I was trying to find who the HR leaders were at the end of last April for this week’s mlb.com column. I used to keep a pretty full set of Baseball Weekly around for this purpose, but they got pretty ratty and took up a lot of room and I could find most of what I wanted to find in them more easily online. Like that sort of data stuff was everywhere.
Except looking for it today, all I could find was 2005 data. All the big sites now have the same format. I asked MLB.com stats honcho Cory Schwartz if it was buried somewhere on the site, but it isn’t. They no longer offer past season sortable splits.
Bummer. But I kept looking and came across this page at baseballmusings.com. I haven’t had time to explore, but this front end to the retrosheet database seems to work great. It isn’t fancy, but it’s fast and I suspect will become a most valuable tool in the months to come.
Bravo.