There are now career leaderboards for the Standard, Advanced, Batted Ball, and Win Values stats sections for both batters and pitchers. The Win Values and Batted Ball leaderboards do not include data prior to 2002 because we just don’t have that data yet. Also, I’ve set the minimum PA and IP at 1000, but you can change it to whatever you want.

There will be Win Probability and Fielding career leaderboards eventually, but it’s going to take a bit more work.

The ZiPS projections, courtesy of Dan Szymborski and Baseball Think Factory are now available in the player pages, the sortable projections area, and the customizable my projections area!

You can download a spreadsheet of the projections here: ZiPS 2009: Build 2

This completes the five different projection systems we’ll carry for this season, assuming there’s no major updates.

We’ve updated the Bill James Handbook Projections to the latest and greatest. They’re available right now individually in the player pages. If you want them in a sortable form (with some extra fields) you can purchase them directly from Baseball Info Solutions.

I’ve made a few changes to the stats pages. If things look a little screwy, as in the postseason stats are there by default, just hit F5 once or twice and all will be back to normal.

The Show/Hide options for the stats pages should be much snappier and some other things have been optimized which should make the pages load a bit faster too.

I was watching the latest episode of Eastbound & Down, the HBO show about the fictional, ex-superstar pitcher Kenny Powers and I was trying to figure out how good a pitcher he actually was. Turns out he has his very own fake website complete with stats:

Season Team   G    IP  W   L  SV   SO  BB  ER    ERA  Value Wins
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

Over the course of his relatively short career he was conservatively 2-some wins over replacement. His home run stats weren’t available so I just set them at 25% of his earned runs. That’s probably a bit high for his peak years, so maybe give him 3 wins if you want to be generous.

He barely made it to arbitration eligibility before he left baseball, so the dollar numbers aren’t too relevant.

In any event, the self proclaimed “greatest pitcher there ever was” didn’t even make it into the top 10 relief pitchers in his best season, but I’m still rooting for a comeback.

Tangotiger on insidethebook.com noted what I thought was a rather comical blog post column by Murray Chass on his outrage that the Red & Green league books will no longer be printed, but instead be available only in PDF format. As Tangotiger points out, you could print your own book from the electronic copy, but I suppose you won’t get any of the gloss of a professional publisher.

In any event, the last paragraph of Chass’ article is quite frankly, bizarre:

Younger writers, more attuned to the use of the Internet than their older colleagues, may not have a problem with the disappearance of the books. But in past years they didn’t have the Internet as an alternative reference site. They apparently just didn’t feel the need for any information the books provided.

That says more about them than it does about baseball’s decision.

I’m not even going to bother mentioning what I think is wrong with the above quote, but as a younger person who uses the Internet (and sometimes even writes about baseball), I actually do have a Green book from the 1970’s lying around somewhere which I purchased off ebay a few years ago. I can’t find it. It probably ended up in storage when I moved, but I recall there may be some interesting team record stats in it.

If anyone has one of these on hand I’d be interested in hearing from you if there is anything worthwhile in these books which can’t be found easily on the Internet.

Sean Smith’s CHONE projection system has been updated to the latest and greatest!

One of the really cool things that Baseball Info Solutions keeps track of is when there is a shift and it effects the outcome of the play. If it doesn’t effect the outcome of the play, it’s not recorded as a shift, even if one was employed.

In 2008, the top 5 players that were most effected by shifts (positively or negatively) were:

Carlos Delgado
Ryan Howard
Jim Thome
David Ortiz
Adam Dunn

Delgado’s BABIP on shift effected plays was at the .191 mark, compared to his .284 BABIP on every play. This is entirely different from say, Ortiz’s BABIP on shift effected plays which was .299, compared to his overall .273 BABIP. Makes you wonder if shifting on Ortiz is a good idea, though it would definitely take a deeper dive into the numbers to know for sure.

Anyway, this was really just a quick preliminary look at the data, but with everyone talking about shifts and BABIP lately, I thought this might be of some interest.

I was feeling the player comments was a bit of a false start, so in an effort to try out some new features, it’s been replaced by the Player Links section, which I think could be particularly useful for both our readers and writers.

For any player you can enter in a link to a particular article that is relevant to that player along with a brief description of the article or short quote from the article. Feel free to submit links to your own work as well as links to whatever news, analysis, or commentary you feel would be useful to FanGraphs visitors for that particular player.

You may have noticed that the look of FanGraphs has changed slightly. It is now 200 pixels wider, in some places. The homepage for instance takes advantage of this space, while most pages don’t quite take advantage of the space yet.

I’ll be working hard to fill in this space with hopefully useful sidebar boxes that give extra information about the player. In some spots, the data tables with be widened instead to allow for more stats and easier viewing. If you have any ideas for what you’d like to see in that space, now is the time to speak up.

However, it’d be disingenuous of me to say that the only reason I’ve widened the page is to just add more content. I’ve been reluctant to put real ads up on the site for some time, but unfortunately there will have to be some advertisements to help pay for the site’s expenses.

With that said, I’m not going to clutter up the entire page with ads or anything and will attempt to keep them to a minimum with tasteful placement that doesn’t disrupt any of the site’s content.