While many websites out there are invaluable sources of baseball information, it's hard to beat Baseball-Reference.com. It has all the basic Major League statistics you could ask for and is constantly doing what it can to add to its database.

Today I visited the site and found out that they're planning to have a new look by Opening Day. While they're still tinkering with it, you can see the planned overhaul here. The layout is going to conform to the template of the other Sports-Reference sites. While I've long enjoyed the soon-to-be-old look, this new one looks promising. The best part though, is the tons of new features that'll be available.

The stats will be grouped in sortable tables now, and there'll be a sortable roster page for each team as well. Now if you want to find out who the oldest, tallest, heaviest, etc. player was on each team, it's as simple as one click.

For teams that went through managerial changes during the season, you'll now be able to see what the team's record was under each manager. I know that seems like common sense, but you had to click on each manager's record to see it before.

Minor league data will now go back much farther than 1992. I was actually able to look up Ty Cobb's minor league stats from 1904!

Hall of Famers will now have their ballot data listed next to their year of induction.

A player's cumulative career stats through a given season will now be available. Next time someone argues that Mickey Mantle shouldn't be in the Hall of Fame because his career batting average is below .300, you can point to his cumulative stats through 1967 and show him that Mantle was only guilty of hanging on one year too long.

A pitcher's stats as a reliever and as a starter will now be available separately.

There will be Fangraphs-like data that tells us what type of contact a hitter makes. Does he hit mainly grounders, flyballs or line drives? Conversely, they'll tell you what kind of hits a pitcher tends to allow.

Total Zone data will be included with fielding stats.

There's more, but I could be here forever if I discussed everything. Needless to say though, Sean Forman and his crew at Sports-Reference are doing an outstanding job and deserve a written round of applause. Also, they're currently adding box scores and gamelogs from 1954 and 1955 (thanks, Retrosheet). Yes, I am salivating over the opportunity to compile the positional data for those years.

Opening Day approaching and now this. I'm in baseball heaven.