It’s come to my attention that the Fielding component for the CHONE projections is per 150 games and not a raw total for the season that I, for some reason, thought it to be. The Fielding projections have now been properly adjusted based on projected games.

I’ve also made a few slight changes to the Fan Projections that adjusted some extremely unrealistic ballots, mostly pertaining to players with zero playing time, but who were projected to hit over zero home runs and extra base hits.

There’s a lot going on at FanGraphs each week. This week alone we had 43 posts, rolled out two new features, and made a book announcement. So in case you missed something, here were the highlights:

Splits! – Finally, FanGraphs now has splits data dating back to 2002. They include platoon, home/away, monthly, leverage, batted ball, and spray splits.

2010 Second Opinion – By the end of the month we’ll be releasing our first electronic publication, The FanGraphs Second Opinion: 2010 Fantasy Baseball Companion

FanGraphs Audio – Carson Cistulli hosts our very first podcast where we go roundtabling with Dave Cameron, Matt Klaassen, and Erik Manning.

New Contributors – Joe Pawlikowski checks out why teams are avoiding Jermaine Dye and Alex Remington looks at why signing early is what gets you the big bucks.

Split Analysis Galore – Intro | Mauer | Platoon | Weaver | Gagne | Bonds | Hill | Howard | The Minors | Looper

And on the RotoGraphs Fantasy side of things:

OBP or AVG – Zach Sanders delves into the merits and difficulties of adding On-Base Percentage to your league’s scoring categories.

ADP Values: Center Field Edition – Eno Sarris identifies some of the values to be had at the center field position.

Rzepczynski – David Golebiewski takes a hard look at Marc Rzepczynski and concludes he’s someone to target late in fantasy drafts.

Update: The 2010 Second Opinion is Now Available!

I’m pleased to announce that FanGraphs will be dipping its toes into the publishing world with its very first publication: The FanGraphs Second Opinion: 2010 Fantasy Baseball Companion, or for short, the 2010 Second Opinion.

First let’s get to what’s in it:

– Over 400 in-depth player profiles written by many of the FanGraphs and RotoGraphs contributors you’re already familiar with.

– Articles covering: closer situations, players coming back from injuries, sophomore players to watch, 2010 fantasy prospects, impact trades, the big questions for 2010, and something that Carson wrote, where he answers your questions before you even ask them!

– Stats & Graphs: Each player profile is accompanied by a stat box with 10 very useful stats for both fantasy and real-life player evaluation including spark graphs showing career trends.

– Team previews: Each team is previewed for next season, giving you the rundown on what to expect from a fantasy and real-life standpoint.

The book will first be available for download in PDF format late February for the low price of $7.95.  In addition to the PDF, you will have access to all the information in the book on FanGraphs.com when logged in to your FanGraphs account.  This information will include the written player profiles which will be integrated into the stats pages and all the articles and team previews in the book.

In addition, some of you may have noticed that FanGraphs has been contributing to ESPN Insider (ESPN’s all sports premium content) this past month with more to come.  If you purchase the book and are logged in, you’ll also have access to these articles and future articles we publish on ESPN Insider, on FanGraphs.com, through March 1st, 2011.

As we get closer to the book’s release, there will be more information and sample pages available.

As a few of you have noticed, tRA was on hiatus for a couple days. Now it’s back, but as tERA. Quite simply, tRA is on a runs allowed scale and not an earned runs allowed scale, which I believed caused some confusion, especially when I placed it right next to xFIP, which is on an ERA scale.

It seemed the natural thing to do was to compare tRA to ERA/FIP/xFIP and with tRA on a runs allowed scale that didn’t quite work, but now it should.

To convert back to tRA, just divide by .92.

Title: Data Architect – Baseball Analytics
Location: Cleveland, OH

Description: The Cleveland Indians are currently scouting for a Data Architect to work in our Baseball Operations Department. This individual will report to the Director of Baseball Operations while assisting both the Baseball and Information Systems Departments.

