Archive for Essential

Over the last five days, we’ve gone through my take on the 50 most valuable trade chips in baseball, 10 players at a time. But I figure it’s helpful to see the whole list together as well, so with the help of Sean Dolinar — if you’ve enjoyed the upgraded visuals around here the last few months, let him know, because he’s the guy behind it all — we’ve created a unified graphic of the smaller images we put at the end of each post. This breaks down each player’s projected ZIPS WAR over the next five seasons (or for however many years of those five years they’re under team control for), while also displaying their contract status, with guaranteed salaries listed in gray, team options in blue, and arbitration (or pre-arb) years listed in green.

If you missed any of the posts, below I’ve included the links to the individual breakdowns, with some explanation for why each player rates where he does. If your favorite player isn’t on this list, I promise it’s not because I’m biased against your team, or hate you personally; in a lot of cases, it’s simply because I had to draw an arbitrarily line somewhere in the midst of a crowd of similar players. George Springer, for instance, has generated some comments based on his exclusion, but if you wanted to swap him in for some of the guys in the 41-50 range, I wouldn’t argue much; there are a lot of similarly valuable players who could have ended up towards the back half of the list.

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Welcome to the final section of this year’s Trade Value series, the top 10. If you haven’t already, read the intro and get yourself acquainted with what question this is trying to answer, as well as an incomplete list of guys who missed the cut for one reason or another. You can see all the posts in the series here.

A few quick notes on the columns listed for each player. After the normal biographical information, I’ve listed Projected WAR, which is essentially a combination of ZIPS and Steamer’s current rest-of-season forecasts extrapolated out to a full-season’s worth of playing time. For non-catcher position players, this is 600 plate appearances; catchers are extrapolated to 450 PAs. For pitchers, this is extrapolated to 200 innings. It is not their 2014 WAR, or their last calendar year WAR; it is a rough estimate of what we might expect them to do over a full-season, based on the information we have now.

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I’m pleased to announce that we’ve rolled out new heatmaps to the site!

There are a number of ways to customize each heatmap:

– Options to choose either a traditional 5×5 grid or a more granular 10×10 grid.

– Choose a heatmap from the viewpoint of either the pitcher or the batter.

– For the 10×10 grid, you can choose your own level of smoothing, which will change the weighting of adjacent buckets.

– Filtering on single or multiple years, handedness, and count.

– A variety of different stats to choose from.

The color grading on the heatmaps is always compared to an MLB average player for the selected time period and handedness.

For every game this year we’ll be projecting the odds of each team winning on our live scoreboard. We’ve also added an extra experimental line on live Win Probability graphs that adjusts for the newly calculated game odds.

To calculate these game odds we’re doing the following:

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We have a new section on both the leaderboards and player pages that now displays Inside Edge fielding data.

Inside Edge scouts watch every play and grade how easy or difficult it is to successfully field on the following scale:

• Impossible (0%)
• Remote (1-10%)
• Unlikely (10-40%)
• About Even (40-60%)
• Likely (60-90%)
• Almost Certain / Certain (90-100%)

We’ve aggregated all the data and made it available for you to peruse on a player-by-player basis:

In addition, this data will be updated nightly during the 2014 season!

Here at FanGraphs, we enjoy rolling out cool new things. It’s fun to be able to add stuff that we can all use on a daily basis, and David Appelman has done a great job of building some incredible tools for public consumption. Today, we’re going to introduce you to the newest additions to FanGraphs: Depth Charts and a dedicated Standings page. We’re rolling them out together because they actually go hand in hand.

We’ll start with the standings page, because that’s what you’ll see first when you visit the new section of the site. The standings table is broken into three sections: Year to Date, Projected Rest of Season, and Projected Full Season.

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At FanGraphs we talk a lot about contracts, but we’ve never had contract data on our player pages or in an easily exportable form.

We’ve already got the ball rolling by entering about 300 contracts, but there’s still a lot of work to do. Our staff will of course continue to enter in contract data, but if you want to speed up the project you can help us by entering in missing contract data.

Any contract data you enter will be sent for approval to an editor.  Assuming the contract data is correct and mostly complete with proper attribution, it will shortly appear on the player pages along with attribution to your FanGraphs username.

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2013 ZiPS Projections, courtesy of Dan Szymborski, are now available in the projections pages in the player pages!

Please note that WAR as calculated on the projection pages and the player pages will differ from the original 30 reports. The projection and player pages use our in-house WAR calculations, where the original reports included Dan Szymborski original WAR projections.

The Steamer projections courtesy of steamerprojections.com are now available in the projections section and in the player pages.

The Steamer projections on FanGraphs use the playing time projections from the FAN projections.

Huge thanks to Jared Cross, Dash Davidson, and Peter Rosenbloom; the team behind the Steamer projections.

Update: FIP, HR, and BABIP columns should now be corrected. There was some bad data cached.

Tim Lincecum’s resume contains the following items: 2 time Cy Young award winner, 4 time All-Star and twice World Series Champion. With all the achievements over the last 5 seasons, he was relegated to a long relief once the Giants made the playoffs because he was no longer effective as a starter. Lincecum’s problem is he can no longer just throw the ball across the plate and hope a batter just swings and misses. If he wants any hope of returning to be the starter he once was, he now needs to learn how to pitch.

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