The Ringer: The strangest, funniest, and most fascinating Baseball-Reference pages
From SABR members Ben Lindbergh and Michael Baumann, and Zach Kram, at The Ringer on March 27, 2020:
Baseball-Reference is the eighth wonder of the world, and frankly, it’s superior to some of the better-known seven, too. Who needs the Colossus of Rhodes, after all, when you have the player page for Tuffy Rhodes, onetime home run king of Japan?
One of the qualities that defines baseball’s corner of the internet is the quirkiness inherent in appreciating its history. Much of that joy is tied in with browsing Baseball-Reference pages, which expose bizarre stats and fun names and fantastic accomplishments and all of those quirky histories. Baseball-Reference is already a year-round treat, but in a time absent of actual games—Opening Day was originally slated for Thursday—it becomes counterintuitively even more central for fans: Only the strangeness can slake our baseball thirst; the only new discoveries can come from mining the depths of already existing pages.
The site has more information available than anyone has time to read, social distancing or not. There are pages for every player, team, and season; for leagues ranging in skill level across four continents; for every possible statistical search a baseball fan would hope to answer. So to celebrate the breadth of the site’s riches, we held a miniature draft, picking our five favorite B-Ref pages apiece, selected from anywhere on the site. As befits this eighth wonder, we got weird—and in so doing, found room for some baseball smiles even when the parks are closed, the mounds just waiting for the first real pitch of spring.
Read the full article here: https://www.theringer.com/mlb/2020/3/27/21196338/baseball-reference-most-interesting-pages-stats
Originally published: March 27, 2020. Last Updated: March 27, 2020.