Exploring FindTheBest.com’s Player Pages

Overview

FindTheBest.com is a [re]search engine that aggregates data from on- and off-line to give users detailed overviews of and the ability to compare products, services, industries, employers, and other topics. They structure information in a visually-oriented way with lots of graphs, charts, and tables. It’s aesthetically engaging and easy to use. More about what they do, per their About page:

There’s a tremendous amount of information on the web, but no way to know it all and be confident that you’ve reached the best conclusion. Search engines and topic-specific websites are great at returning facts, but not so much at providing knowledge. We’re collecting, structuring, and connecting all the world’s data so you have everything you need to research with confidence.

It’s a pretty useful tool for comparing hotels in an area, airlines, or even colleges, among other things. But it appears that the company’s ambition extends far beyond that. When I first happened upon FindTheBest, being a dutiful baseball nerd, I immediately started to explore their MLB player pages.

MLB Player Pages

One of the first things one sees on FindTheBest’s MLB player pages, among the standard “biographical” info, is “Total Compensation.” Right away, I had hopes that there would be more atypical information—by “atypical” I mean stuff that you wouldn’t find on ESPN or even on MLB.com’s player pages.

The “At the Plate” section of FTB’s player page lives up to that expectation to some degree. Instead of listing a player’s standard current season or career stats, the first tab of the bin offers a strike zone visual and the title “Where [Player] is Hitting Pitches.” The accompanying text is quite interesting; consider the entry for 2014 Mike Trout:

Trout is hitting the ball well with a .287 average so far this season compared to the American League average of .100. As a well respected [sic] hitter with a good eye, Trout has drawn 83 total walks (6 intentional) leading to a great on-base percentage of .377. With a .90 higher OBP vs. his AVG, Michael is having a great season by moneyball standards as he’s getting lots of free bases.

The pitch zones you see here show the results of all strikes (swinging and looking) thrown to Trout this year with his best hitting zones in darker blue. Based on what he’s seen and been swinging at, pitches around knee high over the middle seem to be his speciality as he is batting about .400 with 30 hits on those pitches. One area pitchers have gotten the best of him has been where Trout has been rung up 7 times and has no hits.

From this, it is clear that FTB’s editors have some basic sense of the importance and popularity of advanced metrics and analysis in baseball; else, why lead with this info as opposed to the standard batting stats? At the same time, the information would be very misleading to a more casual fan, and doesn’t really seem to have a grasp of context. For instance, “the American League average [AVG] of .100” seems to be filler text.¹ The composite 2014 AL batting average was .253. Even if we took the sum total of the batting averages for every player with one plate appearance on the year and divided by the same number of players (which would be meaningless, for obvious reasons, but which I did just to see if that’s where FTB was getting this number), we’d get an “average AVG” of .190. Why have that text there at all in this case? Better to omit than to mislead, methinks.

Also, there’s the flag-raising phrase “by moneyball standards,” which, in this case, reduces the “moneyball” concept to the number of walks a player draws. This acknowledges a vague industry concept while perpetuating a common misunderstanding about it. (Though, I suppose that lowercase-m “moneyball” might already be a colloquialism for “draws a lot of walks.”)

While the text leaves something to be desired (and personally, I wouldn’t include looking strikes in this graphic), hovering over each strike zone tiles with reveal the hitter’s hit percentage, contact percentage, and swinging strike percentage. When FindTheBest learns to contextualize this data, I think it will be a real boon for them to have graphics like this.

Also included in the “At the Plate” section is a table with three tabs. Standard batting stats are in one tab; then there’s an “Expanded” tab, which includes unique (if relatively meaningless) metrics such as $/H and $/HR; and then a “Value” tab, which includes secondary average (SECA), RAA, RAR, WAR, oWAR, dWAR, and various replacement level baselines. This is a nice combination of the mainstream, the sabermetric, and the unique, even if there is not much to contextualize all this info. In an attempt to provide some context there is the “Glossary” tab in the third bin—a nice feature in theory, but it only provides definitions of standard stats, not for advanced stats, which are the ones most likely to require explanation.

