31 March 2004

While I'm not exactly a stathead, I have found something on baseball-reference.com that is truly astounding: the Oracle of Baseball.

Simply put, you type in the names of any two major leaguers and the site spits out a chain of players that connect your inputs. So if you ever wondered how many players it would take to connect, say, Henry Luff of the New Haven City Elms (a team that played in the National Association in 1875) and Brad Voyles (a Kansas City Royal whose been getting his cup of coffee with the big team since 2001), here's your tool.

(The answer, by the way, is seven. Even more frightening, there are apparently several different combinations of seven players that would get you from Luff to Voyles. My goal is to find a pairing with no connection, but it's looking tough.)

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