Archive for Site News

Depth Charts: Now With Injury Info!

Yesterday we rolled out our brand new depth charts and standings, and since then there’s a few things that have been added:

depthinjury1

- Full injury information is now available in the depth charts. You can find out more about the injury if you hover over the little medical icon. This is updated in real time as soon as the injury information becomes available to us.

- On the Standings page, things are now broken out by division. We’ll be adding AL and NL only tables soon.


Daily Updated Steamer Projections!

Daily updated Steamer Projections are now available in the player pages and the projections pages. These come in both the Rest of Season (RoS) and Updated variety. RoS is the projection for only the remainder of the season, while Updated is the forecast for the player’s final season line, including his performance to date.

One thing to note about the daily updated Steamer projections is that a full new projection for each player is calculated each day of the season, the same way the pre-season calculations are calculated, just including this year’s data.

Much thanks goes out to Jared Cross, Dash Davidson, and Peter Rosenbloom for putting these together.


Live Leaderboards!

Live stats are now available in the leaderboards!

You can view either full season stats with today’s data incorporated into them, or just stats for today’s games.


Yesterday’s Leaders!

At long last, one whim of Carson Cistulli’s is now available on FanGraphs!

In the leaderboards, you can now view just yesterday’s stats!


Daily Lineup Information

On our live scoreboard page we now have each game’s lineup for the day. This information from now on should be available as soon as the teams announce their lineups each day, usually many hours before the game.

lineupdata

We’re also now using this same data to power the “Starter” field in FanGraphs: The Game, so you should know if a player is in the lineup much sooner than before.

If you think things are delayed, or there’s no lineup for a game where you think there should be, please let us know!


Crowdsourced Contract Project

At FanGraphs we talk a lot about contracts, but we’ve never had contract data on our player pages or in an easily exportable form.

We’ve already got the ball rolling by entering about 300 contracts, but there’s still a lot of work to do. Our staff will of course continue to enter in contract data, but if you want to speed up the project you can help us by entering in missing contract data.

Any contract data you enter will be sent for approval to an editor.  Assuming the contract data is correct and mostly complete with proper attribution, it will shortly appear on the player pages along with attribution to your FanGraphs username.

Read the rest of this entry »


2013 Steamer Projections!

The Steamer projections courtesy of steamerprojections.com are now available in the projections section and in the player pages.

The Steamer projections on FanGraphs use the playing time projections from the FAN projections.

Huge thanks to Jared Cross, Dash Davidson, and Peter Rosenbloom; the team behind the Steamer projections.

Update: FIP, HR, and BABIP columns should now be corrected. There was some bad data cached.


FanGraphs+ is Back

FanGraphs+ never went away — we update it throughout the year with content posted on ESPN Insider — but it’s time for the annual. We’ll be publishing the full FG+ arsenal in just over a week.

Once again, we’ll have over 1000 player capsules, sussing the fantasy value of everything from the studdiest stud to the LOOGYiest LOOGY. This year, we’ll add auction values to those capsules, and FG+ subscribers will see those values on the projections leaderboards. And below you’ll see our table of contents — all long, research-driven and analysis-heavy pieces that walk the line between fantasy and real baseball work.

Read the rest of this entry »


Splits by Home / Away and Handedness

Our splits sections now include double splits for Home / Away and Handedness so you can can now see how a player did against righties at home vs righties away, and the same for lefties.

We’ve also added 1st half & 2nd half splits, with the cutoff date being the All-Star game for each season.

These are currently available in the player splits pages for both batters and pitchers.

Update: 1st and 2nd half splits are now available in the leaderboards.


2013 FAN Projections Now Open!

The 2013 FAN Projection ballots are now open!

Before you can project any players, you’ll have to select the team you follow most closely towards the top of the screen. If you really don’t follow a team, just pick one. You’ll only have to do this once.

After you’ve selected a team, there are 9 categories for pitchers and 10 categories for position players. Pick the values in the drop-down boxes closest to what you think the player will do in 2013, hit the submit button and you’re done! If you made a mistake, you can always go back and change your selection at any time.

Please note that everything this year is a rate stat. You’re projecting 2B+3B, HR, SB, and Fielding as a measure of 150 games (basically a full season). The player’s previous stats are shown per 150 games in the projection ballot too. This will make changing playing time projections much easier as you’ll only have to change the games played portion.

That’s really all there is to it. You can filter players by team, or if you go to the player pages, you can project players individually. If you want to see all the players you’ve projected, you can click on the “My Rankings” button which will show you only what you specifically projected a player to do.

Fan Projections will show up on the player pages after there have been 15 ballots submitted.

If you do notice any issues, please let us know.


The New Homepage

This afternoon we rolled out a new homepage.

The idea of the homepage changes was to better organize and highlight content.

The larger two stories at the top and then the four others further down the page are articles that we’re featuring. They may be brand new articles or articles that we don’t want to get lost in the shuffle when we’ve had a busy day.

