What a Week

It's finals week and the moron that I am, I left many things to the last minute. Really, this issue stems from a decision in April that I made to take four classes, three of which were upper-level courses. For my Northeastern finale next semester, I intend to coast on easy street.

Nevertheless, just to give you an idea of what I've been through, since Nov. 28, I have written approximately 12,590 words across three papers, read 476 pages of books and just took an exhausting final exam this morning in which I took up an entire Blue Book. And yet, it's not the end because I have at least 2,000 more words to write and two more final exams to pass.

But I digress.

I want to point out one of my favorite Web sites that makes me jump for joy when we talk about distributing information to the masses. Baseball-Reference.com is the top source for all your historic baseball information. You can get anything you could think of from year-by-year statistics of each team to a list of who won what major award with voting tallies made available too.

Now the site has used another Web source, Retrosheet.org, to present a new feature for the site. Retrosheet compiles all box scores in baseball and posts them into its database. It's free to use and Baseball-Reference has used the site to produce box scores of every major league game since 1957. You can also now finds splits statistics for each player since 1957. Splits are specialized statistics that are based on situations. For instance, in 1995 Mo Vaughn won the American League MVP and he hit .301 with 15 home runs and 52 RBI in home games that year.

It's kind of nerdy, I know, but a true baseball fan cannot live without this precious resource.

The credit goes to Sean Forman, who is the sole proprietor of the site. He is an assistant professor in Mathematics and Computer Science at St. Joseph's University and owns a doctorate in Applied Math and Computational Sciences from the University of Iowa.

Forman is now working on a new service that will allow users to search through play-by-play of individual games to answer questions like "Who has the most RBI by a shortstop against the Mets in interleague play?" He calls it B-R PI and it's coming soon. In addition, he plans to make available analysis of major league results and introduce minor league statistics to the site.

B-R PI will be a paid subscription service, but the rest of the site is free. He does urge that you make donations to the site though. Each player page can be sponsored for a nominal fee, so if you really like Paxton Crawford or you loved the days when Tim Naehring manned third base at Fenway, sign up and sponsor a player. As soon as I make some cash, I'll be sending my donation towards Forman's way.