About The Statistics

Player Inclusion Guidelines:

Players included in the TBC database of 120,778 are part of at least one of the following categories:

Major Leaguer since 1903
Minor Leaguers since 1978
Independent Leaguer since 2003
Japanese Leagues since 2007
Draft picks since 1965
College Division I player since 2002
Team Broadcasters
General Managers, Managers and Coaches

Player Profile Notes

Cities of birth: Based on available information. Some players have their hometown or residence listed. If you would like to dispute the listing, please use the EDIT PROFILE function.
Positions: information on the profile page is based on # of games played throughout the career. Position information on other pages is a static value updated at the end of each season and may not always be up to date.
High Schools: Only one high school is included per player (if included at all). When more than one school available, the graduating school was selected.
Colleges: May not be complete and TBC prefers to keep the list to schools where players played baseball.
Weight: This can change on a yearly (or monthly) basis so please take this only as a guideline. Often, players are included with their college weight and generally gain weight as they get older. If you'd like to update this value, use the EDIT PROFILE button on the player page.
Uniform Numbers: Complete for Major Leaguers since the 1930s and sporadic for the Minors and College with more of the numbers skewed towards the present day and not much before 1997.

Batting Title Qualifications

Using the formula of 3.1 plate appearances per his team's games, we've indicated on stat pages which players have qualified for their league batting title by putting the stat value in bold.

Stat Rankings

Top ranked players are based solely on the aggregated statistical rankings for all offensive and pitching categories (separately). Simply put, for each positive offensive or pitching category (as seen in Leaders section), the top 20 players from a league (AL and NL separately) are ranked and a # between 1 and 20 is given to the player based on his rank. 20 points for 1st place, 1 for 20th. The points are added up across all categories and then all players with points within the league are ranked.

Admittedly, its a primitive ranking system and is subject to strange occurences like pitchers being ranked due to their high # of sacrifice hits. But overall, its a good indicator of which players ranked high statistically and it has been found to be a good guide for a player's success within a league.

The rankings have been assigned for all captured leagues from the Major Leagues (since 1903) to the Minor Leagues (since 1978) and the College ranks (since 2002). Players playing on more than one team within a league have their stats aggregated together and so you might see, on a team's stats page, a player with a ranking despite low statistics values. Its likely that this player has more stats with another team in the same league. Stats across leagues in the same level or kept separate. AL and NL are separate and so a player changing leagues at the trade deadline may have his success understated in both leagues.

Data Sources

TBC is not an official stats provider for any of the leagues listed on the web site. All data has been sourced from other web sites or offline data sources and compiled into a separate database. Here are some of the sources that TBC uses or has used in the past:

Baseball America

MLB.Com

Retrosheet

The Sporting News

College team web sites

Baseball-Reference

MinorLeagueBaseball.Com

Point Streak

Wikipedia (Uniform #s)

Archive.org

Historical newspaper articles

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