Outside the Box

Similarity Scores - Baseball-Reference.com

I just thought of a new feature that wouldn't be that hard at all to add.

Essentially, I would have the career stats of the ten most similar players available by either age-based or career based and you could view those in rows above or below the player's stats. This would be similar to how Bill James presents the material in his books. It would be neat, if you could do this a couple different ways. You could do it as

Numbers for the very next season, or current season or any particular season.

Numbers for their career up to that point.

Numbers for the rest of their careers

You could even do it for the previous or next N years

All that would require is storing the season by season results for all players in a database and then building an easy to use front end for it. I have a lot of stuff to do, but something like this would be pretty easy to do before next season starts. This could be part of a similarity toolbox where I might even be able to set it up, so you can fiddle with different things to include and exclude in similarity scores. Essentially, you could create your own similarity scores based on what you feel is important.

This might also allow a database of career stats, so you could query on different combinations of statistics.

We'll see if something like this can work out.