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.

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.