Minor League Splits Blog

In response to popular demand, I’ve added a link to The Baseball Cube on each Minor League Splits player page.

However, it isn’t perfect (and it’ll probably stay that way). Instead of linking directly to a player’s TBC page, the link goes to the TBC search page results for the player’s last name. There are a couple of reasons why I did it that way.

TBC’s naming convention for player pages is unique–rather than using Minor League Baseball’s numerical player IDs like the official site, Minor League Splits, and Baseball America does, it just uses the player’s first and last name, and if the player name isn’t unique, it adds a number at the end. (E.g. “John+Smith2″) It wouldn’t be all that difficult for me to put together a database of those IDs, but that would means adding yet another query to each player page, slowing things down another notch.

Since the only real solution to that is the player search page, I had to decide how much information to feed the search. Another problem with my database and TBC’s communicating with each other is the first names we choose for players. Mine usually come from the first instance of that player’s name in a gamelog. Often, especially for first year players, that means I have a more formal name, like “Christopher Errecart” instead of “Chris Errecart.” Because of that, the search page my TBC links send you to uses only the last name and first initial. It means you have quite a few results to sift through if you search for, say, C.J. Smith or Delwyn Young, but I think it’s a nice compromise between getting too many results (using only the last name) and sometimes getting none (using the full name).

Enjoy!

Thanks to Dean, an enterprising reader of Minor League Ball, Firefox users can now search for players on MinorLeagueSplits.com directly from their toolbar.

Download the plugin here. I’ve added it to my toolbar and, of course, I use it all the time. (Mostly to search for Yovani Gallardo, whose page I use to test most of the changes I make to the site.) The one small downside is that you can only use the plugin to search for last names, like the search box on the official Minor League Baseball site.

Thanks again to Dean for putting this together. If this isn’t enough to get you to switch to Firefox, I’ll be posting some more persuasive reasons over the next week or two. This site has mostly been tested Firefox, and I’ve tried to take advantage of some of my favorite features.