I made a few highly requested changes to the leaderboards.

– You can now view the entire dataset on one page. This is on a page by page basis at the moment. When you’re done viewing the entire dataset and change your query parameters, it defaults back to 50 records per page. Of course, you can always change it back to full view when you’re ready to export data.

– Batting Average on Balls in Play (BABIP) is now in the batted ball section.

– You are now able to select the minimum plate appearances (PA) or innings pitched (IP). You can still select only qualified players and all players.

The 2008 CHONE and Marcel projections are now available in the stats pages and the projections board.

Big thanks to Chone Smith for his 2008 CHONE projections and Tangotiger for this year’s Marcels.

If you are looking for downloadable versions you can find them here: CHONE download ; Marcel download.

As of now, the 2008 Bill James Handbook projections are available on the player pages.

On a side note, all the minor league players have been synced with the major league players, so there will no longer be duplicate entries for minor league players that were called up last season.

After last night’s Red Sox game 7 victory, I was rather curious to see who would win the ALCS Most Valuable Player award. Without looking at the numbers, I thought it should go to Kevin Youkilis. I thought there was a chance it would go to Manny Ramirez and also a chance it could go to Josh Beckett. When Beckett was announced the winner, I was a little surprised and went to check the numbers.

It turns out that Josh Beckett did lead all players in Win Probability Add (WPA) in the ALCS. In two starts his WPA was .516 wins compared to Youkilis’ .203 wins. Manny Ramirez’s WPA was just slightly below Beckett’s at .483 wins. Jon Papelbon and Hideki Okajima also were also contenders for the WPA title with .467 and .286 wins respectively.

If you look at things just in terms of run production taking the context out of the situation. Youkilis was indeed the most productive player with a Batting Runs Above Average (BRAA) of 9.3 runs. Ramirez came in second with 6.2 runs, while Beckett was the next best with 4.7 runs.

In today’s New York Times, Dan Rosenheck uses some of the tools available on FanGraphs to delve into the Arizona Diamondbacks dubious Pythagorean record.

While I’m at it, I figure I’ll mention a few things that are going on at FanGraphs.

– Live Win Probability will continue through the post season. I’m sure there will be a few improbable comebacks, which will certainly be fun to follow.

– I will be traveling to Japan next week and will be attending a Yomiuri Giants game and Seibu Lions game. I’ll be sure to write about my impressions of the games along with posting various baseball related photos from my trip.

Just thought I’d throw this in the blog for archival purposes:

I was browsing through the Win Probability leaderboards and noticed that Troy Tulowitzki is in the top 10 in Win Probability Added for the season with 2.32 wins. A quick glance in the Batting Runs Above Average column shows he’s the only player in the top 50 who is below average with -1.75 runs. His Clutch hitting has netted him an additional 2.08 wins over what he should have, considering how well he’s hit. So far this season, Tulowitzki has been the most clutch hitter in baseball.

His latest and greatest hit of the season came just two days ago on June 25th when he hit a three-run-homer against Bob Howry to give the Rockies a 9-8 lead against the Cubs. Unfortunately, Rockies closer, Brian Fuentes, couldn’t nail down the save, making his big hit for naught.

As of today, the Red Sox have the best record in baseball. If you look at their Win Probability numbers, their batting has contributed 4.38 wins, their starting pitchers 1.54 wins and their bullpen 4.08 wins. The bullpen which was considered a big question mark to begin the season has surprisingly been just as valuable as their offense, much in thanks to Boston’s lesser known Japanese import, Hideki Okajima.

For the past two seasons, David Ortiz has racked up more WPA than any other player in baseball by adding an incredible 17 wins to his team. About one-third of the way into this current season, Ortiz has accumulated a mere 1 win, but still leads all Red Sox batters in WPA.

Last season, David Ortiz had 15 hits worth more than .2 wins, not to mention a pair of home runs worth .78 wins and .90 wins. This season he has no hits over the .2 wins mark. That’s not to say he’s not having an excellent season. When you take the context out of his wins using WPA/LI he’s 3rd in baseball with 1.93 wins, but the hits just haven’t been as timely as last season. The huge disparity between his WPA and WPA/LI gives him the 5th worst “Clutch” with -.88 wins.

So who has been getting the big hits for the Red Sox if their previously “clutch” star hasn’t? Let’s take a look:

On May 13th, newcomer Julio Lugo was the catalyst for the biggest play of the season. With 2 outs in the bottom of the 9th, down by 1 and the bases loaded, Lugo singled in the tying run while Erik Hinske scored on an error. The whole thing was worth .718 wins and capped off an incredible 9th inning rally (including a Jason Varitek double worth .343 wins) that overcame a 5 run deficit. At the start of the inning the Sox had a mere .9% chance of winning the game.

