Back in July, we launched the RosterResource depth charts, the first of several features moving over to FanGraphs. Today, we have added RosterResource’s payroll pages.

As is the case with the depth charts, these are a near-replica of the RosterResource version. The loading time is faster, however, and player names link to the corresponding FanGraphs player page.  These can currently be accessed by clicking on “Payroll” at the top of the RosterResource pages and then clicking on the team.

Here is most of what you can learn by visiting a RosterResource payroll page.

Player Info

• Contract details (years, total, options, and opt-outs)
• Year-by-year salary breakdown
• Major league Service Time (updated at the conclusion of each season)
• Arbitration eligibility and Free Agency years
• AAV (average annual value of contract)

Team Info

• Estimated Payroll for each year that includes at least one guaranteed contract.
• Estimated Payroll at the end of previous season.
• Estimated Luxury Tax Payroll.
• Dollars due to players no longer with organization.
• Dollars owed by another team.

Players included on each payroll page are separated into three sections:

• Players With Guaranteed Salaries
• Players Eligible For Arbitration
• Notable Players Not Yet Eligible For Arbitration

The Notable Players Not Yet Eligible For Arbitration group has simple criteria: that the player is likely in the major leagues for good, and won’t have their service time interrupted by a demotion to the minor leagues. Players will be added or removed during the season, however, if a situation changes.

For players without a guaranteed contract, we display an estimated salary during the offseason until they have officially agreed to terms. For free agent signings, the annual salary will be broken down evenly across the years of the deal until official numbers are reported. For example, a two-year, $20MM contract will be displayed as $10 million in 2020 and $10 million in 2021. We will update it once the official breakdown is reported. All estimated values will be displayed in italics.

The payroll pages will be updated immediately following the 2019 season to reflect the 2020 through 2026 seasons. If you find anything that’s incorrect, or something that’s not working, please let us know in the comments.

You are now able to add stat (and age!) filters to the Minor League Leaderboards. They work in a similar manner to our splits tools and leaderboards.

The filters are downstream from the main data query, so if your leaderboard stretches across multiple seasons, it will filter out players based on the stat value returned for that time span. For example, with a leaderboard spanning 2018-2019, you can filter for players with 300 or more hits, and it will yield Gavin Lux.

A much-requested feature was the ability to filter by age. Currently, you can filter age on single season leaderboards based on the age-season value, since there’s no single age value for a multi-season span.

Stat Filter Bar Details

• Adding more filters can only narrow the pool of players, because the logical operator between filter is AND.
• The filters operate after the data query; it’s the same as the HAVING statement in SQL.
• This isn’t yet available on the combined Scouting + Stats! board.
• You are able to save your stat filters with your custom reports.
• The playing time query is still handled in the main controls, and not with this filter.
• The player ages used are the age-season values we use on player pages and other leaderboards. These can different from the board and RosterResource, which denote the current age of the player to one decimal place.

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Frequently referred to as the “Mike Trout of Hoodies,” the FanGraphs Hoodie features a 52/48-poly/cotton blend and a drawstring that has never gotten lost in my hood.

Get them while you still can.

In November of last year, Craig Edwards published new research on how to value prospects by Future Value tier. We’ve used that research in conjunction with our prospect evaluations to assess the value of all 30 teams’ farm systems and arrive at our farm system rankings. Starting today, those rankings and valuations are available to view on The BOARD in the Farm Ranking tab. These rankings will automatically update as we move prospects between Future Value tiers, prospects change systems following a trade, or prospects graduate and lose prospect eligibility.

Within that tab, you’ll find:

• A team’s rank
• The value of a team’s system
• A count of how many prospects a team has on THE BOARD
• The average dollar value per player in a given system

We also break down how many pitching and position player prospects each team has within each Future Value tier. You can also sort on each batter and pitcher column within a given tier. Two-way prospects are split (0.5/0.5) between the batter and pitcher tiers for valuation purposes, as you can see below.

To navigate to the players contained within a particular team’s FV tier, just click on the number in the team’s row within that tier.

You’ll be automatically directed to the relevant part of THE BOARD — in this instance, Minnesota’s 13 hitting prospects with a 40 FV.

There’s some wiggle room in this otherwise fairly objective method of rankings farm systems, as two organizations with the same monetary total could end up being separated by which club has the higher per-prospect average. As we’ve discussed in the Trade Value Series and other places, all things being equal, teams would prefer that their WAR accumulate in as tight a time frame — and be concentrated in as few players — as possible. We don’t yet have an empirical way to express this, so for the time being, let’s say the the bonus you can give a system for concentration maxes out at about 10%.

We have a meaty roadmap of features we’d like add to the farm system rankings (more crosstab metadata on the makeup of a farm system, historical values, etc.), along with new columns and features we plan to add to THE BOARD before next season begins. Let us know what’s on your wishlist of new features to added by the wizard Sean Dolinar and the dark overlord David Appelman in the comments.

As you might have already heard, RosterResource will be transitioning its baseball content to FanGraphs over the next few months. Effective today, the 30 depth charts can be found here.

