Uber statistics page Baseball-Reference recently redesigned its pages in time for the new baseball season. There is also a video tutorial of the changes.
The major change that you will immediately notice is that we have changed from pre-formatted text to html-based tables. When the site was designed way back in 1999, the internet was really slow, everyone used fixed width font e-mail clients, and rsbb was the end-all, be-all of baseball discussion, pre-formatted text seemed like the best way to go to make the site fast and easy to use.
In 2009, when you have high speed internet, 70% of users have 1200 pixel displays or higher, phones are surfing the web, and AJAX isn’t just a soccer team, html tables seem like the best way to make the site powerful and easy-to-use. I realize not everyone is going to like this, but the benefits to my mind far, far, far outweigh the negatives.
The changes highlight the need to be faster and prettier. Stats pages aren’t sexy to look at, but they should be easier to read and acquire data.
The data is also exportable, which is a huge plus for baseball junkies (or nerds).