Tangotiger just released the 2011 Marcel Projections. They’re also up and running on the FanGraphs player pages and in our sortable projection section too!

Baseball Info Solutions has two job openings.

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At FanGraphs we’re big fans of the heat map. And now customizable heat maps are now available in the pitchf/x sections for all pitchers. Much thanks to Dave Allen for helping me out!

The thing about heat maps is that one size does not always fit all. Depending on the density of pitches and how many pitches are thrown, it’s not always a clear cut case how to display the data. Sometimes you want the points bigger, sometimes you want the “intensity” of each point to be more and sometimes you really want a different color scheme. For instance here’s the same chart, but with the settings changed.

And here is a third chart, with the settings changed one more time, where the points are made smaller but very intense in monochrome.

There’s a lot to play around with here and a lot of options to try and get the best picture possible.

There have been a couple updates made to a couple of the stats on the site and some new data for 2010 added.

1. Total Zone and Total Zone with Location Data (TZL) are now available for the 2010 season. They’re in all the fielding sections, leaderboards, etc….

2. wRC+ has been updated to fix an issue with the league baselines. As a result for 2010, all NL players are now -4.01 and all AL players are -2.58. This will have some effect on all seasons with a similar uniform effect for AL and NL players. Big thanks to Kincaid for alerting us to the issue.

3. Pitcher BABIP has been updated to use TBF instead of estimating AB through IP. This has been a long time point of contention with our BABIP calculation. For years where TBF is unavailable, the old method is still being used (years prior to 1916 and most projection systems). As a result, BABIP’s for pitchers will show as lower than they were, but the baseline is also lower. The ordering of players remains extremely similar and the correlation between estimating AB’s using IP*2.82 and using TBF is about .99. The BABIP formula we are currently using for pitchers is (H – HR) / (TBF – BB – HBP – HR – SO).

Bill Baer of Crashburn Alley yesterday wrote an article titled, “FanGraphs Fan Projections Are Craaaaazy”. And there certainly was something crazy going on with some players on the Braves.

Long story short: I’ve made some updates and the Braves projections have returned to sanity and now look like this:

Player       Fans   CarAvg    Diff
Heyward, J   .393   .376      .017
McCannn, B   .360   .364     -.004
Uggla, D     .365   .359      .006
McLouth, N   .337   .343     -.006
Prado, M     .351   .352     -.001
Freeman, F   .332   .213      .119
Gonzalez, A  .294   .298     -.004

Player        Fans    CarAvg    Diff
Hanson, T     3.25     3.38    -0.13
Lowe, D       3.94     3.80     0.14
Minor, M      3.83     3.77     0.06
Jurrjens, J   4.02     3.85     0.17
Hudson, T     3.98     3.82     0.16

I’m pleased to announce that Joshua Maciel’s original WAR Grids are now automated for you to create your very own. Also a big thanks to Dave Allen for his help.

Here’s what one looks like for the top 25 WAR leaders since the year 2000.

click to make big

I’d like to solicit the help of our community in building a useful fantasy player valuations guide. When we have the parameters set, I’ll code it and put it up on FanGraphs.

There are a couple goals here:

1. Building a useful and easy to use fantasy player valuation guide.
2. Full transparency in how all the rankings work.

I’ve dabbled in this a bit, so I will first give a starting point:

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The selection of multiple seasons that was made available in the leaderboards section has now been rolled out to the team pages and My Team section sof the site.

Now it’s easy to find which Yankees player had the most WAR since 1996.

Or, which team had the worst offense since 2006.

On the leaderboards you can now filter by multiple seasons going all the way back to 1871.

There are a couple caveats, in that some sections of the leaderboard only go back so far. The Batted Ball, Pitch Type, Pitch Value and Plate Discipline sections can only go back to 2002, and the Win Probability section only goes back to 1974. Splits will also only go back to 2002 and monthly splits currently only for single seasons right now. I’ve included a label which shows exactly which seasons you’re looking at, even if you’ve selected something else.

For instance, if you’ve selected dates between 1980 and 2004 and you go the the Batted Ball section, you’ll only see the dates between 2002 and 2004.

If you’re filtering huge date ranges, please be a little more patient than usual because it may take a few seconds more to grab all the data.

This feature will be making its way to the other sortable stats sections fairly soon.

On all the leaderboards pages, you can now filter by all sorts of splits, including handedness, batted ball type, home/away, leverage, etc…

Want to know who the 4th best qualified pull hitter was last season according to wRC+? No problem; it was Paul Konerko.

How about which second baseman hit the most home runs against right handed pitchers?

Or even which pitcher had the lowest FIP on the road?

Splits filtering can also be done at the full team level, in the team pages, and in the My Team sections of the site.