Minor League Splits Blog

If you want to get the full site experience here at Minor League Splits, it’s very important that your browswer recognizes the HTML acronym tag. To check whether you’re getting the benefits of that tag, check out Philip Hughes’s Trenton splits page. In every row, every number from BAA all the way over to Popups should have a dotted black line (or something simlilar) under it. When you mouse over the numbers with the dotted black lines, another number should appear.

In other words, it should look something like this:

(For some reason, when I took a screenshot, the cursor disappeared: in that example, the cursor is hovering over the “9″ in the “L” column.)

The league averages have been part of the splits tables for a few weeks now; just this morning I added several new tools for batted ball analysis. Mouse over the groundball total, and you’ll see the player’s groundball percentage. Line drive total: line drive percentage. Fly ball total: home runs per fly ball. Popup total: infield flies per fly ball [P/(F+P)].

I haven’t yet included any of those acronyms on team or league pages, but that’s on the list.

If you can’t see the dotted black lines, and nothing happens when you mouse over those numbers, you should switch to Firefox. Actually, you should switch to Firefox anyway. I don’t completely understand which browsers recognize the acronym tag, though, because some friends in IE6 have reported that it’s working for them, while on the copy of IE6 on my machine, it doesn’t work.

If you’re not already taking advantage of MinorLeagueSplits.com’s batted ball data, now would be a good time to start. For the last month or so, I’ve made available complete batted-ball analysis tables for every Minor League player (both batters and pitchers). Those tables include batted balls broken down by type (ground ball, line drive, fly ball), and further by direction (left/center/right, IF/OF, and also by position).

For an example, check out Justin Upton’s BIP table.

For some reason, when I first designed the table, I didn’t include a “total” column, so there was no handy way to compare, say, the number of groundball hits to total groundballs. No more: with this morning’s update, there is a “total” column in place.

Enjoy!

I’m guessing not many users of this site take advantage of the day-by-day Game Log feature available for every player. I just discovered that–for I don’t know how long–the result of that script was Dustin Pedroia’s game log! It appears that the last time I uploaded that script, I accidentally uploaded my version for debugging which, rather than using the player ID it’s given, just went ahead and generated Pedroia’s game log. Every time.

Anyway, that’s fixed now. Game Logs are still quite slow to generate; because I’m updating the logs daily, I upload the complete play-by-play log for an entire league’s worth of games in a single file. Every time that script runs, it has to go through that entire file. I’m working on a couple of things that should accelerate the process considerably, but they will probably wait until the offseason.

Also, I updated the Game Log script so that player sponsorships appear on log pages as well.

Yesterday I wrote about the new Minor League Splits sponsorship program, which allows you, for just $5 or $15, to sponsor all of a player’s pages on MinorLeagueSplits.com. This morning, I also made it possible to sponsor teams.

Team sponsorships cost $10, and buy you placement on all seven of a team’s pages. For example, look at the Visalia Oaks menu page. Whoever sponsors the Oaks will have their sponsorship link and message displayed on that page, as well as all six of the other pages–the team roster, the batter- and pitcher-specific rosters, the team hitting and pitching splits, and the games played by position chart. If I add more team pages in the future (if and when I add defensive stats, that’s probably how those will be formatted), they’ll be included as well.

If you have any questions about MLS sponsorships, or if you run across any problems trying to sign up for and purchase a sponsorship, please drop me an e-mail and let me know. Thanks!