Upgraded Stats Tables Rolling Out Across Sports Reference

In one of the largest engineering efforts we’ve undertaken as a company, we’ve invested a significant amount of time developing a standard method for building and launching data tables across all of the Reference sites. The vast majority of the data across all seven Reference sites is presented in these tables, so this is a massive project that touches nearly every page you visit.

The updated tables are rolling out one-by-one in a process that will take several months. We anticipate the pace of table updates to begin slowly, but then accelerate as our process and framework progress.

Once a table has been updated, you will see an “Upgraded” link next to its title that directs you to this blog post.

Table Title Upgraded

While this project is mostly focused on infrastructure, the standardization process will lead to several new features on many tables. This blog post will update as we publish tables, showing the new features available on each. We anticipate the first few tables to roll out slowly, but once the process is established the pace will pick up considerably.

For example, the first table we updated was the Player Standard Batting table on Baseball Reference League Register pages. This table alone added several new features not previously available on this table:

• Playoffs Tab: For the first time, we’re showing player season-level postseason statistics on Baseball Reference. This tab will also be coming to player and team pages. You will continue to see series-level postseason statistics for players and teams.
• New Stats: We’ve added three stats to our set of Standard Batting stats—WAR (Wins Above Replacement), Rbat+ (our version of wRC+), and rOBA (our version of wOBA). When we update player and team tables, these stats will also appear there.
• Black Ink: When looking at statistics for all players in a league, you can see at a glance who led the league in a variety of categories. We show Black Ink (bolding) for all stats with a leaderboard.
• Awards Column: The Awards column that you see on player pages is now coming to league and team pages. So far, we’ve added to the league page, so you can see at a glance which players were named All-Stars, won Gold Gloves, won MVP, etc. On the Playoffs tab, postseason awards are included (World Series MVP and LCS MVP).

As more tables are launched, we plan to use this blog post to share screencasts detailing the new table feature set. If you see anything that doesn’t look right, please let us know through our Feedback form.