What makes Stathead such a powerful research tool is the depth and breadth of our databases, combined with the endless combinations of filters and search criteria at your fingertips. While some searches are straightforward, there's also many "hidden" tricks you can use to get the answer to questions that might seem unanswerable at first glance. Here's a few of our favorites to get you started. Check back frequently as we continue to add to this page.

How to find a team's best/worst record through X games of a season

Whether your favorite team gets off to a hot or cold start, it's interesting to track how they're doing compared to past seasons. And there's an easy way to do this using the Team Pitching (or Batting) Game Finder:

1. Go to the Team Pitching Game Finder

2. At the top, select Find Teams with Most Matching Games in a Season 

3. On the left side, below the Seasons filter, you'll see a line that says "Span of Games". Click the red text "Show"

4. Enter the number of games "In team's first ____ game(s)"

5. In Team filters, choose Team and then select the team you want to look at.

6. Click Get Results

7. To find the best/worst record, click on the W-L% column to sort it descending/ascending. To sort chronologically, click on the Year column.

How to find the percentage of runs scored by home runs for a team

5. Click Get Results

Sources

Our baseball data comes from a variety of sources, contributors and collaborators over the years. For those users looking to work with large amounts of data, there are a few free sources that might be useful for users with some programming and/or database experience:

Sean Lahman's Baseball Database

Retrosheet.org

Data Coverage

There is a ton of data available to search and filter with on Stathead.com/baseball. For a complete list of what we do and do not have on the site, including which stats are available for which time periods and when they are missing, please see our comprehensive Data Coverage page on Baseball-Reference.com. On that page you'll find complete information on our full season stats, play-by-play, weather data, pitch data, hit location and batted ball type data.

One of the tools unique to our Baseball Stathead site is the Neutralized Stats Finder. It allows you to search "neutralized" stat totals in order to compare players across seasons and in different run-environments. For example, you can find how many home runs Henry Aaron would have hit if he played all his games at Coors Field in 2000. 

How do we do it? In a nutshell:

We adjust all of a player's seasons from the park and league context of the seasons they played in into either a "neutral" setting (which is 100 park factor with 162-game season, 90% of runs earned, and 688 runs/team), or into a setting selected by the user with a particular year, league (with its runs/game and earned runs percentage) and home team (with its park factor).

For more information and the nitty-gritty details on our neutralized and converted stats, check out this link.

Wins Above Replacement (WAR) is a player-value metric, an attempt to translate a player's total contribution on the field into a single number, while allowing for comparison across positions, leagues, eras, etc.

Since we added our WAR metric to baseball-reference in 2010, we've seen its use expand into many new areas and its popularity catch on in the media and general population. But there have also been a lot of questions about how it's calculated and whether it has validity.

On baseball-reference.com, we've put together a comprehensive informational guide to WAR, including a very detailed explanation of the calculations used in WAR and an explainer about how our approach differs from some of the other popular WAR or WAR-like metrics.

If you're interested in learning about how to use WAR, the concept of replacement-level players, the changes we've made to our WAR calculations over the years, etc., please go to this link: https://www.baseball-reference.com/about/war_explained.shtml

For a comparison of the different WAR frameworks (i.e. Fangraphs, Baseball Prospectus, etc.), please go to this link: https://www.baseball-reference.com/about/war_explained_comparison.shtml

comprehensive informational guide to WAR

To obtain a daily downloadable archive of our WAR data going back to 2013, please click here: https://www.baseball-reference.com/data/

The Season, Game and Streak Finders each include the ability to search by Win Probability Added (WPA), Run Expectancy (RE24) and Leverage Index (LI) stats. The framework for calculating these stats was provided by Tom Tango, author of Inside the Book and the currently the Senior Database Architect of Stats for MLB Advanced Media. More information on his methods can be found in this article. 

Win Probability/Expectancy is the percent chance of a team winning the game based on the current score, inning, outs, runners on base, and the run environment. These percentages are calculated using historical data. 

Run Expectancy is a similar concept, but instead measures the number of runs a team is expected to scored based only on the number of outs and the position of the runners on base. 

Leverage Index is a related concept that measures "how important" the plate appearance is, in relation to determining the outcome of the game.

Additionally, our Pivotal Play Finder, which allows you to search the most "game-changing" plays in MLB history, includes Championship Win Probability Added (cWPA) and Championship Leverage Index (cLI). These stats are similar to the ones above, except that instead of measuring the importance of a particular play to the outcome of that game, they measure the importance of winning that game to a team's chances of winning the World Series.

For more detailed information on Win Probability and its related stats, plus a complete glossary, check out this page on Baseball-Reference.com.

We make it easy to download/export the data from all the stats tables on our Reference.com sites and the query results tables from Stathead searches. Here's a quick explainer on how to do it:

• Click on the Export Data link just above the stats and next to the table header (javascript required)

• Choose Get as Excel Workbook (this will automatically download the data table directly to an Excel spreadsheet) 

• Choose Get table as CSV (this will convert the table to comma-separated values so you can copy/paste into any spreadsheet program)

We know you want to impress your friends with all the amazing sports knowledge you've gained since getting a Stathead subscription ... so that's why we make it easy to share the results from any Stathead query.

To quickly share any page from a Stathead search query, simply click the purple button "Share Results" at the top of the table:

You'll then get a popup on your screen with a tinyURL for sharing:

Click the "Copy to clipboard" link and then paste the URL into a tweet, text message, Instagram post or whatever form of electronic communication you prefer. And let the trash-talking begin!

We also offer the ability to generate CUSTOMIZABLE tables with a variety of output options such as HTML, a shareable link, reddit-specific markup, an iframe, a js widget, and more.

• Click on the "Export Data" link just above the stats and next to the table header (javascript required):

• Click the red link labeled "Modify, Export & Share Table"

• A sharing toolbox appears and buttons to delete columns and rows appear allowing you to pare the data down to just want you want.
• Please note that any sorting should occur before you delete rows or columns.
• Next select the output option from html, to iframes, to pre-formatted (good for most internet forums) and more

If we don't have the format you want, please contact us.

You are free to use this data anywhere, we would just ask that you include the citation at the bottom of the table as a courtesy to us for providing this service. Please see our Terms of Service and Data Use Policy for more details.