |||||
| MSNBC | X | ||||||||||||||||||
| Retrosheet | X | X | X | X | X | X | |||||||||||||
| Roto Times | X | D | X | X | |||||||||||||||
| Forecaster | |||||||||||||||||||
| SI | X | X | X | C | X | X | X | ||||||||||||
| Sportsnet | X |
| Site | K/ BB | LG ERA | MOB/ 9 | OBP | OPS | PK | RPF | RS | SB | SF | SH | SHO | SLG | Svo | TB | TBF | W% | WH IP | WP |
| Almanac | X | X | X | X | X | ||||||||||||||
| Cube | X | X | X | X | |||||||||||||||
| Prospectus | X | X | X | ||||||||||||||||
| B-R | X | X | X | F | |||||||||||||||
| Bigleaguers | X | X | |||||||||||||||||
| CBS | X | X | E | X | X | X | X | X | X | ||||||||||
| ESPN | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | |||||||
| FOX | X | X | X | G | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | ||||||||
| MLB | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | |||||||
| MSNBC | X | ||||||||||||||||||
| Retrosheet | X | X | X | X | X | X | |||||||||||||
| Roto Times | X | ||||||||||||||||||
| Forecaster | X | ||||||||||||||||||
| SI | X | X | X | X | X | ||||||||||||||
| Sportsnet | X |
A - ERA+ is ERA normalized for both park and league
B - G/F is ground ball to fly ball ratio
C - GF is games finished
D - Current season only
E - RPF is Relief Pitcher Failures
F - Career only
G - RS is total Run Support
ESPN provides a number of unique pitching stats which are not included in Table 4 above: #P/PA, #P/GS, 2B, 3B, RBI, IR (Inherited runners), IS (Inherited runners scored).
Table 5 - Fielding Stats By Site
| Site | A | C ERA | CS | CS% | DP | E | FP | GP | GS | INN | INN OUTS | LG CS% | LG FP | LG RF | PB | PO | POS | RF | SB | TC | TC/ G | TP | ZR |
| Almanac | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | |||||||
| Cube | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | |||||||||||
| Prospectus | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | ||||||||||||||
| B-R | X | X | X | X | X | B | B | X | X | X | X | X | X | ||||||||||
| Bigleaguers | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | |||||||||||||
| CBS | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | ||||||||||||||
| ESPN | X | A | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | ||||||
| FOX | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| MLB | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | |||||||||
| MSNBC | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | ||||||||||||
| Retrosheet | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | C | |||||||||||
| Roto Times | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Forecaster | X | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| SI | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | |||||||||||||
| Sportsnet | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X |
A – Catcher’s ERA
B – 2000 season and on
C - Triple plays
Other Resources
This article, being devoted to player cards, has not detailed the abundance of other useful information available on all of these sites. Further, a number of invaluable sites have not been discussed as they do not offer player cards. To quickly name just a few:
- 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
Disclaimer: The internet is a big moving target. The big part means that I may have missed sites that really should have been included. The moving part means that some of the details here may already be outdated. Feel free to let me know about any errors or omissions, either by e-mail or in the comments section.
