Author: The Baseball Zealot

Kudos to Baseball Reference again, this time for their “Share” feature that they just implemented in their stat pages. 

The Share feature does what it implies… it allows people to share any stats on almost any Baseball Reference stat page in a variety of formats. 

The formats available are html table, bbcode, a javascript widget, an html iframe, pre-formatted text, comma delimited file or just simply a hyperlink.  Those baseball bloggers, forum posters and stat hounds who frequently cite baseball statistics will find this very useful. 

Just browse to the stat page you want to quote and click the “Share” link. Since Clyde Vollmer was born today, I’ll use his batting stats as an example.  The “Sharing Toolbox” will then come up. 

This is where the best feature comes up.  Don’t want to display the CS stats?  Not interested in the age of the player?  Not to worry, BR has allowed for us to customize the display of the table by deleting columns or rows that you want.

Just click on the red X of any unwanted column or row and it won’t appear in the final result.  There’s also a red X within an arrow on each row and column that will delete trailing ones. 

In Vollmer’s case, I’m going to make his table a simple one with just homeruns and rbis.  I’ll click on the red arrow on the rbi column deleting everything to the right of it.  I then deleted every other column except Tm, Lg, HR, and RBI.  Not being interested in per team stats I deleted every row below his career stats, too.

Don’t forget, stat tables in Baseball Reference allow you to click on stat column headers to sort by stat categories.  In my example with Vollmer though, I’ll keep it in chronological order.

Once you get the stat table the way you want it, click on the format type you want.  A window will then pop up giving you the code or link you need. 

In the Vollmer case, I clicked html table and was given html code for a table. 

Here is the result for Clyde Vollmer’s homerun and rbi totals for his career:

There you go.  A reasonably good looking table that was easy to generate (probably easier than I made it sound).  It’s easy enough to go into the code and remove the link to B-R but why be a tool?  It’s the least I could do.

It should be emphasized that this feature works from almost any stat page in Baseball Reference.  Splits, Game logs, team stats, you name it. 

Oh managers pages too.  I just used it in a recent post about Bobby Cox.

In this day and age when MLB is trying their best to lay claim to baseball statistics as a commodity, it nice to see Baseball Reference making it easy to share them.  Keep up the good work, B-R!