Today, we are proud to announce a new site feature: The FanGraphs Lab. The Lab is a collaboration between the editorial team and the engineering team here at the site, a joint effort to create more ways to sort through and visualize the huge crush of data that pervades baseball these days.

The FanGraphs Lab is a space for experimental data visualization and exploration tools that we believe might one day have a permanent place on the site. The key word there is experimental: One of the reasons we’re so excited about the Lab is that it’s never been easier to go from an idea for a new tool or visual to a functioning version of it. It’s not quite “if you can dream it, you can do it,” but it’s closer than you might think, which means that there’s a lot of room for innovation. The Lab will have a permanent home at www.fangraphs.com/lab. It will also be accessible from the main page of the site on the right navigation bar:

This project grew out of a discussion between the two of us. Actually, “discussion” might be the wrong way to put it: Ben just kept sending Sean links to new apps he had built in rickety programming languages, fun graphing tools without any immediate use case. Instead of politely telling Ben to shove off, Sean came up with a process for turning those concepts into functioning FanGraphs tools. First, with development assistance from Claude Code, Ben rebuilt his initial ideas in the FanGraphs code base. Next, Sean integrated these new pages into the site’s data and infrastructure. From there, we bounced ideas off of each other and iterated until we were happy with the output. After taking a few months to jump-start the process, the first prototypes are coming off the assembly line now. Read the rest of this entry »