Fun with Baseball-Reference.com’s Play Index

I can’t overstress how great a resource Baseball-Reference.com is. For any blogger, this site is the ultimate in statistics. If you know where to look, it has information about any non-BP, non-Sabermetric statistic from any player in any year and a few Sabermetric ones thrown in for good measure. It has World Series data, MVP and All-Star data, and historical charts. You know it; B-R.com’s got it.

Within the past year, B-R.com has unveiled a tool that makes this site the Elias Sports Bureau for the everyday fan. No longer are we confined to the stats available on sites like ESPN.com and MLB.com. With the B-R.com Play Index, you can call up those stats that used to be hard to find. Want to know, as I did recently, how a player ranks at his position through a certain age? Well, now you can.

The best part of this deal is this cost. This information is available for $28 for a year (or less if you sponsor a B-R.com page). It’s hard to turn it down, and I’m not getting anything for this glowing review.

With that wordy introduction, let’s get down to the fun. What can we find out about the Yankees using the B-R.com Play Index?

• Do the Yankees really have an 8th inning problem? The Yanks were 81-4 when leading after 7 innings last year. That’s a .953 winning percentage.
• Of all players with at least 1000 games played at short stop up to and including their age 33 season, Derek Jeter’s 2356 hits are second only to Robin Yount’s 2602 hits. But a good majority of Yount’s hits came when he was in the outfield. It’s hard to believe how great Jeter’s been.
• On 13 occasions in 2007, the Yankees struck out to start the game. Their 117 7th inning strike outs were most of any inning.
• This one’s my personal favorite. In his career, Dere Jeter has made an out toward short stop 882 times. Twent-six of those outs began a game; 15 ended a game; 8 put the Yanks ahead; and 1 tied the game. If this even comes up in conversation, let me know.

Really, the right person could go nuts with this tool and find themselves lost in the numbers for a long time. It opens up a world of stats and game outcomes that, for a long time, hadn’t been readily available to the average fan. I love the Internet.