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 »

In 2008, when Dan Turkenkopf was the first to quantify the value of pitch framing, he noted that it appeared to be alarmingly important. Bill Letson was similarly astounded when he calculated the size of the effect in 2010. Max Marchi and Mike Fast each took a turn in 2011, finding large and highly correlated catcher values despite using different methods. Other sabermetric luminaries have contributed sophisticated methods and sanity checks, some of which I’ll touch on below. And yet, this terrifically important, seemingly well-established, and impressively repeatable defensive skill has been left out when calculating FanGraphs player WAR and ignored when Steamer forecasts pitchers and catchers. . . until now.

In what follows, I’ll briefly lay out a series of steps for calculating how many framing runs each catcher contributed as well as and how many extra strikes each pitcher was granted (or, in some cases, earned). This much has all been done and clearly described before thanks to Dan Brooks and Harry Pavlidis; that research was updated and expanded upon by Pavlidis and Jonathan Judge. I’ll then compare the values I’ve obtained to the ones created by Baseball Prospectus, StatCorner, and Sports Info Solutions and demonstrate (I hope) that those extra strikes really do result in extra strikeouts and fewer walks. Lastly, I’ll discuss what this means for Steamer forecasts.

Modeling the Strike Zone

It all starts with the strike zone and I started by using generalized additive models to estimate the probability of a strike in any count, to either left-handed or right-handed batters at each location in and around the plate. On the first pass (shown below), I created strike zones averaged across seasons and, on the second pass, looked for changes in the strike zone by season. The blue contour lines in the images below show where strike calls are a coin flip and the red dashed lines show where we’d expect a 25% or 75% chance of a strike. If you’re read Matt Carruth or Jon Roegele, you’ll be unsurprised to see a small 0-2 strike zones (shown in the upper right facets) and large 3-0 strike zones (in the lower left).

Read the rest of this entry »

Update: An earlier bug that impacted updated pitcher WAR has now been resolved. The pitcher tables below have been updated to reflect that. Thanks to everyone who pointed out the issue!

I’m very pleased to announce that FanGraphs has finally added catcher framing data to the site, with full thanks to Jared Cross, who you may know as the co-creator of the Steamer projections. We’ve also incorporated catcher framing into WAR.

Including catcher framing in WAR has been a topic of internal debate at FanGraphs for the past half-decade. The problem has never been with the inclusion of framing numbers on the catcher side of things. That’s a fairly simple addition. The problem has always been what to do with the pitchers. For instance, the 2011 Brewers were some 40 runs above average in catcher framing. When you add those 40 runs to catchers, do you subtract 40 runs from pitchers? As it turns out, you do, but those runs are not attributed equally to each pitcher:

While most of the pitchers on the 2011 Brewers benefited from Jonathan Lucroy’s otherworldly framing, Randy Wolf was stuck with George Kottaras most of the time. In this instance, the entire Brewers pitching staff, with the exception of Randy Wolf, was a little bit worse once catcher framing is taken into account than their previous, non-catcher framing inclusive WAR would indicate.

Exactly how do you add catcher framing to WAR you ask?

For catchers, you take the catcher framing runs above average, divide by the runs to wins converter, and add it to your existing WAR total.

WAR = (Batting + Base Running + Fielding + Catcher Framing + Replacement Level) / Runs to Wins

On the pitcher side, we adjust FIP by the catcher framing runs above average per 9 innings. If Zack Greinke’s 2011 FIP was 3.00, and he was helped to the extent of 0.31 framing runs per 9 innings, we now use 3.31 in the WAR calculation instead of the original 3.00 FIP. We also adjust the pitcher’s dynamic runs to wins converter. In Greinke’s case, this would increase his personal run environment and also increase the runs to wins converter.

WAR = (((League FIP – (FIP + Catcher Framing / 9)) / Dynamic Runs to Wins Converter + Replacement Level) * IP / 9) * Game Start Leverage / 2

The RA9-WAR calculation has been adjusted in the exact same way.

