If you ever wanted to be a MLB.com stringer, now’s your chance to apply!

MLB.com, the Official Site of Major League Baseball, is seeking stats stringers in these markets for the 2010 season:

· Boston
· Cincinnati
· Cleveland
· Detroit
· Miami
· Milwaukee
· Texas

Stats stringers are responsible for digitally scoring games from one of the 30 MLB ballparks, which provides the data used in the live content applications on MLB.com, including Gameday and MLB.TV, real-time highlights and text alerts, and by our business partners. This is a perfect part-time job for a diligent, responsible employee who happens to be a big baseball fan.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s targets are: Kelly Shoppach, Josh Johnson, Jake Peavy

Yesterday, our three targets were Jay Bruce, Ricky Nolasco and Edwin Jackson. Let’s see how they fared:

Jay Bruce ended the day with some 200-plus ballots cast and it seems everyone is pretty optimistic about him having a much improved season with a .358 wOBA and somewhere right around 3 WAR. The interesting thing here, though, is that there are apparently only eight Reds fans who visit FanGraphs, and they expect him to have a considerably better year with a .373 wOBA and 4.4 WAR! They project his defense to continue at high levels with an UZR of 7.4 compared to 3.2 for non-fans.

However, fans are not expecting a repeat for Edwin Jackson and instead have projected him for a healthy dose of regression. Everyone thinks the walks will go up, the strikeouts will go down a bit, and the ERA will jump back over 4. Tigers fans think he’ll fare slightly better than non-fans, but everyone seems to be on the same page.

And finally Ricky Nolasco, who is always a hot subject for debate, continued to be controversial in the collective fans’ minds. Now, we don’t have really enough data to run a full study, but generally, fans are torn between two buckets when filling out their ERA selection. Nolasco’s ERA voting was 24% for 3.00-3.49, 46% for 3.50-3.99 and then 25% for 4.00-4.49. Everyone thinks he’ll continue to strike out over 8 per 9 innings and nearly everyone thinks he’ll walk under 2.5 per 9, so no one is questioning his peripherals, but his actual results continue to be a big question mark.

While the Fan Projections have only been available for 1 day, there’s already been well over 4000 ballots cast for batters and 2000 ballots cast for pitchers! These will be open all off-season, so this really is a tremendous start to the project.

Now to continue to keep things lively on the Fan Projection front, we’re going to target 3 or so players each day that we’ll encourage people to project. Then the following day we’ll see if anything interesting happened with those players and give you 3 more players to target.

Today’s targets are: Edwin Jackson, Ricky Nolasco, and Jay Bruce.

For those of you who have been hanging around FanGraphs since at least last season, you’ll know that we carry various projections in the off-season, which are for the most part generated by computer programs.

This off-season, in addition to carrying the various computer generated projections, we’ve teamed up with Tangotiger of insidethebook.com to give you, the fans, a chance to generate your own projection line for each major league player. Hopefully our collective brains will be able to pinpoint things that computer systems don’t.

With that said, let me give you all a quick tour of a projection ballot:

Before you can project any players, you’ll have to select the team you follow most closely towards the top of the screen. If you really don’t follow a team, just pick one. You’ll only have to do this once.

After you’ve selected a team, there are 8 categories for pitchers and 10 categories for position players. Pick the values in the drop-down boxes closest to what you think the player will do in 2010, hit the submit button and you’re done! If you made a mistake, you can always go back and change your selection at any time.

That’s really all there is to it. You can filter players by team, or if you go to the player pages, you can project players individually. If you want to see all the players you’ve projected, you can click on the “My Rankings” button which will show you only what you specifically projected a player to do.

As with all new features, we hope everything is bug free and we test things as much as possible, but if you do notice any issues, please let us know.

Throwing out the opening pitch of the FanGraphs 2010 projection season are the Bill James Handbook projections. Huge thanks goes out to Baseball Info Solutions for allowing us to publish their projections again this year.

They are now available in all the player pages, but as usual if you want them in a sortable format with some extra goodies, you’ll have to purchase them yourself.

And for those of you who own the FanGraphs iPhone app, they’re already waiting for you in those player pages too. No update necessary!

As a few of you had pointed out, defensive games in the 2009 UZR data appeared to be a little on the high side. The problem has now been fixed. The fix affected only the 2009 UZR/150 and DG stats. Raw UZR values and in turn WAR should remain unchanged.

UZR and like minded fielding statistics were almost mentioned by name on tonight’s Curb Your Enthusiasm when Larry David got into a fight with a stonemason about whether or not Derek Jeter sucks. Here’s a transcript of the phone conversation:

Stonemason: “That guy [Derek Jeter] sucks.”

Larry David: “Who sucks?”

Stonemason: “Derek Jeter, he’s the most overrated player in baseball.”

Larry David: “What did you say?”

Stonemason: “I can’t stand Derek Jeter, you know he’s the worst defensive shortstop in baseball statistically?”

Larry David: “Oh Bullshit! He’s a great clutch hitter, he’s a great clutch player!”

Stonemason: “There’s no way he deserves that kind of money he’s making.”

And then Larry David changes the subject.

Later in the episode, Larry David starts talking about the stonemason’s Jeter hating and says, “…starts telling me how Jeter’s overrated. What an ignorant moron. My God, please, give me a break. There’s not one person who has ever said that except this asshole, honestly.”

While the part about Jeter being one of the worst shortstops defensively is true, he has come pretty close to being worth what he’s paid, at least in a cumulative sense over the past 8 years.

In any case, it was fun to see fielding stats mentioned on Curb Your Enthusiasm, even if it wasn’t Larry David defending them.

The Huffington Post today released their list of top 10 “Game Changers” in the world of sports “who are harnessing the power of new media to reshape their fields and change the world.”

I was honored to be part of the list and it’s really a testament to our incredible writing staff and of course all our visitors who have helped spread the word and have taken the time to help educate people about the usefulness of stats based analysis.

In the meantime, if you have a free minute head over to the Huffington Post and give your vote!

When we launched the iPhone App about a month ago, one of the most requested features was adding blog content to the application.

While we are definitely exploring the possibility of adding blog content to the application, in the meantime, both the FanGraphs Blog and the RotoGraphs Fantasy Baseball Blog can now be easily viewed by anyone in their mobile web browser without doing unnecessary finger gymnastics.

Just go to either of these links on your mobile browser to make reading and commenting on the go a lot easier.

www.fangraphs.com/blogs
www.fangraphs.com/fantasy

Apparently for the past few days we’ve had problems sending out e-mails which would have affected anyone who tried to register, reset their password, or send us a contact form.

I apologize for the problem and it is now fixed. If you were trying to contact us in the past few days through our contact form, we unfortunately didn’t receive the message and would be happy to answer any questions you might have if you resend your inquiry.