THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I added THT and BP to my Firefox search bar, and they also get 3 clicks, like Forman.  B-r.com doesn’t save here obviously.

Doing the same to Fangraphs gives me a runtime error.  My guess: David must be using IIS.

Tried with BJO, and while it didn’t blow up on me, it also didn’t do anything either.

Good feedback, Tango.  Thanks.  But what were the three clicks?  I clicked on the search box, typed in his name and got there immediately.

Also, how wide is your screen?

I get two for B-ref, and I didn’t do any typing.

One on your B-ref link, two on the Phillies gives me 4 HBP for the year.  3 clicks if I want his career stats.

I found it on ESPN in about 5 clicks, I think. 

Hold the cursor over MLB, and click “Teams” on the dropdown menu.

Click on “Roster” on Philadelphia Phillies.

Scroll down, select Utley.

Click on “Stats”.

Scroll down, HBP are under “Miscellaneous Batting”.

If we go the typing route, then using the search box in the top right, searching “Chase Utley” brings up a screen with a little picture.  Click on “Stats” under that, and scroll down.  HBP is there.

i.) http://www.enth.com/

I did it in two.  Click the search box, type, enter.  Voila.

I believe you’d have to do it separately if you wanted specific yearly totals, but any single year or the career total would be 2.  There may be a phrase for yearly totals, but it wouldn’t appear to be any of the obvious ("annual" “year-by-year” etc) choices.

1 for baseball reference

Maybe cheating, but I have Firefox keyword searches for the sites I visit most often.

This works for most sites, fangraphs is the notable one that it doesn’t work for (David, you reading?).

To set it up, right click in the search box (eg. where you type the player’s name in baseball-reference.com), and select “add a keyword for this search”.  Put something descriptive in the name field (eg. “baseball reference”, it doesn’t matter what), and something short but somewhat descriptive in the keyword field (eg. “br").

Hit ok and you’re all set.

To use it:

go to the address bar in firefox and type “br utley”.  This is the same as going to baseball-reference.com and typing utley in the search box and hitting enter.

I can’t even begin to think how much time this saves me. It’s by far the #1 reason why I’ll never use internet explorer.

Hopefully useful to some…

Using ConQuery:

FanGraphs
* highlight Chase Utley
* right click
* choose “Query to FanGraphs Player Search”
* list comes up with Chase Utley on it and click on “Stats”
* there are Chase Utley’s stats including HBP

B-R
* highlight Chase Utley
* right click
* choose “Query to Baseball Reference”
* there are Chase Utley’s stats including HBP

ESPN
* highlight Chase Utley
* right click
* choose “Query to ESPN”
* Chase Utley’s search results come up, so click on “Stats”
* Stats come up
* scroll down to find HBP

THT (1)
* highlight Chase Utley
* right click
* choose “Query to Hardball Times”
* Google Search for Chase Utley site:hardballtimes.com comes up, click on “Chase Utley THT Stats”
* there are Chase Utley’s stats including HBP

THT (2)
* highlight Utley
* right click
* choose “Query to Hardball Times: Players”
* there are Chase Utley’s stats including HBP

THT [3]
* highlight Chase Utley
* right click
* choose “Query to Hardball Times: Players”
* Hardball Times Player Search comes with no players found because Chase Utley is in the Last Name box and the First Name box is empty (click here to see) so have to delete Chase from last name
* click sumbit and there are Chase Utley’s stats including HBP

The Baseball Cube
* highlight Chase Utley
* right click
* choose “Query to The Baseball Cube”
* there are Chase Utley’s stats (majors and minors) including HBP, you might have to scroll down a tiny bit

5 at MLB.com.  One on the link.  One to Scoreboard. One on Box for the phillies game. One on Utley’s name. And one on next stats for HBP.

MLB.com
* highlight Chase Utley
* right click
* choose “Query to MLB.com”
* click on Chase Utley under Players
* click on Career Stats
* click on Next Stats
* there are Chase Utley’s stats including HBP

My screen at work is 800x600.  Here at home, it’s wider (1072x800 or something).  So, I do end up with one less-click on some of these.  I don’t have to scroll down or scroll across in some cases.

My guess is that most people do their surfing at the office, and they do so on really old hardware.  I’ve got XP at the office, but 512 MB, which is a killer, as the anti-virus + the browser + USB drive software together already puts me at the 512.  Then, I actually have to load my work stuff too.

TC/4: ok, Utley in 3 clicks plus typing name, using ESPN.  I give them a minus because I had to scan several pages while I held the mouse down scrolling. 

Not bad.  Though, it’s not as intuitive as the other guys.  I didn’t even notice the search box until you told me.  Going through the roster, etc, is 7 clicks.

I wonder how many people are inept like me?

Only 3% of our visitors have a screen size of 800 by 600.  What’s more, when I resize my screen to 800 by 600, I can still see Utley’s HBP.  I think you must have your font size upped or something.

Studes, interesting.  You know what I do? In Firefox, I do:
CTRL+
(that’s CTRL, plus sign)

That makes everything one font size bigger.  You can keep doing that until you get the size you like.  So, I must have that at the office.  The red border on your page here…
http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/stats/players/index.php?lastName=utley
...at the office, overlaps with the SH column, putting all the other columns beyond it, and needing to scroll.  If I put it in its intended size, it comes up on one page, and so, you get it in one click (to position the cursor), and one ENTER key.  Once you get the cursor to default, it’s zero clicks and one ENTER.

Even Forman can’t touch that, since he’s got all that bio stuff and ads on top, that you need to do one extra click to page down.

BP is in the same position as you are with the cursor position.  As well, if Utley is the only player, it should automatically default to his DT card.  Already at the top of that page is a link to his PECOTA card.

Problem is, if we put the cursor in the box, I don’t know how we can keep the “Last Name” hint in the box.  That’s an important visual cue.

Ah, good point.  Ok, you can be tied for the best, instead of standing alone.

..hmmm..
I’m attempting to compare how the difference in strategy between the majors and Japanese baseball (and different physiques of players too) show up in the stats.

But I can’t find MLB Team Batting stats that have categories like SH and SF included for years before this year (or even for this year).

I think I’ve tried the usual suspects (MLB.com, CBS, CNNSI, ESPN, HT, B-R) but obscure (I wasn’t expecting SH to be obscure) team batting stats are harder to come by. I don’t want to have to resort to taking the totals from each team’s player batting page, that would be a major pain…

Do you have any ideas?

Thanks!

I would bet that Retrosheet and b-r.com as DEFINITELY having that at the team level.  Please take a hard look.

Thanks for the prompt reply!

Will give them a further look.