NOTE ON STATS

There are several good sources for minor league stats, each with advantages and drawbacks.  Compared to a few years ago, the availability of non-traditional stats for minor league players is vastly improved, but still nowhere near the level of major league stats.  The latter, of course, are available with extensive splits, game logs, and some "alternative" stats at MLB's web site and at ESPN (to which I refuse to link), if you can tolerate the popups and slow loading caused by voluminous advertising.  The former is only good, though, for the current season.

There have been huge advances at Baseball Reference, which has now incorporated extensive information from Retrosheet.  For major league players, there's a wealth of information such as splits, game and HR logs, performance vs. specific pitchers/hitters, and links to players' minor league pages.  The minor league part of bb-ref is also expanding rapidly.  It now has stats going back to, well, about as far as you can go, although the stats get increasingly spotty as you go back further.  The stats include the DSL and VSL going back to 2006 as I write, and they seem to be adding data for those leagues going back further.  There are team stats and fielding stats, which are helpful in figuring out what positions a player has played, like whether he's played CF.  There are also a few interesting miscellaneous stats, like average ages per team.

The other site I find the most useful right now is Fangraphs.  It has an amazing array of non-traditional stats, including, for the major leagues, Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR) data, which is arguably the closest thing to a reliable defensive metric that's publicly available now, and detailed pitch data.  The latter includes percentage of pitch types thrown for each pitcher and average velocity.

Some other good sites:

The Baseball Cube -- This was by far the best site for minor league stats until bb-ref recently surpassed it, although it's still superior to bb-ref in some areas.  It includes full minor league records of all players, going back I don't know how far.  It also has college and independent league stats for many players, which bb-ref lacks.  The drawbacks are that it does not have stats from the Dominican or Venezuelan Summer Leagues, nor does it have any splits.  It also has numerous errors, particularly missing lines of stats for a surprisingly large percentage of players who've been around for more than a few years.  The stats for players with the same name also sometimes get conflated.

The official minor league site -- A part of MLB.com and usually referred to as MiLB.com, this site has introduced a few splits, but unfortunately doesn't go far enough.  The splits include L/R, home/road, day/night, "grass" (puzzling, since there are few artificial turf parks any more, unless they're referring to some other type of grass), GO/AO for pitchers, monthly, RISP and a few others.  One thing it has that bb-ref and the Cube lack is opponents' batting averages for pitchers.  The main problem with this site is that it has information only for the current and previous year, and splits only for the current year.  It does not have career stats.  Baseball America's stats seem to be drawn from this site, which renders BA superfluous for stats.

Minorleaguesplits -- This was a major breakthrough when it debuted a few years ago, but in the last couple years it's been in an endless stage of construction, to the point where I largely stopped using it for a while.  It seems to be operating better as I write, though.  The site relies on spidering game accounts at MiLB, so the stats are not official and contain (usually) minor inaccuracies.  There are occasional glitches, like players who can't be found.  For a couple years I used this site for pitchers' opposing OBP and slugging--I originally started listing those when BA included them in 2005, but BA hasn't included them since then--but minorleaguesplits no longer has those stats and they weren't official anyway.  For that reason, I've dropped those stats and included a few others, but I'm still not satisfied with what's available for minor league pitchers.  Traditional stats don't seem to me to be as useful for pitchers as they are for hitters, but I keep waiting until more becomes available on a consistent basis.

On the non-electronic front, BA publishes an annual Super Register, which has career stats for everybody who played in organized ball in the previous year.  One drawback is that a player who misses a whole year, with an injury for example, he won't appear in that year's book.  Of course, if you have the volumes for the last several years this isn't a problem.  The book includes DSL and VSL stats, but does not include players who have played only in those leagues.  The only non-traditional stat it has is opponents' BA for pitchers.  It also rounds out inning totals, which is annoying.

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