Full historical WAR for all position players has been added to the site! It’s available in the career leaderboards and on the individual player pages currently and will work its way to some other sections of the site pretty soon. We’ll do full WAR for pitchers eventually, but right now that’s still only 2002 onward.

The other new feature are the WAR graphs where you can compare up to 4 players at a time in various ways:

Just a quick note that these two graphs in particular were inspired by work done over at Beyond the Box Score.

Some additional notes about our historical WAR:

– We’re using the best fielding metric publicly available at the time, so for anything 2002 onward, we’re using Mitchel Lichtman’s UZR and anything pre-2002, we’re using Sean Smith’s Total Zone. Total Zone prior to 2010 is also available in the fielding section of the site which has replaced Range Factors.

– The batting component is based on wRAA (based off wOBA / linear weights) and uses 5 year regressed park factors going all the way back to 1871.

– Positional adjustments prior to 2000 are based off Sean Smith’s positional adjustments by decade. 2000 onward are based on Tangotiger’s positional adjustments.

– Replacement levels are adjusted slightly by season. They’re all right around 20 runs with the exception of a few years and a couple leagues.

– The run to win converter is also adjusted by season, but it’s generally going to be right around 10.

If you want to know more about how WAR is calculated for position players, read the 7 part series.

Our advertising policy strictly prohibits any sort of non-prompted audio, popups, or takeover ads. Earlier today there was an obnoxious non-prompted audio ad that displayed on the site for which we received some concerned e-mails and tweets.

Our policy when we’re alerted to such an ad, or see one ourselves, is to remove every ad from the site until the offending ad can be tracked down and removed. We deal with a number of different advertising networks, and, while the majority of the time they provide ads that meet our standards, there are some rare instances where this is not the case.

We are heavy users of FanGraphs and it annoys us just as much as it annoys you to see obnoxious ads on the site, and we’re committed to keeping the site free of ads that are overly intrusive.

Ultimate Zone Ratings (UZR) home and away splits are now live in the splits sections for position players! And on the subject, I’ll add a quote from Mitchel Lichtman’s revised UZR primer, which we’ll be posting later today.

…if you still don’t trust a certain player’s UZR because of the park factors issue, you can check out his road numbers. Keep in mind that you will see lots of random differences between some players’ home and road numbers which have nothing to do with park effects – they are simply an artifact of small sample sizes. Remember also that even large sample sizes can have large random fluctuations as well.”

I’d like to share some additional information about the Community Blog approval process. We will be selecting on a daily basis the ones we consider the best to appear in the blog.

The approval process can take up to 48 hours and we will probably not be looking at posts on the weekend. If your post is approved it will then appear in the Community Blog. We may feature exceptionally high quality posts on the homepage.

Below are some of the criteria we will use to decide whether we believe the post will be informative and/or entertaining to our readers.

1. The article is well written and well constructed, with minimal spelling/grammatical errors.

2. There is a clear and interesting point to the article.

3. The article is original and if the article contains stats based analysis, the use of stats is creative and relevant to the point you’re trying to make.

4. The article is factually correct and does not blatantly misuse baseball statistics.

5. All articles submissions should be at least 250 words.

We really appreciate the time and effort that goes into all submissions and if your article is not published and you would like additional information, you can contact us at community@fangraphs.com where we will give you feedback on why your post was not accepted.

Many of you have submitted articles to FanGraphs that we’ve been unable to publish because there just hasn’t been a place for unsolicited article submissions. With the FanGraphs Community Blog, we now have a place where we can accept your original work.

Anyone with a FanGraphs account can now submit an article using our standard WordPress interface. Here are the basic rules:

– Each article is subject to approval. We have no idea what kind of volume we will get on article submissions, but we will do our very best to get to every single article within 24 hours.

– Your submission must be your original work. Do not submit articles you have not written yourself or that have a large amount of material that is not of your own creation.

– Your submission does not need to be unique to FanGraphs. If you have written a piece for your own blog and think it would work particularly well on FanGraphs then you may submit it for approval.

– You may submit a maximum of 2 articles per week. Submitting an unreasonable number of articles will result in having your posting privileges revoked.

Other than that, we’ll see how it goes and adjust the rules accordingly. Once the blog gets some posts in it, we’ll start to further integrating those posts into FanGraphs and give it some additional publicity.

If you already have an account, click here to submit an article: New Post

If you don’t have an account, you’ll need to register for one here: Register

If you have any questions, or issues submitting your posts, please fill out a contact form.

This week there’s been a lot of discussion on The Book Blog about creating a save style metric based on WPA. The end result of the discussion was to create two stats: Shutdowns and Meltdowns.

A Shutdown is when a reliever accumulates greater than or equal to 0.06 WPA in any individual game.

