I’m pleased to announce that FanGraphs is now carrying the results of the Fans Scouting Report, conducted each year by Tangotiger. We currently have 2009 and 2010, but plan to eventually get all the years going back to 2003.

Right now it’s available in each of the player pages in both the “Advanced Fielding” section and its own section. It will soon make it’s way to the leaderboards and team pages.

The one thing that you probably need to know is:

FSR – Runs above average for fans scouting report.

Other than that, everything is on a 0 – 100 scale, with 50 being the average.

I’ve made some changes to the player pages:

– The change to the header allowed us to remove the sidebar and increase the width of the stat boxes. I personally think they look less cramped and now there’s room to add more.

– MLB Trade Rumors links specific to that player are now available on each page.

– Facebook like and a universal “share” button is now available on all the player pages.

– We’re now getting all the latest RotoWire news for every player and no longer just a small sampling of players.

I think that’s about it, for now. There may be some future changes depending on how these are received.

Because we can’t run chats everyday, feel free to use this thread to chat about today’s playoff games.

TB @ TEX – 5:00pm ET
MIN & NYY – 8:30pm ET

For all our Wins Above Replacement metrics (WAR) we use five year regressed park factors. These are now updated to include 2010 data.

Our final 2010 UZR update will be later this week, but as of now UZR has been updated through September 30th and is only missing the last three days of the season.

The self-proclaimed greatest pitcher there ever was returned to HBO last night to try his hand in a Mexican League (not to be confused with THE Mexican League, as far as I know).

Clearly Kenny Powers doesn’t read FanGraphs because Kenny Powers “f**king hates computers, all kinds.”

But, if he did, besides calling the site something heinously profane, he might remember that for his career he averaged just above .5 wins above replacement per season — not to mention that, even in his best season, he would have only barely cracked the top 20 relief pitchers according to WAR.

Season Team   G    IP  W   L  SV   SO  BB  ER    ERA  WAR
2001   GWT*  15  23.0  4   0  12   28   0   1   0.39    ----
2002   ATL   62  66.1  7   3  49  106  30  21   2.85    1.75
2003   NYA   64  62.2  7   3  39   79  20  33   4.74    1.13
2004   SFG   52  54.2  3  10  30   44  27  40   6.59   -0.46
2005   BOS   15  12.2  0   6   3    6   9  12   8.57   -0.31

The good news is, that assuming Kenny Powers is between the age of 29-31 (based on being drafted in 1999), he still has plenty of time to make it back to the big leagues!

Don’t forget to fill out the fans scouting report ballot for your favorite team over at insidethebook.com. Diamondbacks fans and Marlins fans are especially still needed!

It’s that time of year again! Tangotiger is running his annual Fans Scouting Report. Please take a moment and fill out scouting reports for the team of your choice!

Occasionally (okay, rather frequently), I’ll see people debate the accuracies between the WAR displayed on FanGraphs and Rally’s WAR on Baseball-Reference.

Joe Posnanski speculated on the differences in a recent article about Josh Hamilton’s MVP chances:

*I could be reading this wrong, but Fangraphs seems to put more emphasis on defense. For instance, Carl Crawford’s WAR at Baseball Reference is 3.7 — his defense is worth eight runs above average. But Fangraphs credits him for 22 runs above average, which thrusts his WAR up to 5.6 and into the No. 4 spot in baseball.

I’ve seen similar sentiments echoed throughout the blogosphere and on Twitter.

In reality, on a per-player basis in 2009, UZR distributed 441 fewer runs than TZ did, excluding pitchers and catchers. And there is not a year that UZR is available where its absolute value has been higher than TZ.

In 2009, the maximum spread of UZR was +31 to -37 and TZ showed a similar spread of +31 to -34. Here’s a graph of the full spread. The blue overlap shows the points at which TZ starts showing a greater spread.

This might not be a perfect comparison in how much defense actually contributes to WAR and a better one might be how much as a whole does fielding contribute to total runs. In 2009, fielding made up about 14.2% of all positive and negative runs according to FanGraphs WAR, while Rally’s WAR made up about 15.5% of all positive and negative runs.

