The Baseball Cube

How to Use The Baseball Cube

How to Use The Baseball Cube

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The TBC Data Store allows you to purchase some standard datasets available on the site or even request a custom extract of your own design!
How to use The Baseball Cube
The Baseball Cube is a baseball data research resource with a wealth of historical information for all major levels of baseball. The site is designed logically into the following categories:

  • Players
  • MLB
  • Minors
  • College
  • High School
  • Draft
  • Research
  • (Everything Else)
  • About

  • Each category above is rich with content. Essentially, the site aims at providing a complete view of a player`s career for as many players as possible. All pages extend off of the player pages and support them as metadata. For example, a player has stats for Vanderbilt. Click on Vanderbilt and see all we have on the Commodores and then by extension, college baseball. View the player's city of birth with all of the other players born there. It goes on and on.

    Here are some tips to help you use the site with efficiency and effectiveness.

    PREMIUM:
    Before getting too far, its important to mention that we have a PREMIUM section. With it, you get access to research applications, the Player TRACKER, Data Store discounts, custom metrics + metrics management and no ads. Actually, there is a ton more functionality listed in our PREMIUM FEATURES article. I recommend reviewing it before continuing here.

    Search:
    The TBC Search Engine will help you navigate the site quicker. Start typing into the search box on the top right and you will see it will quickly provide suggestions for players. This allows for quick navigation to players. You can also hit ENTER and redirect to the search results page from where you can see available results for team-related topics. There is an article on how to use the search along with some shortcuts. Of course, you can also try to rely on Google but once you are on the site, this is the easiest way to jump to the next player of interest. I find the quick-search is very responsive and makes navigation quick on either desktop or mobile versions.

    Navigation
    As mentioned above, each section is rich with content. At the top of the site, you will always see a gray navigation bar with the category headers. Clicking on the topic will display a larger list of options for that category.The amount of options available here depends on the width of your screen. You should be able to get to almost section from here. Additionally, the house icon will bring you back to the home page from where you can also navigate to all sections on the site. This is particularly useful for mobile navigation since the navigation bar will show less options per category. Each category also has its own portal page and from there, you can access each section as well.

    While navigating content, there will be another navigation bar related to the content. This includes related topics or alternate views of the current topic. For example, when viewing a player, you are defaulted to his stats but you will also be presented with several other data views for the player including transactions, awards, draft information and much more. The player navigation menu is hidden on the mobile side but easily accessible by clicking the MORE link. You might also see dropdowns in this section which provide quick links to similar elements. For example, if you are looking at Vanderbilt's history, you can jump quickly to another SEC school's history.

    Page Layout:
    Most pages have a similar layout. Depending on the subject, some pages have an attribute section at the top of the page. For example, a player page has his date of birth, height, weight etc. Stat pages will show the team record, manager, league and much more. For PREMIUM subscribers, player pages will have an extra section for analysis.

    Below the attributes, you might see a written description of the page and below that, almost always, there will be a grid (Table) with data. All tables have virtually the same functionality. Some tables are longer/wider than others. If the width of the table is too wide for the display, there will be a scrollbar below the grid. If the grid is long ... you can scroll a few times before you find the end ... you might need some patience while waiting for larger tables to load. An attempt was made to limit the size of each grid for both data protection purposes and site performance. You may also want to scroll down to make sure there are no data views you are missing.

    Grid functionality: Each grid has some special functionality, most of which is only available to PREMIUM subscribers. In most cases, the data will be relatively similar within the grid but its what you can do to the table that will change. Here are some PREMIUM options:

  • Hide Rows
  • highlight Row - Click row (where there is no link). It will turn Orange.
  • Filter rows - Manually or via pre-defined filters
  • Compare Players - Select 2-25 players for direct statistical comparison
  • Multi-Player Stat Viewer - Select 2-25 players to combine their pages into 1.
  • Sorting - Click the header to sort. Click again to reverse sort. Takes a few seconds on bigger grids.
  • Cell Filters - Double-Click a cell value to apply a filter. Text values will apply an = filter. Numeric values will apply a >= filter.
  • Restore rows - Re-display any hidden rows
  • Export to CSV - Convert the grid content into comma-separated text
  • Leaderboard effects - Player and team stat pages will highlight where player was top 10 in gray (2-10) or light green (#1)

    Metric Display:
    PREMIUM subcribers have control over the batting and pitching metrics displayed within the batting and pitching stat grids. Subscribers can choose which standard metrics (TBC-defaults) are included and in what order. Also, it is possible to create your own metrics for display, provided they use the stats already available within the grid. (You can't add WAR). You can also decide whether to show the standard or custom metrics first.

    Page Updates:
    Pages are updated intermittently, depending on their content. Some content is updated daily while some is yearly. With many variations in between. The site architecture allows for a mostly quick cycle from data collection to publishing. To track when data is added, please follow us on Twitter or read the updates section.

    Inline Grid Filters:
    Also a PREMIUM feature. There are some grids that allow for filtering without reloading the page. You will see checkboxes at the top of a grid that supports this feature. An example would be a team roster with a Hitters, Pitchers, Active or Recently Active checkbox. Click the box and the content below will be filtered to be a subset based on the filters selected. You can apply multiple filters to the page. Recently Active + Hitters will show players meeting both criteria. The benefit of this features is to allow you to navigate a larger grid within the browser with less noise.

    Corrections:
    There is no doubt you will be surfing throught the data on the site and you will come across errors in the data, whether biographical or statistical. Sometimes you may find duplicates or 2 players merged together under the same profile. I encourage you to send me the corrections, otherwise I will likely never find them. The database is a beach and though some errors are easily caught, many others require you to walk right by them. I run some quality scripts against the data periodically to identify issues but this will only catch the outliers. Anyways, use the contact us form to let us know the error. And again, please understand I'm one person running this site and we are not an official source of baseball data. Only attempting to provide a service to baseball fans. Be nice :-)

    For any other questions/suggestions regarding the site, please don't hesitate to send us an email.


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