This individual will be a technical resource to the baseball analytics department, taking on increasing responsibility to design, implement, and manage the Baseball Department’s information architecture.

Responsibilities include:

• Creating data models, developing processes for extraction, transformation, cleansing, and loading a variety of internal and external data sources;
• Creating and maintaining business rules and metadata to ensure data consistency, designing and implementing a data warehouse of baseball information.
• Other responsibilities may include, but are not limited to, statistical analysis and baseball research, application and web development, and user interface and data visualization design.

Candidates must possess:
• A Bachelor’s degree (or higher) in Computer Science or a related field, along with demonstrated work experience designing and managing data warehouses, creating OLAP cubes, and using reporting tools.
• Experience with Oracle (preferred) or another major database system including advanced knowledge of SQL and/or MDX is required.
• Experience with any of the following are highly desirable: database administration, ETL and/or BI tools, application development in .NET and/or Java.
• Proficiency in statistical analysis software packages (R, STATA, SAS, SPSS) is desirable, as is familiarity with current baseball research and analytics.

For more information or to apply, visit http://www.indians.com/jobs , Requisition Number 10-0025. Interested candidates must apply online to be considered.

——-

Title: Baseball Analyst
Location: Cleveland, OH

Description: The Cleveland Indians are currently scouting for a Baseball Analyst to work in our Baseball Operations Department. This individual will report to the Manager of Baseball Analytics while assisting both the Baseball and Information Systems Departments.

Responsibilities include:

• Performing advanced statistical analysis on large volumes of baseball-related data and implementing predictive models to aid in departmental decision making.
• Creating reports, charts, tables, graphics, and other tools to deliver information to staff in concise and readable formats;
• Advising and assisting other analysts and staff on proper selection and implementation of techniques in statistical analysis and data mining;
• Monitoring developments in statistical fields to identify new algorithms or methods applicable to baseball problems;
• Evaluating published sabermetric research to ascertain its value and applicability to internal models and processes.
• Other projects may be assigned consistent with departmental needs and candidate skills.

Candidates must possess:
• A Master’s degree (or higher) in Statistics, Operations Research, Mathematics, Computer Science, or a related quantitative field.
• This individual must possess expert knowledge of modern statistical analysis and/or machine learning techniques.
• Significant experience with R, STATA, SPSS, SAS, or similar software is required.
• Strong knowledge of baseball, particularly in sabermetrics is also required.
• Experience with a database system such as Oracle or SQL Server, and proficiency with SQL is highly desirable.
• Demonstrated ability to advise, consult, mentor, or teach others is desirable.
• The ability to communicate complex concepts at an appropriate level to colleagues possessing a wide range of backgrounds is also important.

For more information or to apply, visit http://www.indians.com/jobs , Requisition Number 10-0024. Interested candidates must apply online to be considered.

For a couple years now I’ve wanted to get better splits up and running on FanGraphs, but other things have taken priority. We’ve had Lefty/Right and Home/Away splits in the graphs sections for almost four years, but never have there been any tabular splits.

In the player pages, there’s a new section called “Splits”. It’s right next to the season stats tab:

Give it a click and you’ll have access to Lefty/Righty, Home/Away, Monthly, Batted Ball, Location, and Leverage splits, with the full selection of stats from the “Standard”, “Advanced” and “Batted Ball” sections.

You can then browse the splits by individual season, comparing one split to another, or you can take a look at the career tab, where you’ll be able to see how a player has fared in a particular split over time. If you just want to see the career total lines, you can collapse the individual season by clicking on the “Show Season Splits” button.

Splits are currently available for all Major League players dating back to 2002. As always, if you have any feedback, or notice anything’s not working as expected, just let me know.

Over the past few weeks Beyond the Box Score has been conducting their first annual Sabermetric Writing Awards and here at FanGraphs, we’re honored that our work was so well received considering all the other great baseball research and writing this year.

