Sports Reference Blog

Thanks to our partnership with the Seamheads Negro League database, we have released an update to our Negro Leagues dataset. Our last update, in April of 2023, was covered in this blog post. Like last time around, this update includes thousands of incremental improvements. The most significant new data revolves around expanded fielding statistics and refinement around the presentation of team records. Additionally, lots of new biographical data has been added. Here's a rundown of some of the improvements Baseball Reference users will now see: Read the rest of this entry

Last September, we extended our coverage of NFL transactions back to 1994. Today, we're happy to announce that we have continued that work and now have coverage of NFL transactions back to 1988 on Pro Football Reference. We hope to continue extending this coverage further back in the future, though the 1987 season, with replacement players during the strike, looms as a challenge.

We would like to thank Pete Palmer for collecting this data for us.

We've recently added thousands of unofficial game-level player and team statistics to NBA gamelogs and box scores on Basketball Reference, covering blocks, steals, turnovers, and offensive rebounds in seasons before these categories were "officially" tracked by the league. The data spans games from the early 1950s through the mid-1970s and represents thousands of game lines that until now haven't lived anywhere on the site. Read the rest of this entry

Less than two months ago we posted that we were missing the dates for 130 women's college basketball games in the 1980s. In the most recent example of our users being incredible, you all have helped us reduce that number all the way down to 44!

The final 44 missing games are listed below. We have estimates for when we think the game was most likely played, but it's possible that these estimates are not correct. If you have dates or other relevant info for any of these games please let us know!

List of games in spreadsheet form Read the rest of this entry

Over the past few weeks, we’ve made a significant update to uniform numbers from the 1920–1949 era on Pro Football Reference.

In total, this project added 1,491 previously missing jersey numbers and made 694 corrections, covering more than 2,100 player-seasons. These updates help fill in gaps and clean up inconsistencies from an era where uniform numbers weren’t always well documented. Read the rest of this entry

Thanks to our friends at Retrosheet, Baseball Reference is thrilled to announce that we have added three new seasons of box score coverage (1898-1900) and two new seasons of play-by-play (1910 and 1911). This means that we now have box scores predating the existence of the American League, covering the entire Modern Era (and then some!). Please see our updated coverage map here. Read the rest of this entry

Thanks to our friends at Retrosheet, Baseball Reference has added three new seasons of National League box scores (1898, 1899 and 1900) and two new seasons of play-by-play coverage (1910 and 1911). Please see our updated coverage map here. Additionally, we have updated our 2024 park factors to use a three-year rolling average with 2025 included. Together, these changes also allow us to make thousands of (mostly) slight updates to player WAR. Read the rest of this entry

Anyone reading this blog post is likely aware that the NBA box score has evolved over the years. The 1946-47 BAA (which the NBA considers its first season), for instance, tracked only points, field goals, field goal attempts, free throws, free throw attempts and personal fouls. This means that important features of a modern box score from minutes played and rebounds to turnovers and steals were not tracked. The early 1950s saw minutes played and rebounds added, but then it wasn't until 1973-74 that many fixtures of the modern box score reached 'officialdom.' 1973-74 is the first season for which blocked shots, steals, offensive/defensive rebounds and team turnovers are considered official. Player turnovers would not reach the same status until 1977-78. However, "official" merely means "of the office" and does not mean that these numbers were not being reliably tracked earlier (or that the 'official' statistics are any better/more accurate). Read the rest of this entry

On our College Basketball site, we’ve redesigned our in-page navigation system (we call it the “inner navigation”) that you use to access supplemental content (such as Game Logs and Splits) as well as the “On This Page” section (which serves as the page’s table of contents). While the content is all the same, we have changed the presentation on desktop from a horizontal bar to a vertical sidebar. The interaction is click/tap based instead of hover-based. The inner navigation is also now the same on desktop and mobile. This is an incremental design update and not part of an extensive design overhaul.

This is the most extensive change we’ve made to the design of our sites in quite some time, so I’d like to walk you through the process. First, here’s what it looks like:

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At Pro Football Reference, we recently completed a project adding full starters and participation data for every game in the history of the NFL (including the APFA), AFL and AAFC. This project gave us an opportunity to re-evaluate some games played and games started totals for players from 1920 to 1969 that have persisted in record books for many years. In doing so we decided to make some changes, in consultation with Pete Palmer, which we'd like to lay out here.

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