Welcome to baseball-stats-online.com! I hope that you enjoy using the site half of much as I enjoyed creating it.

I thought that I should write up a short tutorial for use of the queries in the Statistics Database, just to get you started. So here it goes.

There are three basic query types that are selectable from the main menu: Batting, Pitching, and Fielding. Those are self-explanatory. There are also three different formats that each type of query are available in: Player Career, Player Single Season, and Team. I hope that those are also fairly self-explanatory.

Let’s start by viewing the Player – Career Batting query.

A click on the link from the main menu brings you to the Player Career Batting Data query main page. You will see four distinct sections of user input on the page.

The first is the ‘Sort by:’ section. Here you will choose which statistic you want to sort the players by. Next to it is the ‘Sort Order’ selection, which is either ‘ascending’ or ‘descending’, depending on what results you are looking for.

Next is the ‘Filter by:’ section. Here is where the real power of BBSO is harnessed. The default is for a query of all players in MLB history. However, using the selections listed here, you can choose to view players by Year, or in a range of years, by league, by franchise, by home park, by minimum plate appearances, and even by name. When these parameters are mixed together, it makes for an almost limitless number of unique queries that you can run. There is also an ‘Exclude pitchers’ selection, useful when you are looking for some of the worst batters, but don’t want to include pitchers in the discussion.

At the bottom of the page, we see the ‘Maximum Players Shown’ selection. This simply sets how many players will be listed in your query results.

Finally, at the top of the page, you see a button labeled ‘Update Batting statistics to be displayed’. Go ahead and click on the button. You are brought to a new page that is full of all batting statistics available for display. Next to each statistic is a checkbox. If you want a particular stat to be displayed, simply check the checkbox next to that stat. There is also a ‘Statistics Type’ selection, either Totals or Seasonal (per 162 games). The default, of course, is Totals. Once you have selected all of the stats you wish to be displayed in your query, simply click on ‘Update’ at the bottom of the page, and you will be returned to the Player Career Batting Data query main page.

Well, those are the guts of the query. You might notice a ‘View Last Batting Query results’ button at the bottom right of the page. This button not only allows you to do what it says, but it serves another purpose. Some of the most time-intensive queries on BBSO are those that must calculate complex values, such as OW%, for all players. These can take upwards of three minutes if done for all-time. I have found that some browsers timeout after less than that. If this happens to you, you’ll have to hit the ‘Back’ button on your browser to return to the Query main page. What you may not realize, however, is that your query is still running on my server! If you wait long enough, and simply click on the ‘View Last Batting Query results’ button, you will magically see your query results. How long you need to wait depends on the query, and like I said earlier, it can be up to 3 minutes. I am working on a ‘hearbeat’ page to correct this issue, but I haven’t solved the problem yet. Just remember that this button is there, in case you need it.

I was going to go through an example of running a query here, but on second thought, it would probably not be that useful to many of you. I believe that the query pages are pretty straightforward as is.

I would like to say that, although the display format of these queries is technically a leaderboard, sorted by a statistic either ascending or descending, don't limit yourself to an 'all-time leaderboard' type of thinking. If you want to know the *OPS+ of every player on a specific team in history, for example, you can use Batting - Single Season, set the 'Year' filters to that specific year, and then choose the franchise you are interested in.
Or, say you are interested in the career stats of one particular player. Simply type his name into the 'Player Name' filter, and every season of that player will be displayed. If you want to sort Randy Johnson's career years by the number of strikeouts, for example, you can use Pitching - Single Season, and type Randy's name into the 'Player Name' filter. Voila! (or try 'Big Unit', that may work too!) I have also included 'Year' as a filter in the Single Season queries, so that you can list the career stats of a player, year by year, in sequential order. I'm sure there are ways to use the filters that I haven't even considered yet, so be creative!

If you have any questions regarding the use of the queries, or run into any problems that I might need to address, please contact me using the ‘Email webmaster’ link on the main page.

Thanks, and enjoy!