Today we’re introducing a new form of FanGraphs Membership: Ad Free Membership. With Ad Free Membership, you become a full-fledged member of the site and you will not see a single third-party advertisement on the FanGraphs website so long as you maintain your membership. The price of Ad Free Membership is $50 per year.

If you are already a FanGraphs Member, you’ll be able to easily upgrade your membership at a pro-rated rate, depending on how much time you have left before your renewal date. Just select the new “Ad Free Yearly Membership” and hit the Sign Up Now button.

To give everyone a sense for what Ad Free Membership looks like, we’re going to put the site into Ad Free mode for all users through Monday. We hope you’ll like what you see. I know for the few of us who have been beta testing the product, we can attest that it really does make a noticeable difference in both the speed and responsiveness of the site.

Let me give you some details on why we’ve decided to do this. Earlier this year we introduced FanGraphs Membership, and we are incredibly thankful for everyone who has decided to become a member thus far! FanGraphs Membership is a way for you to help fund the site’s current operations and its future growth. If you think we’re doing a good job and you’d like to support our efforts, it’s a great way to show your support.

However, even with FanGraphs Membership, the majority of our revenue comes from advertising. Without advertising, there is no way the site could continue to operate. This has become a bit of a double-edged sword for us. As online advertising technology has advanced, it has also become more resource intensive, taking up both processing power and bandwidth. While there are movements within the online advertising industry to combat advertising bloat, we want to give our users a way to avoid ads completely, without cutting off the revenue stream which is essential for FanGraphs to operate. Ad Free Membership does exactly that.

We rely on various advertising networks to provide ads to us, and we do our best to vet all of these networks to make sure they’re not serving intrusive or malicious ads. But, even the most diligent ad networks have intrusive ads that slip through the cracks. Tracking down intrusive ads has more or less become a game of whack-a-mole for us over the past few years. Intrusive ads annoy us just as much as they annoy you, and we are constantly trying to make sure the advertising experience on FanGraphs is acceptable.

We will remain completely committed to having a non-intrusive advertising experience for those who would prefer not to become Ad Free Members.

It would be disingenuous of me to not mention ad-blocking. Ad-blocking is a real problem for us, but we also understand the many reasons people decide to install ad-blockers. If you are using an ad-blocker and you regularly visit FanGraphs, I urge you to become an Ad Free Member. There is now a real option for you that will help us continue to bring you high quality baseball content, without ads.

As we’ve stated before in our previous membership posts, Ad Free Membership, or any type of FanGraphs Membership is not a paywall. Whether you decide to be a member or not, all the content on FanGraphs remains available to you. We are incredibly thankful to the entire FanGraphs community for supporting us over the years and hope that we can continue to earn your support going forward.

Earlier this year we introduced FanGraphs Membership, a voluntary way to to help support all the baseball content we produce each and every day. As a reminder, Membership is achieved through a $20 annual donation to the site — or $3 per month for those of you who prefer short-term contracts! — and we are greatly appreciative of all those who became members when we rolled out the program back in February.

Since we haven’t really mentioned Membership much since the rollout, we wanted to give you guys an update on the program. Beginning today, frequent users of FanGraphs who are not Members will occasionally be reminded that that becoming a Member will help support all the great baseball content at FanGraphs. These messages won’t be overly intrusive or too frequent, but will serve as a reminder that the content and data you’re consuming costs us real money to provide, and you can help ensure that FanGraphs remains a leader in both spaces by becoming a Member.

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Today, we’re excited to introduce FanGraphs Membership. What is FanGraphs Membership? Quite simply, it is a voluntary way for you to help support all the baseball content we produce each and every day. If you’ve been looking for an opportunity to help contribute to the long-term growth of the site, this is your chance to do just that, and partner with us to help continue to provide data and content that helps us all understand the game of baseball a little bit better.