Our first version is close to an exact replica of RosterResource, with a few important improvements. The load time is much faster, and player names link to the corresponding FanGraphs player page. In addition, the minor league power rankings, plate appearances, and innings will be updated daily as opposed to weekly.

In case you’re unfamiliar with RosterResource, here’s the lowdown. I created the site just over 10 years ago. It was initially called MLBDepthCharts but was renamed RosterResource a few years later. The idea was that the site would be an easy-to-read, visual interpretation of a team’s 25-man roster and organizational depth throughout the entire year. It has evolved over time, but at a pace that was never fast enough for me. With the move to FanGraphs, you should expect to see a cross-pollination of data and features from both FanGraphs and RosterResource in the hopes of bringing you a more useful product. Read the rest of this entry »

With Jason Martinez and RosterResource.com joining FanGraphs, we’ve taken all the great information over there and put it to work on the FanGraphs player pages.

That means that up-to-date contract information, service time, various eligibilities, and minor league options are now available on our player pages. Please note that Service Time and MiLB Options are recorded at the start of the season and will be updated in the off-season. Arbitration and free agent eligibility is projected.

If anything seems amiss as you’re looking through your favorite players’ pages, please let us know in the comments.

We have added a custom date range to the main leaderboards. This allows you select any date range of three years or less after the start of 2002. Importantly, this will give you custom defined partial season WAR, which can’t be found elsewhere on the site.

The main controls for the custom date range can be found beneath the multiple seasons drop down menus. It uses the same date selector as the splits leaderboards, except it requires you to hit “Submit Custom Date” to load the leaderboard with the desired date range.

A custom date range is similar to options like “Last 30 Days” and “Past 3 Calendar Years” that are currently available on the leaderboards.

• There is a new option, “Custom Date Range,” in the same “Split” menu.
• A custom date range follows the same filtering restrictions, where you can’t filter by age, split seasons, or filter rookies.
• You also cannot apply additional splits like handedness.

This is the present behavior of our time frame options. They might change in the future, but not in this update.

Important notes:

• The leaderboard will only apply a date range when the split option is set to “Custom Date Range”
• You can only select dates from 2002 to the present.
• Date ranges can’t exceed three years. This restriction is due to data processing time.
• Date ranges only work with the batting and pitching tabs, NOT the fielding tab.
• Defensive value metrics, including the components of WAR, are prorated from the entire season, so you are unable to analyze defense within a specific date range.

If you encounter any issues, please let us know!

One of the tricky things about having so many stats on the site is that it can sometimes make it difficult to figure out whether a particular player is “good” or “bad” in a given statistical category. The other thing that can further complicate matters is the ever changing league rates. Given that the league strikeout percentage has increased over 8% in the past 30 years, what was once considered a well above average strikeout rate might today be merely average.

That’s why we’re introducing the “+ Stats” section to our leaderboards, where we have season and league adjusted a number of stats for your perusal.

Just like wRC+ and ERA-, all of these stats have a baseline of 100, where the number above or below 100 is the percentage above or below average a player is. For instance, Pedro Martinez’s 1999 K%+ is 239, that means he was 139% above the league average.

These baselined stats make it relatively easy to compare things like strikeout rates and walk rates across seasons and careers to see who was truly above (or below) their peers.

We’ll periodically add other stats to this section, so if you have additional “+ Stats” you’d like to see, please let us know in the comments!

FanGraphs now has Dan Szymborski’s Three Year ZiPS Projections on both the sortable projections pages and all of the player pages.

As Dan notes:

It’s the ZiPS you love/like/hate, now slightly less accurate! Predicting the future is foggy and the further you go, the thicker the fog gets. Every time ZiPS runs a projection, it provides a player’s rest-of-career projection, but until now, only the first-year projection has been made public on a systematic basis.

ZiPS is a non-parametric model, deriving aging curves from very large groups of similar players, so history is the main guide. After all, there’s no experimental data; it’d be nice to let Jose Altuve play out his career a million times in a million realities and see how he ages, but that’s currently impossible. Plus, the MLBPA probably would not be open to participating in this unending purgatory.

The three-year projections are start-of-season projections. There’s currently no mechanism to update future projections the same way the in-season projections are calculated. The year-to-year model that ZiPS uses is much more robust than the in-season model and I am not smart enough to have figured out an automatic workaround yet.

Happy Opening Day everyone! In this post, I’m going to tell you about all the wonderful, possibly hidden, stat things you can find on the website. This is for those of you who may be joining us for the first time, or for those of you who might be returning to the site after doing whatever it is people do when not thinking about baseball every waking moment.

Player Pages

The Main Player Page – The main player pages include hundreds of stats on each player. Player pages have real time data, season and daily projections, and basically everything you’d ever wanted to know about how a player performed.

Graphs – Visualize how a player has performed over time! You can see breakdowns by season, game, age, and so on. The combinations are nearly endless.

Splits – Splits pages come in three varieties: static splits, the splits tool, and pitch type splits. The static ones contain all the pre-compiled splits. The splits tool is where you can slice and dice your way to the most esoteric of baseball stats. And the pitch type splits break down each pitch a player has thrown or has seen, and provides performance metrics on those pitches. Read the rest of this entry »