FanGraphs took home the award for Best Online Recourse and took second in the Best Sabermetric Research or Writing Website, beaten out only by our friends at The Hardball Times

For the individual writer awards, our very own Dave Cameron took home awards for Best Commentary Article and Best Sabermetric Primer or Review Article/Series.

Dave Allen won the award Best Applied Research Article/Project for his multiple articles on Run Value by Pitch Type and Location, which can all be found at Baseball Analysts. And in the same category Matt Klaassen finished fourth with his article on the “little things” for 2008. The 2009 version of the article can be found here on FanGraphs.

Award winning aside, the whole nomination process definitely brought a lot of the year’s best baseball research and writing to the forefront and it’s worth checking out all the nominations in each category if you haven’t already.

For those of you wondering what the twitter topic #BBGSports is all about, Bloomberg is hosting an event at their headquarters in NYC where they’re demoing their latest fantasy and professional baseball data products. Their professional product more or less slices Pitch f/x data in every which way possible. Here are some pictures of the demo:

Data sliced and diced in the strike zone and on the field:

Strike zone data and spray charts for specific players:

Their pitch predictor tool:

Regular stats section, including a section where you can create your own stats:

As you might have guessed, not all baseball fans agree when it comes to evaluating baseball players, and the Fan Projections are a great example of how many different opinions there are of various baseball players.

If you look at all the players’ projected wOBA and the spread of how individual people projected wOBA, you get a standard deviation of about .017 on average. What this means is that assuming the Fan Projections have a normal distribution (which may not be the case), about 68% of the fan projections are within +/- .017 of the fan average when it comes to projecting wOBA. Over 600 plate appearances, that works out to about +/- 8.5 runs above average (wRAA).

It’s particularly interesting to see just which players fans happens to be more or less in agreement about, so here are the top 10 regular players with at least 50 votes where the fans agree the most:

                  wOBA      Std   Votes
Adam LaRoche      .350     .009      65
Brian Roberts     .358     .010      65
Aaron Hill        .348     .011      77
Juan Pierre       .316     .011     107
Bobby Abreu       .365     .012      89
David Wright      .396     .012     153
Matt Holliday     .396     .013      99
Todd Helton       .388     .013      51
Felipe Lopez      .333     .013      71
Ryan Zimmerman    .376     .013      81

With these players, people seem to have a pretty good idea of what to expect. Keep in mind that every additional .001 of wOBA ends up as an extra .5 runs above average over 600 plate appearances.

Here are the top 10 players people disagree on the most:

                  wOBA      Std   Votes
Shane Victorino   .350     .024      65
David Ortiz       .362     .024     105
Ryan Howard       .388     .023     107
Pablo Sandoval    .384     .022     113
Alex Gordon       .364     .021      49
Alex Rodriguez    .418     .020     263
Jimmy Rollins     .342     .020      92
Justin Upton      .393     .019     102
Adrian Beltre     .345     .019     151
Curtis Granderson .376     .019     137

With all of these guys – just on batting alone and not even looking at defense or playing time – you’re looking at at least a +/- 1 win difference within one standard deviation assuming a minimum of 600 plate appearances.

As the ballots keep coming in, we’ll continue to look at the Fan Projections in various ways. There really is a wealth of data in these projections that goes beyond just what goes into the single projection line on the player pages and hopefully we’ll all be able to learn a lot from them.

I’m sure there are more than a few FanGraphs readers qualified for this job:

Major League organization is looking for a motivated individual with significant (5+ years) experience in both web development and database application design/maintenance for a full-time position. Must have experience or working knowledge in all of the following areas: Linux (Ubuntu a plus), PHP, PostgreSQL, HTML, CSS, Unix Shell Scripting, Python, Ruby, and XML data importing. Understanding baseball statistics and player evaluation methodologies is also required. Love of baseball will definitely help but is not strictly required.

Please send your resume and a brief explanation of your experience to mlbprogrammer@gmail.com.