August 28, 2013

Feature Focus

Sortable Statistics (Introduction)

by Rob McQuown

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The Sortable Statistics at Baseball Prospectus offer the ability to dig up data on players and teams as introduced in articles on the site and in books over the years. Most of this data is available for all the years for which it's possible to compute it, which can be delved into by selecting custom reports that mine the various databases. The easiest way to get introduced to the reports is via the "stock" options, each of which is available via a link when clicking "Statistics" on the navbar at the top of the page:

As can be seen, much data is available via these stock reports. The most-read reports are:

• Batter Season - Standard: Lists each batter's stats for a given season at a given level. Can be filtered by year, level, position, and minimum plate appearances.
• Pitcher Season - Standard: Lists each pitcher's stats for a given season at a given level. Can be filtered by year, level, and minimum innings pitched.
• Batter Team - Standard: Lists each batter's stats for each team he's played for in a given year at a given level. Can be filtered by year, level, league, position, and minimum plate appearances.
• Pitcher Team - Standard: Lists each pitcher's stats for each team he's pitched for in a given year at a given level. Can be filtered by year, level, league, and minimum innings pitched.

Within a given report, any of the displayed statistics can be used to sort the data, and a pulldown menu offers access to all of the glossary entries for the stats displayed on the page. Additionally, these reports are tied in to the Team Tracker teams, so if a group of players is on a Team Tracker team, the report can be filtered to show only those players. Here are the menu options when the "Batter Season - Value" report is selected:

Note also some various other options available here - the report can be downloaded as a CSV or Tab-delimited file that's easily imported to Excel. And additional statistics can be selected by clicking the "Statistic Selection" link. For example:

Of course, the real star of the show is the stats. The best way to see what can be done with sortable reports is to click on them and experiment, but here's one of the less-wide reports with "value" data (namely VORP) for batters' season totals:

There's a whole world of information available inside the sortable statistics reports. Look forward to more details in this space in the coming weeks.

Rob McQuown is an author of Baseball Prospectus. Follow @robmcquown
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