| Players | Teams | Draft | Minor Leagues | College | High Schools | Stats Machine | Managers | Posters | Links | MVN Blogs | Advertising |
|
|
| NFL Tickets, MLB Tickets, Red Sox Tickets, NY Yankees Tickets, World Series Tickets, Cubs Tickets, Patriots Tickets and Steelers Tickets. |
| John Mayer Tickets, Bob Dylan Tickets – Jersey Boys Tickets, Jimmy Buffett Tickets, Cardinals Tickets, Red Sox Tickets, New York Yankees Tickets, White Sox Tickets. |
Frequently Asked QuestionsI found an error on the site, how do I let you know?Send us an email explaining the nature of the error that you find with as much detail as possible and though I'll modify my database immediately, it would not show up on the site until the next web site update, which could happen about once a month, depending on when the next project is due to be released. If its a bug relating to functionality regarding the web site's usability, a fix will be put out as soon as possible. Can you help me contact a player? The Baseball Cube does not have contact with the players listed on the site and therefore, could not provide email addresses for each player. Your best course of action is to contact one of the teams for which that player is currently (or once) affiliated with. They could probably tell you how to contact a certain player, most likely it will entail going through them but you will be able to reach your goal nonetheless. On occasion, players or relatives of players listed on this site contact The Baseball Cube for various reasons. Please be advised that if you are one of these players or relatives that your email will remain confidential and will not be given to any other person(s). Where does your data come from? There is no simple answer to this question. The quick answer is that the data comes from yearly publications and web sites. A more detailed answer is that the data was pieced together using official web sites for each team, from MLB to college. Historical data has been amassed from historical publications and Media Guides and Almanacs. There will soon be a detailed listing of all sources on the site, something I have been meaning to get around to for some time. The data on this site was not "Copied" directly from another site. There are over 200 sources of the data on this site and it was all pieced together and reorganized to make what you see today. I played in the minors. How come I'm not listed? Unfortunately, I do not have minor league stats for all players who have ever played. The current status (as of 2004) is that I have career minor league stats for all major leaguers who played 1999 and later. I have career minor league stats for all players who played in 2002 or later, regardless of whether they made it to the show. The plans are to go backwards from 2002 (2001,2000 etc) until I can go no more! If you would like to help me out by sending me your statistics and profile information, I will be more than happy to add you to the site. Why do you bother with college stats? This is a fair question and I think the easiest answer is to say that its because no one else is doing it. But I have found it very interesting to see how a major leaguer or minor leaguer did in their college years. Do the key stats hold up? Does a player with a high OBP in college carry that over to the minor leagues? Do pitchers with high strikeout rates in college have high strikeout rates going forward? I am sure there are those out there who would like to chart the correlation between college statistics and a career in baseball. Are your stats for sale? Currently, I have only one product available for sale called the Baseball Cube Stats Register. Its an excel spreadsheet that includes all mlb and minor league players from the most recent baseball season and includes some profile information and all of their historical stats going back to college, if available. It is currently listed in the data store. The only stipulation of purchase is that the data be used for your own personal use and not be redistributed through a similar web site to the Baseball Cube. What is the technology behind The Baseball Cube? Warning! This part is for techies only! There are 2 schools of thought behind building a data-intensive web site. The first is that you pre-build your site offline and load it as static web pages onto the web. The second is that you build dynamic pages based on passing parameters from page to page, pulling this dynamic data from the databases. The baseball Cube has been built using school of thought #1. That is, almost all of the pages that you see on this site have been pre-compiled. The drawback to this type of architecture is that there is a big song and dance required everytime an update needs to be made to almost any section of the site. With some good planning and solid programming offline, it is possible to minimize the impact by creating detailed update paths for all affected pages on a given project. The online technology is mostly HTML, disguised as SHTML. SHTML allows for the inclusion of INCLUDE files which can be used for common components which appear on several pages. For example, the header on TBC is simply 1 file that is called by each page as it is being loaded. If I need to make a change to the header, then I change the header and upload to the server and the change is applied to all pages that use it. This is recommended practice whenever possible as it reduces the size of each stored file and it makes for easy maintenance on common components. Active Server Pages (ASP) are used where required. An ASP page will be required when dynamic content is expected. Dynamic content can be defined as "User Input affecting content of a page." The search pages use ASP to produce detailed player search results. You may also be redirected to Sports-Wired.Com domain at times and you will see ASP often on these pages. ASP is essentially a script that creates HTML pages when called. So you can see that when you call one of these pages, the page being called must first be converted into HTML before displaying results. Not the most efficient way to use the web. Online and offline databases are Microsoft Access, if only because its easy to use and available to me. I am interested in looking for alternative means of data storage but so far, I have not found a suitable replacement. Static vs Dynamic is an interesting debate