The FanGraphs+ player profiles section now includes team and position.

Also we’ve found a few missing profiles including Billy Butler, Johan Santana, Kendrys Morales, and Franklin Gutierrez.

I’d also like to gauge whether or not we should explore putting the FanGraphs+ content into an eBook / PDF format. Poll after the jump:

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FanGraphs+ (formerly The Second Opinion) is now available for just $4.99!

Here’s what you get:

Player Profiles – Over 1100 player profiles written by the FanGraphs and RotoGraphs contributors you’re already familiar with. Available on either the player pages or in blog format.

Articles – 11 in-depth articles to help you win your league:

-Keeper League Prospect & Rookie Strategies
-How to Use PITCHf/x in Your Fantasy League
-Keepr Conundrum: Bryce Harper or Mike Trout
-Improve Your Control and Break Out
-The Difficulty in Predicting Saves
-Valuing Upside Graphically
-Ottoneu Strategies for Every Setting
-Projections and Playing Through Pain
-Mining for Under (and Over) Performers: Strikeouts
-Prospects with Pedigree: Eno’s Rookie Lineup
-The 2nd Annual Cistulli-Sarris Prospect Face-Off Challenge

Quick Opinions – Short one to two sentence profile that give you the bottom line about a player. These are also integrated into our various projection pages so you can quickly get more information about a player.

FanGraphs+ Year Round Content – FanGraphs has partnerned with ESPN Insider again this season and everything we write for ESPN will be available. (2 – 3 articles weekly)

FanGraphs+ Archives – Our previous two year’s worth of FanGraphs+ content will also be available to you.

For those of you wondering, there is no PDF (again) this year. I know we released one sometime in mid-March last year, but I just don’t feel comfortable promising a half-hearted PDF.

The idea of FanGraphs+ is to enhance your FanGraphs online experience and I think for $4.99, it’s really an amazing bargain.

All sizes of FanGraphs T-Shirts are now back in stock! Huge thanks to all those who have already bought them to show their support for the site!

If anyone has ideas for what they’d like to see on future FanGraphs T-Shirts, please send us a note via our contact form.

Update: Today’s maintenance has been completed!

FanGraphs.com may be unavailable early tomorrow morning between the hours of 2am and 4am Eastern for server maintenance.

RotoChamp projections are now available in the sortable projections pages and player pages for the second year in a row. Big thanks to RotoChamp.com for letting us post these for the second straight year.

One quick note about projections this year is that you can filter by active team, giving you available projections for anyone who is on the current 40 man roster.

The results of the 2011 Fans Scouting Report are now available on the player pages and the leaderboards.

As always big thanks to Tangotiger for running them each year.

All the leaderboards now preserve sorting in the link, meaning you can sort by whatever you want and share with someone exactly what you were looking at. This is made even easier by the addition of the usual smorgasbord of “share” buttons to the leaderboard pages.

For instance, here are the qualified BsR (baserunning) leaders last season.

Also, sorting now sorts in descending order first. Fans of looking at the league-worst first will just need to click again. Someday we will just have the stats sort from best-to-worst, first, regardless of whether it should be ascending or descending. But in the meantime, having stats sort descending first should save an extra click most of the time.

On the exporting front, playerids are now listed by default at the end of the dataset when exported. Gone are the days of parsing out playerids and player names. Thanks to all those who found and shared workarounds while exporting wasn’t so pretty.

Hat Tip: @GiantsNirvana, @CajoleJuiceEsq, xiefrank

The Minor League leaderboards have been overhauled and now have a ton of new features including:

- Filtering by individual team.

- Custom stat lists, just like the major league leaderboards.

- The ability to group stats over multiple leagues.

- Custom player lists, allowing players to be easily compared.

- Custom reports let you save your custom stats / players for easy retrieval.

On the leaderboards, you can now filter by “Active Roster”, which currently displays the 40 man roster.

Please be aware of how this works:

- Team names next to a player are still denoted as the team they played on historically for the year of data selected.

- When you filter by active roster and you are looking at all players and not any specific team, it will show only players who are on active rosters.

- When you are looking at a specific team and you filter by active roster, it will show all the players who are as of this moment, on the active roster.

- If a player has never played in the Major Leagues, he will not show up on the Major League leaderboards.

One of the most frequent questions we get is: The players names and team names are garbled with HTML when I export data. How can I fix this?

Simple Tag Removal:

To remove any HTML tags from the data all you need to do is a quick Find & Replace All.

Fill in “<*>” (no quotes) into the Find what box, and then leave the Replace with box blank and hit Replace All.

And that’s it. You now have a worksheet completely free of all HTML.

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The leaderboards now have PITCHf/x data available.

All the functionality of the leaderboards should work with the new data, including custom leaderboards and custom player lists.

If you notice any issues, please let us know.

Also a quick note about qualified players. If you’re looking at multiple seasons for qualified players, it now defaults to 1000 PA or 300 IP. Single season qualified criteria remains the same. (Hat tip: Tangotiger)

In the player pages you’ll now find some new PITCHf/x sections that display data for pitch type, velocity, pitch values and plate discipline.

