In honor of opening day, the FanGraphs iPhone App has been discounted to $0.99 for today only!

FanGraphs App iTunes Link

Age filtering is now available on the leaderboards for full season batting and pitching stats. This will forever be known as the Dave Cameron feature, because he’s been asking for this in increased frequency for quite a while now.

There’s lots of neat stuff you can do with this, like see all qualified batters in their age 18-24 seasons since 2005.

Or maybe which teams have benefited the most from pitchers age 30 and up since 2000.

Basically, you can now slice and dice by age to your hearts content.

Custom Leagues are now available for FanGraphs: The Game!

If you and a group of your friends would like to have any easy way to see how you players stack up against each other on the leaderboards, just create a Custom League:

When you create a Custom League, anyone you add to the league will then see that league show up on their FanGraphs: The Game dashboard for easy access.

If you are added to a league that you don’t want to be a part of, you can go to the Custom League page and hide the league from your dashboard:

Custom Leagues use your already existing players and don’t impact the way the game is played at all. You can join as many or as few Custom Leagues as you like.

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.

Since there have been some FanGraphs: The Game questions, specifically about how choosing a team impacts your player and why it locks at some point (among other questions), I thought I’d take a post to clarify. I’ll add this to the game rules later for easy access.

How does the team you choose for your player impact The Game?

The team you choose is simply the team your player is on. It does not affect who you can pick each day, and it does not affect how your stats are accumulated.

You should choose the team you want your player to be associated with; most likely (though not necessarily) your favorite team.

Then what is the point of choosing a team?

Since one goal of the game is trying to be the best player at your chosen position on your specific team for bragging rights, it will affect which depth chart you’re a part of. There are also some team-centric periodic awards that are handed out based on your team.

Why can’t I change my team mid-season?

Teams lock because we don’t want players switching teams and changing depth charts during the season. After the season is over, you’ll be able to put your player on a different team for the following season if you want.

Won’t it be more challenging to be #1 on the depth chart if you choose a popular team/position combination?

Yes. Just like in real baseball, there are varying levels of competition for starting spots on different teams.

Read the rest of this entry »

FanGraphs: The Game now contains a settings page where you can change your team (for a limited amount of time) and hide players that you don’t want to use or created by mistake.

In addition, you can now clear your pick on the picker page if you’ve made a pick and decide you no longer want to make any pick for that day.

You may change your team up until your player has accumulated stats. Once your player has accumulated any stats, your player’s team will be locked for the rest of the season.

I’m pleased to introduce FanGraphs: The Game!

FanGraphs: The Game is our new daily fantasy game, and allows you to create a player and make picks each day to build your player’s stats over the course of the season. Whatever statistics your pick of the day accumulates are then added to your player’s totals.

All of your totals will be tracked on your very own FanGraphs player page and your player will show up on the leaderboards, so you can see how well you’ve performed compared to others throughout the season. (These will be blank until the games begin.)

Because each player you create is assigned a position and is affiliated with a specific organization, you have the chance to crack the starting line-up and hold bragging rights over your friends and others who are gunning for that same spot. You can also win awards (weekly, monthly, half-season, and full-season), achievements, and track your hitting streaks.

At the end of the season, the player with the highest WAR at each position will win $100, and the player with the second highest total at each position will each win a FanGraphs T-Shirt. Please see the full game rules for further details.

Click here to create a player and make your first pick. You can make as many as eight players or as few as one – it’s all up to you. And, since you’re only going to be making one pick per day for each player you create, this is the fastest and easiest way to enjoy fantasy baseball. And best of all, it’s entirely free.

We’ve created a twitter account where you can keep up with accomplishments, leaders, and various news from FanGraphs: The Game, so follow @fgthegame now, and use #FGTheGame to communicate with your friends and others on Twitter each day.

We hope you enjoy FanGraphs: The Game – good luck becoming the starter for your favorite team!

All of the Defensive Runs Saved data on FanGraphs has been updated to reflect the numbers available in the Fielding Bible Volume III. These are now available in the player pages and leaderboards.

I am going to quote directly from the Fielding Bible Volume III on the changes:

1) Timer Plus/Minus – This is the most important new addition to the DRS System. In 2009, Baseball Info Solutions started timing every batted ball from the moment it was hit to the moment of the resolution of the play (hit or out). By using the timer, we have taken some key subjective elements of the system and made them objective. For example, we used to measure the velocity of a batted ball with an estimate, calling it softly hit, hard hit, or medium. Now, we know the exact velocity of every batted ball. We have added this tour cornerstone methodology, the Plus/Minus System.

2) Good Plays and Misplays – This is a brand new methodology. When a player makes a play that is better than the norm, we want to give him more credit. Or if it’s worse, we want to take credit away. We have 28 categories of Good Plays and 54 categories of Misplays. We have converted the ones that don’t overlap with our other methodologies to Runs Saved estimates. With this system we especially made great strides in measuring catcher defense.

3) Outfielder Arms – Here we use the new batted ball timer to upgrade our system to measure the impact that outfielders make defensively with their throwing arms. We also now use a more precise location of batted balls to enhance this methodology.

4) Double Plays – We’ve upgraded our system to measure how good infielders are at starting and turning the double play by doing something similar to what we do with our Outfield Arms technique: measuring the location and the velocity of the batted ball in a double play situation to determine how difficult the play is to turn into a double play.

5) Bunts – Same thing here. We now include the location of bunts among other criteria to better evaluate how fielders make plays on bunts.

6) Centering – The intention of Defensive Runs Saved is that zero is average. If a player has a positive number of runs saved, it’s an above-average performance. If he has a negative number of runs saved, it’s below average. As we’ve added on to the system over the years, we veered away from zero a bit. To get back on track, we took every methodology and “centered” it at zero.

The 2012 Marcel Projections courtesy of Tangotiger are now available in the usual sortable format and in the player pages!

If you are unfamiliar with the Marcel the Monkey Forecasting System, please read the FAQ and all subsequent links.