All in all, they are similar in how fielding is weighted as a whole. The biggest difference between the two is how each individual player’s fielding is evaluated.

Update: Tangotiger pointed out to me that fans scouting report numbers for Holliday and Wilson looked off. Turns out I was calculating players who switched teams for the Fans Scouting Report incorrectly and as a result Matt Holliday and Jack Wilson are now adjusted accordingly and the tables below have been updated.

Earlier this week I ran the the Aggregate Defensive Evaluations (ADE) on 2009 shortstops. For those who missed it, this is an attempt to take 5 different fielding metrics (UZR, Fans Scouting Report, John Dewan’s DRS, Total Zone, and Total Zone with Location), put them on the same scale and then see which player’s defensive abilities we are fairly certain about and those which we are not.

In response to some comments, I’ve added a weighted average and standard deviation. This excludes standard Total Zone in favor of TZL. It also weights UZR, DRS, and TZL 3 times each and then the Fans Scouting Report only 1 time. (These are the last two columns)

It’s probably not much of a surprise that Carl Crawford sits atop the list. UZR has actually rated him as 56 runs above average the past three years, more than double the next closest player. Same goes for pretty much all the defensive metrics.

Matt Holliday I would say has the highest level of disagreement of any player. The Fans Scouting Report hates him, DRS loves him, UZR thinks he’s above average, and Total Zone thinks he’s just average. I’d consider the inconsistency with Holliday different than Juan Rivera’s situation where there’s also a high level of disagreement. In Rivera’s case at least all metrics agree he’s average or better.

Ryan Braun is also pretty interesting in that the Fans rated him as +15, while all the other defensive models thought he was well below average. This season Ryan Braun continues to be rated poorly by the defensive models. It will be interesting to see what the fans think of him next season.

I’d still consider these reports a bit of a work in progress, but for those interested, here’s the shortstops again, but this time with the weighted averages column:

There’s no denying defensive metrics are controversial. Whether they clash with what you’ve seen with your own eyes, or you just don’t believe them, it seems like everyone has some sort of opinion to offer on their validity.

On FanGraphs, we carry no less than four different defensive metrics:

UZR – Mitchel Lichtman’s Ultimate Zone Rating
DRS – John Dewan’s Defensive Runs Saved
TZL – Rally’s Total Zone (location based version)
TZ – Rally’s Total Zone (standard version)

There’s no denying that we use some more frequently than others (cough, UZR), but the reason we have all four is because it’s great to see what different data sets and different models spit out. And In addition to the four, there’s also a fifth completely unrelated metric in the Fans Scouts Report that is run each and every year on insidethebook.com by Tangotiger.

It’s important to note that all these defensive metrics are not on the same scale, so it’s difficult to glance at all four (five if you use the Fans Scouting Report) and get a good sense if they’re in agreement or not. Which brings me to the preliminary look at the Aggregate Defensive Evaluations, where each metric is put on the same scale for each position, averaged, and then a standard deviation is computed for each player. Here are the 2009 Shortstops (min 82 games played):

As you can see, Paul Janish and Brendan Ryan are the clear leaders atop the list and even all the metrics are for the most part in agreement. +/- 5 runs in either direction is still going to make them elite defenders.

And there are players like Yunel Escobar who is considered by Total Zone and DRS to be very good, but by UZR and the Fans to be more or less average. On an aggregate level he still ends up as very good, though there is a good amount of disagreement as to just how good he is, even if no system thinks he’s below average.

All in all, it should be easy to go up and down the list and see which players there’s a high level of confidence about defensively, and which there is not.

From a mere computational standpoint, is this the best way to go about combining defensive metrics? I’m really not sure and it’s certainly worth looking into further. There are a lot of options in weighting the metrics differently and how to scale them, but overall I feel this is at least a decent start and something I hope to delve into a bit more.

The point here is that there’s a lot of information in these metrics with so many models out there it’s becoming increasingly important to try and identify what we’re fairly confident about and what we’re not so confident about instead of making the mistake of throwing them all away.