Huge Expansion of Unavailable Players!
To celebrate the 9 Inning Companion's second birthday, I've prepared the biggest expansion to the Registry since its first publication! Over 500 players with nearly 1,600 cards, nearly all of them with stats and positions.
Read on to learn about where the data comes from and why it took two years to get it into the Registry.
Where Did The Data Come From?
As mentioned in my Registry Data-Dive: December 2020 , the Companion Registry got its start with the now-retired Free Agent Tracker. I manually logged base stats and GI as I input free agents. When I decided to create and publish the Registry search as we now know it, the folks who ran the Reddit stat spreadsheet graciously agreed to let me port in stat data they had gathered over the years.
At the time, I'd logged about 800 cards myself. The Reddit spreadsheet data gave me another 3,500. I also added another ~500 cards from other sources, leaving the Companion to launch with nearly 5,000 cards total.
At the time, I was still figuring out what I wanted to do with this brand new site - essentially building the plane as it flew. To prevent issues with duplicate cards and misspelled names, I decided I would only import data for cards that were currently in the game. This was a tradeoff between keeping the Registry clean and importing the maximum number of players.
I ended up skipping nearly 1,600 cards from the Reddit spreadsheet.
What Allowed This To Happen Now?
Two big changes to the site got me to the point where I could finally process and import those remaining unavailable players: Baseball Reference IDs and an improved stat submission flow.
Baseball Reference ID
A while back, I improved the way I distinguish players, namely by adding Baseball Reference IDs for every single entry in the Companion Registry. This allows me to handle players with similar in-game names, such as Anibal / Aaron Sanchez (A.Sanchez) and Dom / Drew Smith (D.Smith, both frustratingly playing for the Mets).
I can also use the bbref ID to verify the names of players. They don't always match the player names in-game (Com2Us is often inconsistent) but this verification helped identify a few typos and duplicates in the Reddit data. It also means that if the player returns to the game, I'll be able to more easily match them to any existing data in the Registry, even if Com2Us uses a different in-game name.
Stat Corrections
The other big change was that I made it easier to submit stats on the Companion, which included allowing stat corrections.
Despite the hard work of the crew that maintained the Reddit spreadsheet, I knew that some of the data had errors / mistakes. Over the past two years, I've edited the stats / positions of nearly a third of that original batch of data from Reddit. I also knew that there wasn't a convenient way for users who found these issues to tell me about them.
That changed with the overhaul to the stat submission workflow. Users can easily and quickly submit corrections by following a link shown on every player card. It takes you to a friendly UI with the player's existing stats pre-loaded. You just need to fix whatever is incorrect and hit submit:
I'm sure Jed's 15 HRs that year warrants this POW...
My hope is that the community will continue to help me find and fix any stat errors in the Companion Registry, eventually weeding them all out.
With these improvements complete, I felt comfortable importing the remaining, unavailable cards.
Who Is Included In This Import?
The complete details can be found in the Registry Update but here are some highlights.
Top Batters (by OVR)
| Player | OVR | aOVR |
|---|---|---|
| C.Beltran'06 (NYM) | 74.2 | 76.3 |
| C.Carter'16 (MIL) | 69.6 | 73.5 |
| J.Bautista'14 (TOR) | 71.6 | 73.3 |
| D.Ortiz'16 (BOS) | 68.2 | 73.2 |
| M.Reynolds'09 (AZ) | 70.2 | 72.6 |
Top Pitchers (by OVR)
| Player | OVR | aOVR |
|---|---|---|
| J.Fernandez'16 (MIA) | 74.8 | 76.9 |
| J.Peavy'07 (SD) | 74.8 | 76.0 |
| T.Lincecum'08 (SF) | 74.2 | 75.6 |
| R.A. Dickey'12 (NYM) | 74.0 | 74.9 |
| K.Uehara'13 (BOS) | 69.8 | 74.6 |
Overall, there are 30 new cards with Primes and over 150 with Sigs. For Patrons with Site Access, you'll be able to include these unavailable cards as Endgame Players in the Best Lineup tool and model the Sig boosts in the Sandbox .
Every team had at least 30 new cards added, with SF, BAL, and TOR leading the pack at 86, 71, and 70 cards respectively.
There were 750 batters and 810 pitchers. Here's the breakdown by position:
Batter Positions
| C | 118 |
| 1B | 92 |
| 2B | 98 |
| SS | 89 |
| 3B | 106 |
| LF | 161 |
| CF | 103 |
| RF | 95 |
| DH | 46 |
Pitcher Positions
| SP | 284 |
| RP | 467 |
| CP | 59 |
Improved Registry Filter
Finally, I wanted to make it easier to find these new unavailable players in the Companion Registry. Multiple people have told me they were surprised to learn that unavailable players were even viewable at all because they hadn't seen the filter for it.
To remedy this, I've added a new filter on the main search page: Availability. It's a simple select box with Available and Unavailable options. This puts the filter front and center, and it also means you can now exclude Available cards if you want.
Hopefully this makes it easier to find the cards you're looking for.
More Registry Improvements On The Way!
I'm not done overhauling the Registry search page either!
I realized it's been over a year since I last updated the search filters, and even longer since I revisited the results UI. Over the next few months I plan on updating the page to make it easier to use and faster to respond.
I'll be posting some polls and status updates over on my Patreon to gauge interest in different improvement ideas.
Thank you!
Thank you for reading and for visiting my site!
I could not do this without the support of the community and especially without the support of all of my followers on Patreon. If you'd like to participate in the upcoming polls for Registry improvements or simply support me in maintaining the Companion, please consider joining me by clicking the button below!
I work on this site in my free time and every bit of support makes a big difference in keeping this a sustainable project for me.