for web usage as they both have advantages and drawbacks. Having tried both, I can tell you that the tradeoff is for the programmer only and if you want a successful web site, you need to keep the needs of your site's users in mind. Is this your full-time job? At times it has been and I readily admit that I wish it was, but it does not have the earning power to support my family and so I spend the days playing with programming code and trying not to break systems at an excellent company in the Montreal area to make ends meet. Maybe some day… Tell me a little about who you are? As you can tell from the site, I am a baseball fanatic and someone who likes to play around with designing web sites. Put those together and you've got The Baseball Cube. I was born in 1973 and I am a Pisces. I live near Montreal up in Canada, where the baseball team is dying a slow death due to its lack of solid ownership over the last 15 years. I married my wife Christine in 2001 and we have 2 beautiful daughters just waiting to become a sleek double-play combination. I grew up with baseball, playing it and reading about it. When I was 8, I used to photocopy scoresheets from an Expos game program and use them to score some games that I invented using a marble and a pen. I made real lineups, batted left or right and kept stats for a 12-team league. At the age of 12, I discovered Strat-O-Matic and found it much more interesting to have results based on statistical tendencies. It made keeping stats much more interesting and much more accurate. I went through a few different types of board games before trying my hand at computer baseball games. I figured, why keep stats myself when the computer could do it for me. Trouble was, in the late 80s and early 90s, it was very tough to find a game that didn't have strange bugs. In Earl Weaver Baseball, for some odd reason, my flame throwing closer would throw the ball over the centerfield fence when you called his best fastball. And on a curveball in the dirt, if you were batting, you best not be double clicking the swing button by accident to attempt to hold up your swing lest you get called as many strikes as times you clicked on the button. And the classic bug, in MicroLeague baseball, when I attempted a steal of second and got thrown out, instead of the runner going back to the dugout, the centerfielder came running in and my buddy had to play the rest of the inning without a giant hole in his outfield. All this and sometimes the stats went bonkers in certain situations. And so all this frustration caused me to abort the computer games and go back to manual scoring on the board games. All this nerdiness, and I still managed to find a wife. Go figure! When I'm not pounding away on the keyboard, I like to play with my daughters, read and jog. I love to travel and though my dream is to someday get to every major league park, I have put that aside for now because a vacation is too precious to waste it by going to Milwaukee instead of Disneyworld. I have already been to Olympic stadium, Skydome, Tropicana field, The New Comiskey and Camden Yards and I hope to get to a few others in the near future. Are there really no Expo fans up there? This is what MLB would like you to believe but nothing can be farther from the truth. The fans here are dormant and its not because the fans don't like baseball but because they've been jerked around way too much since the late 80s. What do I mean by jerked around? Well, we've had about 4 fire sales since 1994. We lost Larry Walker, Marquis Grissom, Pedro Martinez, Rondell White, Darren Fletcher, John Wetteland, Moises Alou and last year, Javy Vazquez and Vladimir Guerrero. Not only this, but the team does absolutely no marketing towards fans in outlying areas, let alone the city of Montreal. Major League Baseball has systematically taken all the life out of the Expos by allowing it to remain under MLB control for the 3 years. Montreal can support Major League Baseball with no problem, but only with the right ownership group. One that is willing to do some marketing, promotions, embed itself into the community and provide a competitive team each year while keeping a hold of some their stars while they are in their prime. Do I think it will happen? I honestly don't think that there will be an ownership group in the city that will do all those things and I am expecting the team to someday be moved to Washington or Virginia. Will it be a big blow to the city? Yes. Absolutely. There are a lot of Expo fans up here and though its hard to see them behind Montreal's label of being a hockey town, they are here. And they're not just here. They're in Ottawa, Northern New York, Vermont and Eastern Canada. Don't believe everything MLB and the media tell you about the Expos. 95% of the time, its just not true. Ask any Expos fan up here. Can I have some data to use on my site? I will sell subsets of data, customized to your needs for a price. It takes time for me to extract and format the data and so this time must be accounted for. All that I ask is that if you are going to use any data from my site, that you properly reference the data with a link to The Baseball Cube at http://www.thebaseballcube.com Player x was not born in the city listed. Please change it. I have no problem changing a place of birth or high school for a particular player provided your source is better than mine! If you are a relative, friend of former teammate of the player in question, I will be happy to update the information. In several instances, the city of birth listed next to a player is his place of residence and not his actual place of birth. That is the most common error and its due to the fact that for younger players being added to the database, the actual place of birth is not always available. A more infrequent error is the name of the city being correct, but the state being wrong. For example, player x shows Springfield,MO but in reality, its Springfield,MA. I've done lots of data entry after midnight so you'll have to forgive these errors! Do you have any information on Uniform Numbers that players wore? Though it is an excellent idea for a future enhancement to the site, the feature is not currently supported on The Baseball Cube. I would recommend that you visit http://www.baseball-almanac.com as I've noticed that they track this information for professionals. |
|