A Meltdown is when a reliever’s WPA is less than or equal to -0.06 in any individual game.

The entire discussion of Shutdowns and Meltdowns was started off by Jeff Zimmerman’s “saves rant” over at Beyond the Box Score and then the creation of the new metric was hashed out on The Book Blog here and here.

The number of Shutdowns are scaled to Saves + Holds, which is where the .06 thresholds originated.

Both these metrics: Shutdowns (SD) and Meltdowns (MD) are available in the Win Probability leaderboards and teams sections and will eventually make it into the player pages. Remember you will either need to click on “All Players” or “Relievers” since starting pitchers are not eligible for Shutdowns or Meltdowns.

With one month of baseball in the books, it’s time to take a look at who you voted as the FanGraphs Stars of the Month!

The way these rankings are calculated (for the time being) is the sum of the percentage of total stars accumulated for each individual game. Onto the awards! (3 stars is the top spot.)

3 Stars – Jason Heyward: Baseball’s #1a/b prospect had a monstrous and timely first month. He even had a game where he accumulated over 1 full win in WPA. He was awarded 3-stars, five times.

2 Stars – Miguel Cabrera: Leading the month in WPA with 2.04 wins, Cabrera missed out on his third star by just a handful of votes. He was awarded 3-stars, a month-leading six times.

1 Star – Ubaldo Jimenez: In order to compete in votes with batters who play everyday, you really need to have a pretty special month as a pitcher. Ulbado did just that with 5 wins, a no-hitter, and a major league leading 0.79 ERA to take 3rd place in fan voting this month. In each of his five starts, he was awarded 3-stars.

That’s all for the very first FanGraphs Stars of the Month! Be sure to vote after each game is completed for who you think is the most deserving player of the game.

For pitchers there’s a new table in the splits section, Pitch Types, which shows the percentage of pitches each pitcher throws on any particular count. Here’s what the MLB averages looked like in 2009:

As you might have suspected, as the count gets more in favor of the pitcher, out come the breaking pitches. And typically, the more behind the pitcher gets in the count, the more fastballs are thrown.

Today the Boston Herald and Deadspin homed in on Jason Bay’s 13-run change in his 2009 UZR. John Tomase of the Boston Herald writes that “UZR owes Jason Bay an apology” and Deadspin’s Barry Petchesky writes that “it’s foolish to jump aboard the Sabermetrics bandwagon.”

John Tomase goes on to say:

… Ultimate Zone Rating, which was treated as Gospel this winter during all the discussions of defense around these parts.

Let’s just say that it’s not UZR’s fault that it’s been treated like gospel, and anyone who actually reads FanGraphs should know that we definitely don’t treat single-season UZR like gospel either. Dave Cameron addressed “not liking or agreeing” with UZR last year in his Bay vs Cameron article and Jack Moore consulted multiple defensive metrics in his contract analysis of the Jason Bay signing.

Even with the UZR improvements, Bay is still listed as -35 runs below average since 2007. Some will point to his poor 2007 as the result of still recovering from knee surgery, but his problems in the outfield continued to plague him in 2008 between playing in PNC and Fenway.

All the other defensive metrics seem to agree that he has been pretty sub-par since 2007 as well. John Dewan’s +/- has him at -18 runs. Sean Smith’s Total Zone has him at -47 runs and Brian Cartwright’s WOWY based system likes him the best at -8.2 (having him at +9 in 2009).

Now there’s no doubt that, in 2009, it seems most systems have him somewhere around average, which is a fairly large departure from his 2007 and 2008 metrics, but let’s not forget that the fans themselves seemed to think Bay was below average in 2009. Tom Tango runs the Fans Scouting Report each year and they rated Bay a 2.69 on a scale of 1-5, which placed him 48th of the 71 rated left fielders.

Do we need to average out every single defensive system for each player to get a decent picture of his defensive abilities? Probably not. But when in doubt (like some of you were with Jason Bay), you can always get a second opinion, and a third opinion. Right here on FanGraphs we now carry two separate defensive systems (UZR and John Dewan’s Defensive Runs Saved) for all players.

Baseball statistics can be a valuable tool in your toolbox when analyzing a player. Often times they can be one of the most useful tools in your toolbox, but there’s really no reason to throw that tool away completely, just as you wouldn’t throw away scouting information. And as I’ve said before, a lot of times the metrics you use actually do contain “scouting” information.

New information and better models are coming out all the time and this is not unique to baseball. Analysts use the information that’s available to them and in light of new information, there’s a chance that the previous analysis might be wrong.

But the alternative as Barry Petchesky wrote is that “it’s foolish to jump aboard the Sabermetrics bandwagon.” Suppose we go back to the days of batting average and fielding percentage; to how many players would batting average or fielding percentage “owe an apology”?