The “Slugging” section is briefer and probably mistitled, but it includes the most interesting graphic on the MLB player pages, in my opinion. In it, a baseball field is divided into thirty sections. Hovering over a section reveals a number of stats about balls the player hit to that section: the number of total hits, a breakdown of hit type, and what percentage of the player’s balls in play went to that section of the field.

The player pages round out, with several more sections: Gear (for purchase); Game Log; [Year] [Team] Roster (with links to other player pages from that team/year); and Career Batting. These are pretty straight forward, so I won’t discuss them in detail.

I’d be remiss not to examine the Compare feature, though, which is a defining feature of FindTheBest.com as a whole. The compare search box is found at the top of the player page, directly under the player’s team and position information. Once you select the player to compare, click the “Compare Now” link.

I should note that there’s something different in the way that FTB categorizes MLB players: each player season has its own entry at FTB, so if you want to compare 2014 Giancarlo Stanton with 2014 Mike Trout, you have to make sure to select the player pages for those years. At first I thought this was kind of tedious, but then I realized that this allows users to compare different player seasons from historical eras, something that’s not easy to set up at any site of which I’m aware. Still, I think FTB would better served its users to develop an option to select a player season from one main player page, rather than having users search for the individual seasons.

Some General Conclusions

My overall impression is that FindTheBest is drawing from some quality sources (Baseball-Reference.com and sportrac.com being two very likely sources), and that the editors have an awareness of the importance of certain concepts (e.g. “moneyball”) and statistics within the arena of baseball analysis. They are trying to create a comprehensive, nuanced, yet easy-to-navigate profile based on the information they have available. The potential is there to expose casual fans to new metrics and ways of understanding the game, and to be a great resource for more serious fans and writers.

To reach that potential, however, I think FindTheBest will have to do a number of things. Primarily, they will have to exhibit a greater understanding of the statistics they present and the concepts they reference so as not to mislead their users. FTB doesn’t yet have a exhibit that they have a grasp on what the all information means or how it can be used, and so the placement and arrangement of the material doesn’t seem cohesive. I’m sure that FindTheBest has systems in place to collect and place data and to generate some of the text for these player pages, but real human editors are deciding which data to include and how to present it. I think that the pages will improve in short order if FTB continues to invest the necessary human hours.

At this point, FTB doesn’t offer anything substantive that a place like FanGraphs doesn’t offer, and the player pages at FanGraphs (and other sites) are situated firmly among articles that use and explain the data contained in the player pages and leaderboards&emdash;not to mention that other sites have more useful glossaries. But sites like FanGraphs aren’t general search engines with 25 million monthly users, and they’re probably never going to include the quasi-proprietary stats associated with other sites like Baseball-Reference or Baseball Prospectus. So, there definitely is a place for FindTheBest as a research tool in the baseball community, and even more so as a place where casual fans discover new things.

NFL Player Pages, Briefly

In the NFL player pages at FindTheBest, you find the basic season and career stats and game logs that you can find most places, some of them also presented in graph or chart form. There is detailed salary information, which is presented using the same breakdown that sportrac.com.

In that they are simpler, the NFL player pages at FindTheBest are actually more useful. Player salary information isn’t included at any of the sites one might normally check for stats, and the sites that do provide salary info don’t offer a full complement of stats, at least not in the same place that they offer said salary info.

The player comparison feature functions differently for the NFL than for MLB. NFL player pages are not by season; each player only has one page, so when comparing players it provides graphs that do a season-by-season comparison of passing yards and rushing yards, and the tables present career totals. While this might be exactly what some users are looking for, it’s frustrating not to be able to customize the comparison to any degree. Again, I imagine that this is something that FindTheBest will seek to improve over time.

Other Sports

As they exist presently, the NBA player pages are “currently under construction” and only offer basic info: team, position, height, weight, age, etc.

NHL player pages do not exist in any form at this time at FindTheBest.com.

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[1] Since this article was first written, FindTheBest has revised Trout’s page and other pages so that they no longer include the filler text that refers to “American League average of .100”. Things are changing quickly with FTB’s MLB player page, and for the better, much to their credit.