Exciting news! We've updated the sections of Baseball Reference devoted to leagues beyond the majors! In case you didn't know, we have extensive coverage (both historic and current) of many leagues from around the world, including Japan's NPB and Korea's KBO, as well as non-major league American baseball institutions like college and the minors.

This update makes the home pages for these leagues look similar to the Baseball Reference front page. For instance, here's what our NPB section looks like now. Read the rest of this entry

Thanks to the efforts of the Chadwick Baseball Bureau, Baseball Reference is happy to announce that we have extended our coverage of NCAA Division II & III baseball all the way back to 2011. Previously our coverage of D-II went back to 2013 and our D-III coverage went back to 2016.

All of the non-majors content on Baseball Reference is available via our Register section, where you will find information on countless leagues. Among the D-III stars we now have stats for is Tim Locastro. He hit .436 with 40 stolen bases (in 41 attempts) across 48 games in 2013. Among the notable D-II names we have added statistics for is Joey Wendle. Wendle hit .399 for West Chester in in leading the Golden Rams to the 2012 National Championship.

Please keep your eyes peeled for further enhancements, including extensions of our historical coverage of NAIA and collegiate summer leagues.

We have decided to turn off the Oracle of Baseball for good. There are a couple of reasons for this which I'll get into below. This feature was launched in 2002 or so, so this isn't a decision we take lightly. We know there are a number of users who will be sad to see this tool go, but in order for us to update the sites in a number of important ways we will be making this change.

• The Oracle of Baseball only gets about 10,000 user sessions per year which makes it very hard to prioritize work to improve or modify it.
• Related to the above, the Oracle data hasn't been updated since 2021. Due to some underlying data changes it became difficult for us to keep the data generated and up to date. As I said above, it's hard to prioritize a multi-day project to update the tool when it won't pay off for decades at current usage rates.
• We are working on a major upgrade to our operating system on the sites' servers. The Oracle is a custom built app that runs as a daemon in the background on the servers and porting this over to our new infrastructure would be a difficult process even for a tool that was generating a lot of revenue.

All three together mean we can't make a business case (or even a user-based case given the opportunity cost of this work) to continue supporting this feature. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Thanks to our friends at Retrosheet, we have added Play-by-Play for 3,868 games from 1912 to 1972. The additions mean we now have Play-by-Play for all games back to 1969. Before this update our coverage was 100% back to 1973. Additionally, we have Play-by-Play coverage for over 99% of games in each season back through 1957. You can see our full NL/AL/Federal League Play-by-Play coverage map by season here.

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As the 2024 season begins, we have made some updates to our Wins Above Replacement calculations on Baseball Reference. You may notice some small changes to figures as you browse the site. As always, you can find full details on how we calculate WAR here. Read the rest of this entry

We've added a very cool new features to Stathead that we're excited to share with you. On all Game, Streak, and Span Finders for all five Stathead sports, there's a new way to search timeframes. Read the rest of this entry

Most Valuable Player Awards in the National and American Leagues date back to 1911, when the Chalmers Award was voted on by a writer from each league city to reward the player in each league who "should prove himself as the most important and useful player to his club and to the league at large in point of deportment and value of services rendered." The reward for winning was an automobile. The award was created in 1910, but was for winning the batting title and ended in controversy. So from 1911-14 the award went to an MVP from each league. Interest in the award waned, and so from 1915-21 no MVPs were awarded. Read the rest of this entry

You may have noticed that, as of the end of the 2023 MLB season, the counter on the front page of Baseball-Reference indicated that there had been 23,115 players in major league history and that that number now says 23,114.

This change is due to the hard work and dedication of the SABR Biographical Research Committee, which continually makes new discoveries about players in the early days of the game, in particular. In this case, a mistaken identity involving a player who caught one inning for the 1900 St. Louis Cardinals has been resolved. Previously, it was thought that this catching appearance was made by Henry Edward Stein. However, it has been discovered via the Sporting News archives (which all SABR members get complementary access to as a membership perk) that the appearance was actually made by Tom Stanton. Stanton also appeared in one game for the 1904 Chicago Cubs, and thus already had a player record. This is why we now show 23,114 all-time major league players instead of 23,115.

In SABR's Fall 2019 Baseball Research Journal Ed Coen produced some remarkable research on the history of franchise nicknames.

Coen wrote:

Of the major league teams that trace their history before 1960, most started out with several short-term unofficial nicknames or even no nickname at all. Although several reputable sources provide a history of these nicknames, there are numerous contradictions between the available sources, and sometimes even when these sources agree, they conflict with the original sources. In other words, they do not reflect what the team was actually known as at the time.

Coen then performed exhaustive research using local newspapers to find out what teams were actually most commonly referred to at the time in their home cities. Thanks to his research, we are now able to use the actual names these teams were mostly commonly known as locally at the time on Baseball Reference. In many cases, you'll see the teams had no nicknames at all and were just known for the city and league they played in. Below is a list of the changes we have made: Read the rest of this entry

In April, May, and June, we launched the Versus Finder on Stathead for Hockey, Basketball, and Football. Last but not least, we’re excited to announce that we’ve launched the Versus Finder on Stathead Baseball!

The Baseball Versus Finder has many of the same powerful tools as the Versus Finders across our other Stathead sports, as well as a couple of new ones that are specific to baseball. Here’s a primer on what it offers and how to use it.

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