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.

The Baltimore Orioles are looking to hire a Baseball Analytics intern to work in our Baseball Operations Department. This individual will report to the Assistant Scouting Director and the Coordinator of Baseball Analytics.

The intern will primarily focus on compiling, maintaining and analyzing data to assist the department in its development of various statistical models for use in player evaluation, both in the amateur, pro, and international arenas, in addition to performing other baseball-related research projects.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

It’s the first day of December, which means it’s time to once again open the FAN Projection ballots!

Before you can project any players, you’ll have to select the team you follow most closely towards the top of the screen. If you really don’t follow a team, just pick one. You’ll only have to do this once.

After you’ve selected a team, there are 9 categories for pitchers and 10 categories for position players. Pick the values in the drop-down boxes closest to what you think the player will do in 2012, hit the submit button and you’re done! If you made a mistake, you can always go back and change your selection at any time.

Please note that everything this year is a rate stat. You’re projecting 2B+3B, HR, SB, and Fielding as a measure of 150 games (basically a full season). The player’s previous stats are shown per 150 games in the projection ballot too. This will make changing playing time projections much easier as you’ll only have to change the games played portion.

That’s really all there is to it. You can filter players by team, or if you go to the player pages, you can project players individually. If you want to see all the players you’ve projected, you can click on the “My Rankings” button which will show you only what you specifically projected a player to do.

Fan Projections will show up on the player pages after there have been 15 ballots submitted.

If you do notice any issues, please let us know.

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.