For those of you who visited FanGraphs for the first time this off-season, you may not realize that we track every game’s win probability in real time during the season. This year, we’re also going to “tweet” every play and win probability in real time! We have twitter feeds set up for each team, so you can follow your favorite team on your cell phone or through a twitter application of your choice.

We will be tweeting all 162 games for each team, the all-star game, and the playoffs.

There are two types of feeds for each team. The full version, and the lite version. The full version is every single play and the lite version is end of inning plays, significant score changes, and any play that changes the win probability more than 10%. I suspect the full feed will have about 70-100 updates a game, while the lite version will have 20-30 a game.

Consider these feeds in beta! I have tested them a bunch of times this off-season, but there still might be some issues. I’ll definitely take suggestions on these feeds but remember there’s a 140 character limit on tweets.

Example Tweet: 2-9, 0 % to Win, Top 9, 3 Outs, ___, Jay Payton flied out to second .

It gives you the score (with the team your followings score first), the % chance the team your following is going to win the game, the inning, the outs, the base state ( ___ means no one on, _23 would be runners on 2nd and 3rd), and the last play(s).

You can sign up for as many feeds as you like, but be warned, you will receive two tweets per game update if two teams are playing each other and you are subscribed to both feeds.

The Feeds: The full feed is followed by an _fg, so the yankees full feed would be “yankees_fg”. The quick feeds are followed by a _qf so it would be “yankees_qf”

Team:           Full Feed           Quick Feed
Angels:         angels_fg           angels_qf
Astros:         astros_fg           astros_qf
Athletics:      athletics_fg        athletics_qf
Blue Jays:      bluejays_fg         bluejays_qf
Braves:         braves_fg           braves_qf
Brewers:        brewers_fg          brewers_qf
Cardinals:      cardinals_fg        cardinals_qf
Cubs:           cubs_fg             cubs_qf
Diamondbacks:   diamondbacks_fg     diamondbacks_qf
Dodgers:        dodgers_fg          dodgers_qf
Giants:         giants_fg           giants_qf
Indians:        indians_fg          indians_qf
Mariners:       mariners_fg         mariners_qf
Marlins:        marlins_fg          marlins_qf
Mets:           mets_fg             mets_qf
Nationals:      nationals_fg        nationals_qf
Orioles:        orioles_fg          orioles_qf
Padres:         padres_fg           padres_qf
Phillies:       phillies_fg         phillies_qf
Pirates:        pirates_fg          pirates_qf
Rangers:        rangers_fg          rangers_qf
Rays:           rays_fg             rays_qf
Reds:           reds_fg             reds_qf
Red Sox:        redsox_fg           redsox_qf
Rockies:        rockies_fg          rockies_qf
Royals:         royals_fg           royals_qf
Tigers:         tigers_fg           tigers_qf
Twins:          twins_fg            twins_qf
White Sox:      whitesox_fg         whitesox_qf
Yankees:        yankees_fg          yankees_qf

From the most recent Sports Illustrated: Baseball’s Next Top Models

This winter Lichtman, who left the Cardinals after the 2005 season, made UZR—considered by many to be the most comprehensive defensive metric out there—available to the public on the website FanGraphs, which will update player stats weekly during the season. “The funny thing is, all this information is now available free for anyone to see, so there’s really no reason for teams to do their own thing,” says Lichtman. “Yet it’s clear that half to three quarters of the teams still have no clue how to evaluate defense on that level and how to interpret that into a player’s overall value.”

It’s nice to see UZR and the others becoming more mainstream!

While I was reworking some FanGraphs logos I noticed a striking similarity between 8 of the team’s colors choices. These are taken straight out of the team’s logos I found at sportslogo.net. You would think that there would be a little more variation in the colors used, with three of the teams even using the exact same red. You can hover over the images to see which team is which:

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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!