FanGraphs Membership is not a paywall; we are not creating a separate section of the site that will only be available to members. In fact, we’re actually taking the content that was previously available to FanGraphs+ subscribers and making it available to everyone. We want every person who visits the site to feel that they are getting the most out of their experience, and believe that, with a broad base of support from the fantastic community here, we can continue to provide that information without restricting access to anyone.

With the introduction of FanGraphs Membership, all the content produced on FanGraphs will now be accessible for free, without logging in, or being a FanGraphs Member. If you are not a FanGraphs Member, we will occasionally ask if you’d like to join in supporting the site, but it will always be your decision to make. Think of FanGraphs Membership as something akin to the model used by NPR.

Now you may be asking yourself, why is FanGraphs doing this?

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The 2016 FAN Projection ballots are now open!

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 9 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 2016, 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.

Please note that everything this year is a rate stat. You’re projecting 2B+3B, HR, SB, and Fielding as a measure of 150 games (basically a full season). The player’s previous stats are shown per 150 games in the projection ballot too. This will make changing playing time projections much easier as you’ll only have to change the games played portion.

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.

Fan Projections will show up on the player pages after there have been 5 ballots submitted.

If you do notice any issues, please let us know.

Good news everyone! You can now make your picks in FanGraphs: The Game for the 2015 season!

For those of you who played in previous years, you will be able to change the team of any of your players up until you first spend money. So, if you want your players to be on different teams, I advise doing it before you make any picks. You can do this on the settings page.

In addition, your player will keep all of his stats from all previous seasons and continue on to year two of his career.

Lastly, if you had autopick set last year, it has now be unset. If you want to keep playing with autopick on, you will need to make your autopick selections again.

And for those of you who are rookies to FanGraphs: The Game…

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I’m pleased to announce that FanGraphs now has an auction calculator!

In terms of methodology, we are using a method that is pretty similar to the Last Player Picked methodology.

Besides all the usual features of an auction calculator, we have a couple of unique features that are worth some addition explanation:

– There is an “experimental” check box, which adds in replacement level value for players with incomplete playing time. If a player was to have a .300 batting average for the season in 450 plate appearances, it would add in an extra 150 plate appearances at a .220 average (numbers for illustration only) for that player and calculate the auction values off his new batting average.

This is something that could be useful if your league allows you to carry a lot of bench spots and you have the ability to supplement potentially high risk injury players with a replacement level player. Chad Young wrote about this a few years ago.

Please feel free to check the box and see how it changes player values if you feel it’s appropriate for your league. And like the option says, this is still an experiment and should be considered a “beta” feature.

– There is also an option to artificially increase or decrease relief pitcher value. Since we don’t project holds, this might be particularly useful for ottoneu leagues or other leagues where holds are considered. By not taking into account holds for a league that might consider them, relief pitcher values will most likely be inflated.

This could also be a useful option if the players in your league generally undervalue (or over value) relievers and you would like to put relief pitcher values more in line with reality as opposed to theoretical value.

Please let us know if you run into any issues!

The St. Louis Cardinals have two openings in their Baseball Development department for an Analyst and a Developer:

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The 2015 FAN Projection ballots are now open!

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 9 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 2015, 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.

Please note that everything this year is a rate stat. You’re projecting 2B+3B, HR, SB, and Fielding as a measure of 150 games (basically a full season). The player’s previous stats are shown per 150 games in the projection ballot too. This will make changing playing time projections much easier as you’ll only have to change the games played portion.

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.

Fan Projections will show up on the player pages after there have been 5 ballots submitted.

If you do notice any issues, please let us know.

There’s no official chat today, so feel free to chat in the comments section for today’s ALDS games.

Quantitative Analyst

Reports to: Director of Baseball Systems Development

Location: Bradenton Florida

Job Summary
This position will focus on creating and analyzing baseball data sets through the use of advanced statistical analysis with the tasks of creating, implementing, and maintaining predictive models to aid in the decision making process. The position will report to the Director of Baseball Systems Development and act as a resource to other staff on the proper use and implementation of statistical techniques and their suitability for baseball analysis.

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