These are now there in addition to the BIS data that has always appeared in the player pages. If a section is not labeled PITCHf/x, it is Baseball Info Solutions data.

For plate-discipline stats, we’re using Mike Fast’s definition of the strike zone.

The pitch type abbreviations are as follows:

FA – Fastball (includes FF classification)
FT – 2-seam Fastball
FC – Cut Fastball
FS – Split-fingered Fastball
FO – Forkball
SI – Sinker
SL – Slider
CU – Curveball
KC – Knuckle Curve
EP – Ephuus
CH – Changeup
SC – Screwball
KN – Knuckleball
UN – Unknown

I’ve received a few reports today that there are some ads covering up content. If you see an ad in a place where it shouldn’t be, or if it’s playing unprompted audio, don’t worry, we’re not trying to destroy FanGraphs with ads. These types of ads annoy us as much as they annoy you (we use the site too) and they are not allowed on FanGraphs.

If we see one of these ads ourselves, we take the steps to remove it from the site immediately. If we only get reports of an ad and can not see it ourselves, it can be difficult to track down and the more information we can get about the ad the better.

The best thing you can do is to take a screenshot of the ad, or send us a description of the ad (what is the product?) and send an e-mail to ads+feedback@fangraphs.com and we will remove the offending ad as soon as we can track it down.

Update: It currently appears to be an issue with Internet Explorer only and ads in general. This should be fixed shortly.

Second Update: This should be corrected now. If you are still seeing issues, please let us know. For those interested, this was actually the result of a change in Google’s ad serving system and apparently it ended up breaking a number of website layouts in Internet Explorer that use third party ads in conjunction with DoubleClick for Publishers.

The 2012 Bill James Handbook Projections are now available in the player pages. Big thanks to Baseball Info Solutions for allowing us to publish these for the fourth straight year.

The Win Probability Graphs on the site were updated last night. They’ve been made interactive, so you can scroll over any point to find out the play, score, and win probability of the situation.

If you’re a blogger, you can now easily embed the charts into posts when you click on the little arrow button in the right hand corner of the graph:

Source: FanGraphs

The “Embed Code (Static)” will give you a non-changing version of the chart, but if you use the non static version, the graph will be updated automatically as the game progresses.

The WAR Graphs section has received an update that now makes it possible to create graphs for as many players as you like, instead of the previous limit of four.

Source: FanGraphs — Jeff Bagwell, Albert Pujols, Mark Teixeira

In addition, the graphs are now interactive, allowing you to see the numbers behind the graph if you want to scroll over them.

And finally, if you’re a blogger and you’re interested in using WAR Graphs on your site, they can be easily embedded:

The difference between “Embed” and “Embed (Static)” is that if you choose the static option, the data behind the chart will not change. If you choose “Embed”, it will always be updated with the latest data from FanGraphs.

This past weekend the leaderboards got a slight overhaul in appearance and bunch of new features. Look below the stats table in the leaderboards for the customization options.

- Custom Stat Lists: Choose which stats you want to see in the leaderboards, just like you can in the player pages dashboard.

- Custom Players Lists: Choose only the players you want to see and easily compare any stat between a select group of players.

- Custom Reports: Save your current leaderboard as a report for quick access to your custom stats lists and stat lists.

- League Stats: Easily see league/season totals for every single year in baseball.

- Streamlined Leaderboards & Team Pages: The functionality in the team pages is now available to you in the leaderboards section. Filter by team or see team totals by season. Soon the team sections will just take you to the appropriate leaderboard.

- Split Teams: Breakout players who played on multiple teams by giving them two (or more) entries instead of grouping their stats together for a single season.

A couple days ago, Tom Tango, did a study to show how hitters produced at different times of the day. One possible problem with the data is that shadows from the stadium could be skewing the data. We would like to know if at any time of the day there is a shadow between the pitcher and the hitter and from what time to what time does the shadow stay between the two combatants. Finally, if any one knows the information on any closed stadium, that information would be helpful.

With this information, it can be seen if the shadow has an effect on the hitter-pitcher match-up. I would expect the number of strikeouts to increase as the batter would have a harder time picking up the ball, but it would be nice to put a number to the theory. Thanks for your time and I am sure someone will jump right in for the data on Tropicana Field.

Since its inception in May of 2010, the Community Blog has (a) provided a space for some excellent work by the FanGraphs readership but also (b) occasionally fallen through the editorial cracks (and not in the gross way that you’re imagining).

After some serious-type conversations and more than one fistfight, however, we believe that we’ve established a sustainable way of reviewing submissions in a timely and efficient manner. Today, for example, we’ve published James Lewis’s article proposing a totally creative and equally unlikely solution to the Cardinals’ shortstop hole (again, not disgusting).

Please acquaint yourself with the guidelines for submission if you’re interested. Ready to submit a post? You can do that here with your FanGraphs user name (register here, if you don’t have one yet). Already published an article somewhere? Feel free to cross-post.

We’re looking forward to your submissions.

K% and BB% for pitchers have been added to the player pages and leaderboards in the “Advanced” sections.

They are both calculated using Total Batters Faced. SO/TBF and BB/TBF.