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When you grow up in a military family, change can sometimes feel like the only consistent thing in your life. For me, while bouncing between stations up and down the Eastern Seaboard for much of the '90s, consistency also came in the form of my regular Wednesday routine where, no matter what part of the country I was standing in, I was able to track down a newspaper stand, gas station, or commissary that carried Baseball Weekly (renamed Sports Weekly when they added football to their coverage in 2002). After reading Bob Nightengale’s latest and checking my position in the Clubhouse Fantasy League, I usually found my way to the team-by-team transactions, where the story of a given team’s season could be told in unbiased stock language. That’s where my fascination with roster mechanics began and, based upon the comment threads of our Transaction Analysis articles, I’m guessing many of you share that same interest.

That’s why I’m pleased as Punch (but not as smug) to unveil Baseball Prospectus’ new Transactions page. Let’s take a look around, shall we?

The latest 50 league transactions greet you as the home page loads for the first time. Right away, you’ll notice that instead of grouping all of a team’s transactions into a single row, we’ve broken each player out into separate listings, making it easy to quickly pick out specific players. To see all of a player's transactions, simply click on his name in the text string. If you're interested in his player card, click the headshot. Similarly, all of a team's transactions can be viewed by clicking on the team name in the text string, and clicking on the logo will open up that team's audit page. Some rows feature an “Analysis” link, which offers direct access to the Transaction Analysis article that discusses the move.

Above the listings is a search form that allows you to browse transactions by any combination of player, team, and date range. For example, if you’re interested in the exact dates that Cliff Lee was placed on and activated from the disabled list in April 2010, you can enter his name into the Player Name field and specify a date range of 4/1/2010 to 4/30/2010, which returns the following:

To see the rest of Lee’s transactions, simply clear the date range and resubmit:

If you’re only concerned with the dates Lee has been traded and don’t care about his injury or free agency history, clicking the blue “Advanced Search” link next to the search button will give you myriad ways to narrow the scope of your search, including the ability to limit results to specific transaction types:

Submitting that query will return only the three records for his trades to Philadelphia, Seattle, and Texas:

The rest of the options displayed in the Advanced Search form allow you to narrow your search by league, team, general manager, injury, transaction type, and player age at the time of the transaction. Selecting a second league, team, or general manager enables you to find all of the trades made between the specified entities:

Next to the date fields in the Advanced Search form, you have the option to change the kinds of dates that are returned in your query. By default, the transaction date—the date the move is announced—is used, but you can select “Use Effective/Retroactive Dates” to return, for example, the date Joe Mauer’s placement on the disabled list is retroactive to.

You probably noticed in the screen shot of Cliff Lee’s trades that the infamous Bartolo Colon-for-the-farm move, which sent Lee, Brandon Phillips, and Grady Sizemore from Montreal to Cleveland in July 2002, was nowhere to be found. Currently, our transaction logs only go back as far as January 2009, the earliest MLBAM makes them available. However, you can expect more historical years to be added over the next few weeks.

Aside from adding historical seasons, what features or improvements would you like to see? Let us know in the comments or feel free to send me a note with your thoughts. 

Thank you for reading

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buddaley
12/23
Will you include contract extensions? For example, when I looked for transactions by Andrew Friedman, I did not find the Matt Moore extension listed. Am I missing it, is there some step I did not take or are such deals not included?
bradleyankrom
12/23
That's one of the big things we're addressing in the next update of the browser. I'm not exactly sure why, but MLBAM transaction logs don't include when a player resigns with his current club, which is obviously something we want to capture in this tool.
Oleoay
12/23
Can't Cot's Contracts help?
sam19041
12/23
Looks pretty cool!
dianagramr
12/23
This is an answer to one of my silent data mining prayers (and nearly worth the price of a BP subscription itself)

Thanks BP!
modofacid
12/23
This is pretty stellar
mkblais
12/23
Solid. I think I just found my new homepage.
bradleyankrom
12/23
One thing I probably should have mentioned in the intro is that we're working on a way to group together players involved in trades for easier viewing. Currently, the MLBAM logs give each player his own row, though players involved in the same trade will usually share the same transaction id. I'm hoping to have a fix for that rolled out in the next week and a half or so.
Lassaller
12/23
Plus 1 for the trade grouping.

I'm not sure if you can do this right away as it would make this page work differently than the others, but it would be interesting and helpful if you could make the links interactive within the Transactions feature.

Using Cliff Lee as an example, clicking on Lee would bring up the transactions with Lee while choosing the Mariners would display a slice of the Mariners transactions, focusing on before and after the Lee trade.

I appreciate all of BP's data but I want the ability to wander aimlessly in it, to randomly explore and find connections on my own. It's what I like best about the internet.

Perhaps there is a way to show both, to explore as well as BP's current method of linking to Lee's stats page? Hopefully someone can design methods for multiple ways of presenting BP's data -- and in an intuitive way.

Thanks again!
bradleyankrom
12/23
I made a few quick changes:

1) clicking the player name in the transaction text string will now take you to all of that player's transactions.

2) clicking the team name will take you to all of that team's transactions.

3) clicking the player headshot will open up his player card.

