It's been a while since I blogged over here about the Minor League Splits Database--that's in part because I started a blog just for MLS updates. If you're interested, that's here.

The reason I bring it up today is that I've added a new feature to the site: page sponsorships. It's a way for regular users of the site to show their support, and for me to try to break even on the costs of running it, and maybe even buy a ticket to a Beloit Snappers game sometime.

Since the official launch of the sponsorships was just hours ago, 6175 of 6177 total players are available, and the vast majority are five bucks. Big-time prospects are $15, but even at that rate, somebody wants Yovani Gallardo, don't they? More information on sponsorships is here.

If you like Minor League Splits, go check it out.

But this time, I came up with it all on my own!

I'm thinking of adding leaderboards to MinorLeagueSplits.com, and ran up against the problem of deciding who "qualifies." The usual rule for batters is 3.1 PA/team-game; for pitchers, I think it's one inning per team-game. Over the course of a Major League season, then, it's 502 ABs or 162 IP.

That's easy, but in the avalanche of data that drives the MLSD, I don't track team-games. I could fetch it easily enough, but I wanted a way to determine who qualified from information my program already had at hand.

One thing I do have at my disposal is total PAs and IPs for each league. (For instance, here's the split table for Southern League hitting.) I checked the Baseball-Reference.com page for the 2005 NL and discovered that the PA qualifying threshold (502 PA) is almost precisely half of one percent of the league-wide total.

Pretty cool, huh?

The IP threshold isn't so mathematically elegant, but again it's a reasonably round number: it's almost exactly 0.7% of the league-wide total.

And while we're on the topic of Minor League Splits, I have to point out to you that Yovani Gallardo, in his first 18 2/3 IP in Double-A, has yet to walk a right-handed hitter. That's no walks in 39 ABs, to go with just five hits, all singles. Proof at last: Gallardo is the polar opposite of Doug Davis.

It's a little silly to post updates to the MLSD here on Brew Crew Ball, since the splits moved. But I'm going to do it anyway.

Today, I introduced several new features:

• Every splits table now includes a "Close and Late" split, defined as 7th inning or later, team at bat is leading by no more than one, is tied, or is trailing with at least the tying run on deck.
• Batting splits tables now include splits by lineup position.
• Batting tables also include splits by defensive position, including DH and PH.
• Pitching splits tables include splits by inning.

Ok, it's official. The Minor League Splits Database has moved: It's at MinorLeagueSplits.com for the duration. I updated the "old" pages on this site through games of 7/7 just now, but that's the last I'll do for them. All of the links on the front page are updated to reflect the new site.

I wrote a bit yesterday about some new features at the new location. If you find any problems, please let me know. I spent a big chunk of today tweaking code and correcting a big mistake in my my master player database (now 5,900 strong!) that affected a few hundred guys, including most of the AZL Brewers team. I hope that after all that, most of the problems are gone, but I know better :).

I've updated the MLSD through games of July 6th.  In much bigger and better news, I've finally moved the whole shebang to a prettier, database-backed site independent of Brew Crew Ball.  Check it out here:

www.MinorLeagueSplits.com

I encourage you to check out the new site and poke around.  Consider yourselves my alpha-testers...I wrote most of the code for that site without an internet connection, and it's my first try at web programming, so there are probably mistakes.  

I hope you like the simple design--for the most part, I stole it from a very popular website that most of you are probably familiar with.  

Bigger news, though, is that along with moving the site to a new home, I added some new features that I've long wanted to include:

• A player search function, so you don't have to hunt through league and team lists to find a certain player.
  
  
• For players who have been on multiple teams, there are always links to their splits for those other teams, so you can quickly compare, for instance, Yovani Gallardo's A-ball performance with his Double-A dominance.
  
  
• Along the same lines, you can also see a player's cumulative splits if he has spent time with multiple teams.
  
  
• I've saved what I think is the best for last: now you can see a full-season game log for every Minor League player.  You'll find out how the player performed (including batted-ball types) every day he's been in the lineup, and you can see the progression of his averages throughout the season.  The game log feature is a bit slow, because the site generates those tables when you click on them--I'd like to pre-generate all of them for you, but there are over 5,000 players in the database, so it's far from practical when the alternative is waiting a few seconds.

In the next couple of days, I'll shift entirely to the new site and stop updating the one here.  I purposely didn't link to any of the features I mentioned because I want at least a few of you to head over and explore.  Let me know what you think--it's a work in progress; most of all I just want it to be as functional as possible.

Minor League Splits are now up-to-date for all games through June 26th for all full-season leagues plus the VSL.  All of the short-season leagues are in full swing; splits should be available by the 4th.

All full-season leagues plus the VSL are now updated through games of June 25.  Enjoy!

Minor League Splits are now up to date through games of June 23rd for all full-season leagues plus the Venezuelan Summer League.

Oddly enough, for the first time in a month or so, something happened in a game that my program wasn't prepared to parse and couldn't even work around.  In the 6-23 Kane County Cougars game, an injury led to the DH switching to shortstop and the pitcher entering the batting lineup.  One of the trickier parts (for me to write, anyway) of my parsing program keeps a record of the current batting lineup and fielding alignment for each team at all times.  The program handled the DH-SS move just fine, but since the play-by-play log didn't say anything about the pitcher moving to a certain spot in the order, it didn't know what was going on when someone pinch-hit for the pitcher.  Since the pitcher wasn't included in the current batting lineup, I got an error message, cursed a lot until I figured it out, and did a decidedly slapdash job of fixing it.

Enjoy!