In a previous blog I discussed Baseball reference.com as an excellent source of baseball statistics. It is an excellent source, but a coworker pointed out to me that it can be much more. There are numerous links down the left-hand side of the webpage. You can view MVP and Cy Young award winners from 1911 to today; you can see a play-by-play writeup of any All-star game and all the Home Run Derby contestants and their scores. Baseball-reference.com can help you to use up a lot of your spare time in many interesting ways.

The most fun can be had with a section called Frivolities. Oracle of Baseball will allow you to take two random baseball players and create a chain of connection between them. This is sort of a baseball version of the idea behind Six degrees of separation. I put in Barry Bonds and Ted Williams. The link between them needed four players. The real fun starts when you exclude a player from the chain. I excluded every player in the chain and Oracle established a new four player chain with completely different players.

Another interesting section was Non-pitchers who pitched. I was curious to find out what a non-pitcher was doing pitching in the first place, but I never did find this answer. Why would you ask the left fielder to pitch?! But anyway, in the lists, I noticed the name Terry Francona. I selected him and was taken to a page about him which included all of his statistics, but also, similar batters, similar players by age, and a breakdown of all the teams that he played for and how much he earned. There was also a connection to the Dressed to the nines online exhibit from the Baseball Hall of Fame. Here you could see what the uniforms looked like, both home and away, that were worn by each team during the time that he played there.

You can find players who were born on your birthday, players who died on your birthday and players who were born in any state or country. Did you know that 4 baseball players were born in Nashua NH? This is a fascinating way to spend a rainy day or one of those really hot days. If you love baseball and everything about it, this is the place for you!