The Futility Infielder
A Baseball Journal by Jay Jaffe I'm a baseball fan living in New York City. In between long tirades about the New York Yankees and the national pastime in general, I'm a graphic designer.Saturday, October 12, 2002
Welcome to the Stat Machine
Aaron Haspel, who writes a blog called God of the Machine, called my attention to a nice little statistical search feature he's programmed. Through his page, one can make customized queries against the historical database of baseball statistics. That is, you can define searches for players with (more than/less than/equal to/between) a number in a given category (either career or in a season).Want to see the season stats of all the players who hit 50 or more homers in a season? Here you go. Ever wonder how many players have appeared in over 1000 games and hit fewer than 5 homers? They're all here. Guys who got 200 hits in a season during the Fifties? Got 'em. Hitting stats for all of the guys named Mendoza? No problemo.
It's a nice little toy, though it has its limitations. You can only call upon a player's raw totals in each category; while you can find pitchers with 100 wins and a winning percentage over .650, or hitters with 40 doubles and 40 homers in the same season, you can't do the same for pitchers with 200 decisions (wins plus losses), or batters with 100 extra-base hits (doubles plus triples plus homers). Being able to call upon such sums (plate appearances and OPS are others that would come in handy) would make this a more useful tool. But that's a minor quibble.
I understand that the proprietary Sabermetric Baseball Encyclopedia can handle queries of the same sort (not to mention more powerful ones), but I have no first-hand experience with that product, nor am I likely to get any in the near future. I'm a graphic designer, and in my industry, it's all Mac, all the time. The SBE has no Mac version, nor is there ever likely to be one, as programmer Lee Sinins has written his encyclopedia in the Windows-only language Visual Basic.
Of course, the SBE isn't online, and Aaron's database is. I wouldn't be surprised if Sean Forman of the awesome Baseball-Reference.com is developing something like this, but for the time being, Haspel's got himself a pretty good little niche in the world of baseball statistics. Great work, Aaron.
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