Other than that, everything that was in the old layout is available in the new layout, except in a more condensed three columns instead of two.

The other main change is the site is now centered and a little bit wider than before.

With the changes, we’ve also implemented a new article search feature that lets you use the player search box to search for any article on the site across all our blogs.

If you’re wondering if there are more layout changes on the way, there will be a minor update to the article pages to center them and change the font size over the weekend.

I’ve seen that generally the reaction to the changes have not been positive. We’re always open to suggestions and if there are things you like or don’t like about the new layout, please use this thread as an opportunity to weigh in.

Update: For those of you experiencing the boxes around the comment icons and headers, those should be gone now. There was a formatting issue with IE browsers only.


2013 THT Annual 15% Discount Code!

The 2013 Hardball Times Annual is 15% off for today only with the following discount code: LNDEY3Y4

Just follow the link and when the book is in your shopping card copy and paste the discount code into the box and you’ll get 15% off. This discount code is only valid when you order through this link.


New Dropdown Search

We now have new search functionality, which will hopefully allow you to get to the player pages much faster than before.

Typing something in the search box will now display a drop-down of all the players you searched for, just as would have been displayed on the actual player search page. You are still able to hit enter and get to the old search page if you want.

One additional note is that when the search bar is empty, the drop down displays a list of the most popular Major League and Minor League players on FanGraphs.


FanGraphs iPhone App $0.99 Sale Today!

As the title says, the FanGraphs iPhone app is discounted to $0.99 for today only!

The app will of course include data for the 2013 season and already has the 2013 Bill James Handbook Projections available in the player pages.


The 2013 Hardball Times Baseball Annual

The Hardball Times Baseball Annual for 2013 is now yours for the purchasing. This is something we do every year, just for the heck of it. In fact, this is our ninth THT Annual, and we’re trying a few new things this year.

First of all, we went the self-publishing route. We always had a great relationship with our previous publisher, ACTA Sports, but it’s so easy to self-publish, and the economics are better (we think). So you’ll notice that our cover art has changed, and we won’t be available in bookstores. The price is lower, and the dimensions are a bit smaller, too. We’ll let you know how it goes.

The Annual is now 6″x9″—easy to carry and read. We dropped the stats altogether after significantly cutting them back last year. As time went on, the stats became a less important feature of the Annual, because it’s so easy to pick up your stats online at any time. Other than that, the format is exactly the same.

You’re left with 300 pages of baseball eloquence, primarily contributed by THT and Fangraphs writers, as well as a few special guest writers. Here is the specific table of contents:

Read the rest of this entry »


2013 Bill James Handbook Projections!

The 2013 Bill James Handbook Projections courtesy of Baseball Info Solutions are now available on the players pages!


Player Pages: Glossary Tooltips & Leaderboard Linking

The player pages now have some some additional usability features.

- You can now hover over any stat header and get the definition of the stat. This will soon make its way to all sections of the site.

- Seasons, Teams, and Positions are now linked back to the leaderboards. For instance if you are perusing Mike Trout‘s page and you click on the Angels link in his 2011 season, it will bring you to the 2011 Angels leaderboards for the corresponding section.

Read the rest of this entry »


Leaderboards: Non-Pitchers

There’s a new positional option for the leaderboards labeled NP (Non-Pitchers). This will exclude all players that qualify as pitchers from any of the batting leaderboards.

This works at both the team and league levels as well, making it easier to compare teams across leagues.


wOBA & Base Running Changes

To better isolate batting and base running skills, SB and CS have been removed from wOBA and given their own category wSB.

What’s Changed?

wOBA, wRAA, wRC, wRC+ – These all no longer include SB and CS. SB and CS have been removed entirely from the wOBA calculation include the weights calculation.

Batting – Batting in the Value section no longer includes SB and CS.

Base Running – Base Running in the Value section now includes SB and CS.

FanGraphs Guts! – Our Guts! section now has updated weights and the SB and CS weights for use in wOBA have been replaced with the raw run values.

What’s New?

wSB – how many runs above or below average a player is at stealing bases.

UBR – (miscellaneous baserunning / advancement) is now broken out into a separate category which is in the Advanced section. This contains all the information that was formerly just in Base Running.


New Pitcher Value Stats

The Value (WAR) section for pitchers has been updated to help further break out a pitcher’s value. These stats are now available in the leaderboards and player pages.

We’ve added the following stats:

RA9-Wins – Wins above replacement calculated with RA9. This is both park adjusted and league adjusted.

BIP-Wins – Wins above average based on BABIP. This is both park and league adjusted.

LOB-Wins – Sequencing (and miscellaneous) wins above average calculated as RA9Wins – WAR – BIPWins.

FDP-Wins (Fielder Dependent Wins) – This is the full difference between RA9Wins and WAR, or BIPWins + LOBWins.

WAR – Wins Above Replacement remains unchanged.

Dave Cameron will have two posts with more details about these new stats at 9:00am and 10:00am and will be answering questions during his 12:00pm chat.

Read the rest of this entry »