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.

The comparison graphs section has received an overhaul and now contains much of the functionality that our WAR Graphs tool contains, but for many of the other stats on the site, including standard counting stats.

You can easily embed them in your blogs in either static versions (where the data doesn’t change) or in updating versions where the data is always kept up to date.

Here’s a graph of cumulative home runs by age:

Source: FanGraphs — Barry Bonds, Albert Pujols, Alex Rodriguez

And these work for pitchers too:

Source: FanGraphs — Clayton Kershaw, Felix Hernandez, Tim Lincecum

Back in October, Bojan Koprivica wrote an excellent research piece on determining the difficulty of blocking every major league pitch.

Our WAR implementation now includes Bojan’s pitch-blocking algorithm dating back to the 2008 season. This impacts catchers only, with a maximum range of +/- 7 runs per season. The vast majority of catchers will see a change of +/- 2 runs or less per season.

We’ve also included two new stats in our fielding section: CPP and RPP.

CPP – The expected number of passed pitches.
RPP – The number of runs above / below average a pitcher is at blocking pitches.

You can check out these leaderboards to see which catchers have benefited the most since 2008 and here are the RPP leaderboards for individual seasons since 2008.

Much thanks goes out to Bojan for helping us get his metric up on the site! We will be updating CPP rand RPP weekly (possibly daily) throughout the 2012 season.

The 2012 Steamer Projections are now available on FanGraphs courtesy of steamerprojections.com. Massive thanks to Jared Cross, Dash Davidson, and Peter Rosenbloom for putting these together and letting us display them on FanGraphs.

The Steamer projections did quite well in last year’s Forecaster Challenge.

All the usual bells and whistles apply, including FanGraphs+ integration on the projection pages, integrated 5×5 ADP rankings, projections on the player pages, and active roster team filtering.

We are only displaying players that have more than zero plate appearances or innings pitched. AVG/OBP/SLG for batters and ERA for pitchers are projected for additional players in the downloadable spreadsheets.

Mock Draft Central’s 5×5 Mixed League Average Draft Position values are now available in all the projection pages under the heading ADP.

These are updated daily as new drafts happen. If you see a 999.0 as the ADP value, it means that player has not been drafted at all.

The 2012 ZiPS Projections courtesy of Baseball Think Factory and Dan Szymborski are now available in the sortable projections pages and on the player pages!

The new Custom Teams feature will replace the My Team and My Projections feature and now have the ability to create as many different team lists as you’d like, all while utilizing the existing leaderboards and projection pages.

If you’ve been using the old My Teams feature, your team will already appear in your custom team list as “My Team”.

To get to your team once it’s created, just click on the Leaders or Projections link.

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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