What are those numbers after players' names in the leader charts?

Those numbers indicate the order in which players were added to the Box-Toppers database. For example, an older player, such as Roy Halladay was the 1,178th player added to the database when he was added in 1998. Mike Trout, a younger player, was the 2,949th player added, when he made his debut on August 30, 2011.

Players are added to the database when they are named Player of the Game for the first time. For example, Casey Blake made his Major League debut in 1999 and played in about 50 games over four seasons, but was not added to the Box-Toppers database (as player 1,715) until April 20, 2003, when he was Player of the Game for the first time in a win for the Indians.

Not all players have the appended numbers. The practice of adding the numbers did not begin until 1998, so many of the first 1,000 players do not have numbers appended. However, starting in 2019, we began to audit the Box-Toppers results from 1995, making sure our game-by-game results were accurate. During this process, numbers are being added to player names based on when they earned their first Player of the Game honor in 1995. Raul Mondesi of the Dodgers, who earned Box-Toppers Player of the Day on the very first day of tracking on April 25, 1995, is listed as player number 1. As of this writing, several hundred players who first earned Player of the Game honors in 1995 have numbers appended to their names with the goal of one day having numbers appended to all player names based on their order of making their Box-Toppers debut.

At the close of 2019, there were 4,269 different players who had earned Box-Toppers points since 1995. As of May 2020, there are about 700 of those players without numbers. When we began the practice of appending numbers in 1998, the first player to have a number appended to his name is the 1,056th player added to the Box-Toppers database, Marlins pitcher Jesus Sanchez, who made his Box-Toppers debut with his first Player of the Game honor on May 3, 1998. Sanchez earned 14.7 career Box-Toppers points from 1998 to 2001 with the Marlins. 

Bartolo Colon of the Rangers was the last active player as of 2018 without a number appended to his name. He made his Box-Toppers debut with his first Player of the Game honor on April 4, 1998. Colon‘s teammate at the time, Adrian Beltre, was the only other active player in 2018 who earned Box-Toppers points in 1998. However, Beltre made his Box-Toppers debut Aug. 13, 1998, after Box-Toppers began appending numbers to names. Beltre is the 1,141st player to debut since the start of player tracking at the start of the 1995 season.

lowercase explanation

You may note that many players making their debuts in Box-Toppers’ early days—from 1995 to 1997—appear in lowercase without proper capitalization. Back in those days, Box-Toppers was tabulated with now-ancient software on a computer that operated so slowly that hitting the shift key to capitalize words slowed things way down. It was Box-Toppers' e.e. cummings phase, if you will.

Despite technology improving enough to easily fix that flaw, we've kept the lowercase names until now for old time's sake, a reminder of how far—in terms of technology, at least—we’ve come. (However, as our audit of 1995 games continues, we are standardizing and cleaning up capitalization of these player names from the early days.) Team abbreviation codes used in the database are also lowercase.

(Shawn Plank, updated Friday, May 15, 2020)