If you’d like to work for in baseball:

Executive Development Fellow (EDF) – Web Software Development, Baseball Systems
Full job posting and application process can be found online at www.indians.com/jobs.

The primary responsibilities of the EDF are to assist the Software Development staff with designing and supporting web-based applications for the Baseball Department. Through an intensive and structured 12-month immersion program, the EDF will also be exposed to other facets of the Indians business operations and will participate in a comprehensive orientation and mentoring program to enhance professional development.

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I’ve seen some stories floating around the blogosphere which relate to the choices you have when it comes to your baseball stats. In general, the stories have been directed at the SIERA metric, which was unveiled in great detail last week. Overall, the reception was very positive and we’re really glad Matt Swartz agreed to work with us.

Here at FanGraphs, we’re about expanding baseball knowledge and enjoyment through opinion and analysis. Obviously, we think adding SIERA to the site brought something new to the table and we wouldn’t have added it had we thought otherwise.

That’s not to say that reasonable people can’t disagree. If you think one ERA estimator is too complex and is ruining baseball, that’s fine. You’re welcome to use another of our myriad statistics. I’m sure you’ll find one that works for you. From our perspective, our variety is our strength. Whether you use FIP, xFIP, tERA, SIERA or plain, old ERA to judge pitchers, the whole point of this site is to heighten your knowledge — and enjoyment — of baseball.

For those of you who don’t know how FanGraphs selects its statistics, it should be noted that we don’t develop in-house figures. We look around and edit down the incredibly large selection of metrics being created and then select the ones that have the most relevance. We work closely with those statistics’ creators to make sure things are calculated and displayed properly.

Denouncing work by claiming it’s anti-baseball does everyone a diservice. No one is forcing our readers to use these numbers. In fact, I hope you look at them critically and let us know how we can make them better. I’m betting that improvements would mean more — not less — statistical investigation, critical thinking and debate among the thousands of baseball fans who visit our site daily.

Whether you like your baseball full of complex stats or void of stats entirely, there’s a place for you at FanGraphs. And, in my mind, that’s exactly how it should be.

K% and BB% for pitchers have been added to the player pages and leaderboards in the “Advanced” sections.

They are both calculated using Total Batters Faced. SO/TBF and BB/TBF.

Due to popular demand and to decrease general confusion, K% has been changed from K/AB to K/PA.

On average, you’ll see players’ K% drop about 2% and, at the very most (rare cases like Adam Dunn), about 6%.

This is a site-wide change and impacts stats pages, splits, leaderboards, and graphs that contain K%.

Last night we rolled out some changes to the menu bar in an attempt to improve navigation on the site:

If there’s something that you would like to have quicker access to, that isn’t already in the menu bar, please let us know!

If you don’t see the menus correctly, please hit refresh on your browser.

Last year during our very first FanGraphs Event, we gave out FanGraphs t-shirts to everyone who attended and up until this day, those were the only FanGraphs t-shirts that were let loose into the world! Turns out we had some left over, and now we’re selling them for $19.99 each, which includes shipping and handling.

For you t-shirt aficionados, they are Fruit of the Loom brand, 100% cotton, and actually fit quite nice. They come in navy blue, and white. The supply of these is fairly limited, and some of the white ones are out of stock. If there’s demand, maybe we’ll make another batch.

They’re on sale now!

I’m pleased to announce that FanGraphs is now carrying a comprehensive base running stat: Mitchel Lichtman’s Ultimate Base Running (UBR).

UBR is now being included in WAR for years where UBR is available (2002-2011).

Though 95% of all players will have their WAR changed less than .4 wins in any particular season and less than 1.3 wins over their careers, we feel that the inclusion of UBR in WAR will help properly credit/debit players who truly excel or are particularly awful on the base paths.

UBR is available under “Bsr” or “Base Running” in the player pages and leaderboards.

Here’s an excerpt from the UBR primer that we’ll be posting later today:

Base running linear weights or base running runs, or Ultimate Base Running (UBR), is similar to the outfield arm portion of UZR. Whatever credit (positive or negative) is given to an outfielder based on a runner hold, advance, or kill on a batted ball is also given in reverse to the runner (or runners). There are some plays that a runner is given credit (again plus or minus) for that do not involve an outfielder, such as being safe or out going from first to second on a ground ball to the infield, or advancing, remaining, or being thrown out going from second to third on a ground ball to SS or 3B.

Runs are awarded to base runners in the same way they are rewarded to outfielders on “arm” plays. The average run value in terms of the base/out state is subtracted from the actual run value (also in terms of the resultant base/out state) on a particular play where a base runner is involved. The result of the subtraction is the run value awarded to the base runner on that play.

Frequently people wonder when the site was last updated and if FanGraphs stats included the previous night’s games. Now you no longer have to do the legwork yourself and you can easily see in the footer when the site’s stats were last updated.

Typically our stats load finishes up between 5am and 6am Eastern time.

There is now “rookie” filtering in the leaderboards.

The criteria to be a rookie is any season where a player has started the season with fewer than 130 at-bats, and fewer than 50 innings pitched. Roster time is not a factor in these, so there may be the occasional player that show up that is not technically a rookie by MLB standards.

What’s neat is you can combine this with the “Multiple Seasons” feature to get the best rookies of any decade (or any time period really). For instance, here are the top rookie seasons by pitcher WAR since 1980.

And here are the top rookie seasons by batter WAR from 2000 to 2009.

It’s worth noting that if you don’t check the “split season” box, it will combine all a player’s seasons when they were rookie eligible and it will not “split out” the seasons.

Anyway, there’s lots of neat ways to filter this data and please let us know if you run into any bugs.

2011 UZR data is now up on the site and will be updated during each Sunday night’s data load.

The UZR data will always include games through Saturday.