Our friends at Sports Info Solutions (formerly known as Baseball Info Solutions) have provided us with a pitch framing measure back to 2011, which we have added to Baseball Reference. Before I explain any further, if you're unfamiliar with the concept of pitch framing please read Mike Fast's 2011 article on the topic and Ben Lindbergh's 2013 follow up.

The stat that we have added is called Strike Zone Runs Saved. It represents the runs saved by catcher framing. In our tables, it's labeled RszC and it's available from 2011 to the present. While this statistic is a potential component of Defensive Runs Saved (and therefore WAR), please note that we have elected to not integrate this number into DRS (or WAR) at this time. We may elect to do so in the future, but for now we agree with Bill James's stance that waiting for further research is a good idea.

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I'm pleased to welcome Alex Bonilla to Sports Reference as a User Affairs Coordinator. He'll be answering user questions, working on our new Stathead.com newsletter and much more. He's on twitter at @AlexChacon_OVA. This hire brings us to ten full-time employees.

In other news, Mike Lynch has been promoted from Users Affairs Coordinator and is now Product Manager for Sports Reference.

You may have noticed that our homepage has upcoming Spring Training games listed in the MLB Probable Pitchers section. If you click on a team's name in that section, it will bring up their 2018 Spring Training stats. For instance, here's the 2018 Yankees Spring Training stats. We'll be updating the stats daily.

We also have this register of all 2018 Spring Training stats. If you're looking to access that page via the site, it can be found in the 2018 season menu under the batting or pitching dropdown.

Thanks to the efforts of our friends at Retrosheet, we have added box scores back to the 1908 season to Baseball Reference (previously, our coverage went back to 1913). Additionally, we have added play-by-play coverage for games games as far back as 1925. Previously, our oldest play-by-plays were from 1930. In addition to the boxes and PBPs themselves, this update allows for a variety of new information searchable in the play index, as well as new rows of information in team/player/league statistics tables.

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I'm pleased to welcome Jaclyn Mahoney and Jay Hutchinson to Sports Reference in the roles of Data Developer. They'll be working behind the scenes to make sure our data is accurate and updated in a timely manner. Their main focus, for now, will be helping us push FBref.com out the door this spring.

I've written a bit about them on our About Page.

You may have noticed that we added projections for 2018 to player and team pages last month. We have now added a register with all 2018 projections. See the batting projections here and the pitching projections here. These projections are very simple and are done in an automated way using Tom Tango's Marcels forecasting system, which you can read about here.

Users, your voices have been heard! After much clamoring, we have added a Player Batting Comparison Finder and a Player Pitching Comparison Finder to the Baseball Reference Play Index. With these new tools, you can compare the statistics for any season or set of seasons for up to six players at a time. For instance, here's the top six vote getters in the 2017 AL MVP race.

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We just wanted to quickly announce that we have added 2017 stats for the Pecos League and the Pacific Association. You can see all 35 leagues we have 2017 coverage for here.

We are thrilled to announce the addition of two incredible new tools to the Baseball Reference Play Index:

The Team Batting Season Finder and the Team Season Pitching Finder.

These new tools will allow Play Index subscribers to create customized leaderboards for all team pitching/batting stats in Major League history.  In addition to standard team stats, we've also opened up searches for value stats, advanced stats, win probability stats, ratio stats, baserunning stats, situational stats, and stats in various pitch counts.

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Thanks to the tireless efforts of SABR, we have recently added a new Major League baseball player to our database. However, you won't find this player on our list of recent debuts. That's because this "new" player was actually a player in the 1884 Union Association.

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