4) clicking the team logo will open up that team's audit page.

I like the idea of slicing the team results up, too - let me discuss with some other folks and we'll see if it's feasible.

Thanks for the suggestions.
Brad
Lassaller
12/28
Thank you very much!

One other suggestion. If you search for someone that isn't in the Transactions, like Babe Ruth, you get a blank page.

Is there a way to put up a search result that says what was queried for is outside of the current scope?
rawagman
12/24
This is awesome. I think a nice way to have full trades be shown would be as a mouse-over box, such as what we see on BO when a term from the glossary is used. That would allow for keeping of the line by line formatting while providing that extra bit of information in a simplified manner.
Cheers, and happy holidays.
jhardman
12/23
Yay!
dwachtell
12/23
This feature is great. One suggestion might be to include, on the team pages, entries for when a team lost a player to another team via free agency -- something akin to what Christina used to do in her TA columns, which was to say (e.g.) "12/6/11: Mets noted the loss of SS Jose Reyes." This would provide a more comprehensive chronology, looking at one team, of how different moves fit into a bigger picture of player loss/acquisition.
bradleyankrom
12/23
I hadn't thought of that, thanks for the tip.
dianagramr
12/23
The "Glossary" of transactions doesn't seem to show up (at least in Firefox 9).
MichavdB
12/23
Looks great!
Oleoay
12/23
Can you add an Advanced Search filter for looking at all transactions that had an analysis written up for them?
Oleoay
12/23
Also the Analysis link looks a little wonky. For example, in the Latos trade, only Alonso has an Analysis link.. not Latos or Volquez, etc.
bradleyankrom
12/24
Yes, not sure why it's capturing most, but not all, TAs. Working on a fax.
bradleyankrom
12/24
Also, working on a fix.
prhood
12/23
I can't see to find the link on the Home Page.
dpease
12/28
we've added "Transactions" to the links at the top of every page. Thanks!
Peter7899
12/23
Does the Search include a players minor league transactions? Like prospects being traded?
bradleyankrom
12/23
Yes, MILB transactions are included in the search results.
markbhey
12/23
Having a hard time seeing all AL transactions to AL teams.....assume this will be valuable for AL or NL only leagues, no?
bobbygrace
12/23
This is great. Thank you!

A nice addition would be definitions of terms such as "optioned," "selected," "designated for assignment," and "outrighted." They could appear when you "hover" over the words, as happens with SNLVAR and such.

Timcarvin
12/24
This is such a great new feature. Outstanding job
slackerjake
12/24
This is great.

I found it cumbersome, however, to get back to the homepage.

bradleyankrom
12/24
Good catch. If you click on the page header - "Transactions" - you'll be returned to the start page.
dpease
12/27
to follow up on this you can click the Baseball Prospectus logo on the top left of any page to get back to the homepage.
FrankL
12/24
Search by League (NL or AL only) possible? All transactions, all players, for a specified time period. You know, useful for the one-league fantasy junkies - not that there's anything wrong with that - that happen to find the Holy Grail.

All smiles and wishing you a happiest of Holiday Seasons.
liptowi
12/24
It would be helpful to hav ethe tranactions segregated by league.
bradleyankrom
12/24
Thanks, everyone, for your comments and suggestions. I've implemented a few of your ideas already and am working on others over the holiday break. Keep 'em coming!
kmbart
12/25
This page needs a link directly off the home page; someone already asked where that link was in the comments above, but there was no response. I've poked around the site and can't find a path to access the Transaction Browser except via this article.
dpease
12/26
There isn't one, but we will add one.
dpease
12/28
its in there now!
Sacramento
12/25
Brad, is there any way to link the Player Cards when you click on their name in the list of transactions involving them? That would make it easier to check their stats without having to open another window.
bradleyankrom
12/27
Do you mean linking the player's name in the text string to their player card?
Sacramento
12/27
Yeah, that's it.
bradleyankrom
12/27
If you click on their headshot, that'll open up their player card.
ColKiner
12/26
How about a way as you add historical season to click on a date and see all the transactions that occured on a particular day. That would aide some of us who use baseball simulations of past season to accurately know when players shuttled between the Majors and the DL/Minors without checking player by player
bradleyankrom
12/27
So if you clicked on the date at the left of the row it would show you only the transactions of that day?
bradleyankrom
12/27
Added this feature - clicking the date in any transaction row will show you all of the transactions for that particular day. Good suggestion.
Oleoay
12/28
You could add a ticker on the right beneath the "Blogs beta" section.

Something like "Transactions On This Day In History". etc.
chabels
12/27
What data feeds the list? I'm in a cutthroat fantasy league that assigns newly called up player to the first owner who can claim him. On days when hotly anticipated prospects are getting called up (or superstars who started the season on the 60-day), owners are all combing numerous sites, hitting refresh in the hopes of finding the move listed first.

We've long wondered when a transaction becomes official, and how that information is conveyed to various media outlets. Can you shed some light on this, and whether we can expect this page to be the first to report transactions when they happen?
bradleyankrom
12/27
MLB.com is probably your best bet. Our transactions update daily, but I believe MLB.com's update throughout the day.