In a classic Yankees-Red Sox battle on April 20th, Coco Crisp tripled in two runs to tie the game at 6-6 off Yankees closer Mariano Rivera. This triple was worth .472 wins. Immediately following Crisp’s triple, Alex Cora singled allowing Crisp to score the go ahead and final run of the game. In contrast Cora’s hit was worth .123 wins.

On April 26th, Orioles closer Chris Ray (who also gave up the hit to Lugo on May 13th) gave up a grand slam to Wily Mo Pena which put the Sox up by 3 to win the game. Down by 1 at the time, the home run was worth .43 wins.

Alex Cora on April 19th, in the top of the 9th with 1 out, tripled, allowing Julio Lugo to score the go-ahead run. While not quite as big as Crisp’s triple on the 20th, this one was still worth .373 wins.

Erik Hinske’s two run blast in the 7th inning of a tie game back on May 17th rounds out the top 5 most important Red Sox hits so far this season. Manny Ramirez owns the next two biggest which were both worth juts over .3 wins.

David Ortiz is no where to be seen on this list with his biggest hit worth .197 which came on April 25th in the 7th inning of a tie game. In the 9th inning or later in a game, Ortiz is actually a -.213 wins while in 2006 he was 2.34 wins; far and away the most in baseball.

I’m sure as the season goes on, things will start to even out and there will be some big hits here and there, but fortunately for the Red Sox, they haven’t exactly needed Ortiz to be the savior he’s been the past two seasons.

With the exception of last week, it seems that there are more or less the same players in the top 10 week after week. In an attempt to make things more interesting, let’s look at the top 11-20. But first, let’s pay homage to the actual top 10.

Alex Rodriguez, Barry Bonds, Albert Pujols, John Maine, Ichiro Suzuki, Derek Jeter, Josh Beckett, Jose Reyes, David Ortiz, David Bush. These guys round out the top 10. I have not been visiting Bush’s page a whole lot this week either. And I’ll continue to assert that he will turn things around. Onto the top 11-20.

11. Manny Ramirez – A previous fixture in the top 10, he’s fallen all the way down to number 11. Manny has really started to turn things around and is batting just about .350 in the month of May. He’s also wracked up a solid .42 WPA for the American League’s most winning team.

12. David Wright – He’s another player who started off a bit slow. He’s batting just under .300 for May and more importantly is starting to hit with some pop. He also stole 3 bases in last night’s game; a feat which has only been accomplished about 100 times in the past 5 years.

13. B.J. Upton – While he continues to challenge Ryan Howard for the major league lead in strikeout percentage, the main difference between the two is that B.J. Upton has pummeled major league pitching. He’s been a bit less stellar in May, but no one’s going to complain about a .916 OPS.

14. Daisuke Matsuzaka – Yawn. Dice-K is 4th in the AL in K/9; striking out just over a batter an inning. FIP suggests his ERA should be in the mid-3’s as opposed to the high-4’s. Giving up 10 runs to the Yankees has been his only problem.

15. Kelly Johnson – Though his batting average graph looks like a camel’s back, he still leads all second-basemen in OBP (.409). Unfortunately, he hasn’t been walking much this month either and the graph looks eerily similar to his batting average.

16. James Shields – He only threw 9 innings of 3 hit ball the other day. Despite his obscenely high WPA of .766 in that game alone, his team still didn’t get him a win. He’s good.

17. Jonathan Papelbon – The Red Sox closer currently has a 1.35 ERA. Last year he’d only given up 1 run at this point in the season. This year, he’s already given up 2. For shame.

18. Roger Clemens – He’s back with the Yankees, but you probably knew that already.

19. Chien-Ming Wang – His ERA now sits at 5.40 after a disastrous outing against the Rangers. If it weren’t for his 2 hit gem against the Mariners, his ERA would be over 7. He was a hot topic for debate this off-season and so far things are not looking good for Wang.

20. Dustin Pedroia – Alex Cora really tore things up while Pedroia was riding pine. The big difference between him and Cora is that Pedroia can actually take a walk. Despite his troubles, Pedroia should continue to be out there everyday.

You may have noticed there’s a new tab in the player pages called “Play Log”. This will give you every single play for the selected player in any given year. It’s currently sorted by WPA so you can easily tell which plays were the most/least important.

It’s a little slow for my tastes and I’ll see what I can do to speed it up. Sorting is currently disabled because it was extremely slow. If you desperately want to do sorting, you can add “&sort=wpa” query string to the end of the url. The options for the querystring are “li”, “braa”, “wpa”, and “day”. Update: Sorting is now enabled, but you can no longer click on the play to find out the pitch sequence. I’ll get that fixed soon enough.

This is still pretty bare-bones right now, but I’m sure as the season goes on there will be substantial improvements.