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.

The FanGraphs iPhone App is discounted to $0.99 from it’s original price of $2.99 until the end of the weekend.

I’ve also added the in-season ZiPS projections, both “Updated” and “Rest of Season” to the player stats.

The ZiPS in-season projections courtesy of Baseball Think Factory’s Dan Szymborski are now live on the player pages making the pre-season projections hidden by default.

Remember:

ZiPS (R) – What a player is projected to do the rest of the season.
ZiPS (U) – A player’s full season updated projection.

Updated and Rest of Season ZiPS are also available in the sortable projection area.

Our boxscores just got a major overhaul after being neglected for several years! Here’s what’s new:

– The Game Graphs, Play Log, and Box Score sections were merged into one single page.

– Almost every FanGraphs stat is available in the boxscore both on the individual player level and team total level. Every stat comes in its own familiar section, just as they’re laid out on the player pages and leaderboards.

– Each section is fully sortable with much improved sorting performance.

– Each stat can be hovered over for a tooltip style quick definition.

– Stars of the Game voting and viewing can be conducted on the boxscore page. Please remember to vote!

All the new boxscores are available for both live games and any game dating back to 1974.

Big thanks to Amazin’ Avenue for thoroughly trashing our previous boxscore layout.

A number of months ago I rolled out “the most popular player feature”. It’s basically which players were viewed the most on FanGraphs in the past 24 hour period. Over our spring training trip, it was mentioned to me several times that Rafael Soriano is always in the top five and that the list must be broken.

It’s certainly possible that the list is broken, but after combing through the code, I couldn’t find anything particularly egregious. I’m inclined to believe one of the following: the system is being gamed (maybe it can be if you do something like this), there’s a group of people who everyday can’t help but fawn over Rafael Soriano’s stats (there are a lot of Yankees fans), or he really is just that popular (I’m skeptical).

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It seems like everything is working properly with the 2011 stats, with the exception of a lot of negative FIP values. That’s what happens when you only have six MLB games and the FIP constant is 1.72. If you see anything else that doesn’t look right, please let me know!

Daily data loads from here on out should be complete by 5am every morning.

Last night I rolled out ERA-, FIP-, and xFIP- to the site. These are all park and league adjusted and basically your pitching equivalent of wRC+, except that lower is better, with 100 still being average.

You can read more about ERA- (or as it’s called in the article, aERA) here.

These are now available in all the player pages and leaderboards.

One other quick addition was adding Shutdowns (SD) and Meltdowns (MD) to the player pages.

I made a change last night to xFIP that adjusts the major league HR/FB rate on a seasonal basis. Previously, the average was set at 10.5%. In recent years the average HR/FB has been somewhat lower than 10.5%, which is what prompted the change.

2007 – 9.7%
2008 – 10.1%
2009 – 10.1%
2010 – 9.4%

Overall a player’s 2010 xFIP will tend to be a little bit lower, at most around 0.20 runs, but generally more in the 0.05 to 0.10 range.

This year’s latest ZiPS projections, courtesy of Dan Szymborski of Baseball Think Factory are now live in the player pages (you’re welcome, Carson) and the sortable projection sections.

If you’d prefer them in excel format you can download the full spreadsheet here.

We’ll be updating these every day of the 2011 season, as usual!

I’ve added a place on the player pages where you can leave a comment or have a threaded discussion about a particular player. You can log in using pretty much whichever service you want (twitter, facebook, google, etc…), or continue to comment anonymously.

We tried something like this a couple years ago for a short amount of time and it didn’t work out too well, but I think it’s worth trying again.

The comments section is at the very bottom of the page (with a link at the top of the page showing how many comments there are) so it doesn’t get in the way of your stats browsing.