Let’s take a look at how the inclusion of catcher framing has changed things:

And the Pitchers, where the differences are considerably smaller:

Now you know everything there is to know about how we added catcher framing to WAR. Please note the following:

• Catcher Framing (abbreviated as FRM) is available on the leaderboards and player pages in the fielding sections.
• WAR has been updated with catcher framing data everywhere WAR is available on the site.
• Catcher Framing data is available in batter and pitcher sections of the leaderboard as a custom stat.
• Fielding (the WAR component) now includes Catcher Framing runs above average.
• Steamer projections and depth chart projections both include projected catcher framing for catchers and pitchers.

We’ve added a column on THE BOARD called “Current Level” displaying the most recent minor league level the prospect has played at or has been transacted to.

The process of programmatically determining a prospect’s current level is slightly less straight forward than it might seem. For example, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is currently a Blue Jays non-roster invitee, so his Minor League Baseball stat page has him listed as Blue Jay, but he hasn’t played a MLB game.

To mitigate problems like this, we are using a combination of our game logs and MLB’s transaction list, along with some logic to determine the prospect’s level. Here’s the summary of the logic:

• If the prospect hasn’t played in the majors, he cannot have the majors as his level.
• We look at the most recent minor and major league games the player has played and find the game with the most recent date.
• We look at the most recent transaction MLB has listed.
• We compare the transaction and last game to determine which is more recent and use that for level, with consideration of the MLB debut.

This logic will prevent prospect non-roster invitees in Spring Training from displaying as being at the major league level. The transaction and game log approach will provide some robustness against any errant transaction data. Since this is programmatic, there isn’t any judgement on whether an assignment is temporary, like a rehab stint would be.

If you notice any errors, there could be a delay because the data processing runs overnight, but if it persists, please let us know.

In January, we put out an open call for contributing writers. The response we received was overwhelming. Over 500 people submitted applications, and we are very grateful that so many smart, passionate baseball writers wanted to be a part of what we do here. It made for some really difficult decisions (and a rather long hiring process), but we are very excited to welcome six new contributors to our ranks.

A quick note to those who applied but weren’t hired: please keep writing. A number of people who have come to work for the site weren’t hired on their first go, but kept getting reps elsewhere on their way to making us regret having passed them by initially. Just because there wasn’t a home for you at FanGraphs this time around doesn’t mean that there won’t be one later, and in the meantime, public baseball analysis will be made better by your good words and good work.

And so, without further ado, allow me to briefly introduce the writers whose work will be debuting on these electronic pages soon.

Rachael McDaniel
Rachael has written at Baseball Prospectus, Vice Sports, and The Hardball Times, authoring work encompassing a whole range of baseball topics past and present. Rachael is currently in the creative writing program at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and following the conclusion of the academic year, will assume the role of managing editor of The Hardball Times in addition to writing at FanGraphs as a contributor.

Twitter handle: @rumhamlet

Devan Fink
Devan has spent the last two years as a featured writer at Beyond the Box Score and the previous four years blogging for his own website, Cover Those Bases. He loves analyzing the latest current events and trends in baseball, ranging from the most minute aspects of the game to the largest, most impactful tendencies league-wide. Outside of baseball writing, Devan is currently a senior at James Madison High School, where he serves as an editor-in-chief of the school newspaper, The Hawk Talk, and as the captain of the debate team. He will be attending Dartmouth College next fall, where he plans to study quantitative social science. Devan resides in Northern Virginia with his parents, brother, and his four-year-old cockapoo, Ike.

Twitter handle: @DevanFink

Sung Min Kim
Originally a broadcast journalism student at Maryland, Sung Min took a sports writing class as a fun elective and went from there. Since his debut at The Hardball Times, he has been writing about the Yankees at River Avenue Blues. He has also written about Asian baseball for publications like VICE Sports, The Sporting News, Baseball Prospectus, and The Athletic. Sung Min will explore different aspects of Asian baseball while also writing about major league subjects.

Twitter handle: @sung_minkim

Ben Clemens
Cardinals fans may recognize Ben as a writer from Viva El Birdos. He always wanted to play baseball and be a famous writer growing up — he got ‘baseball’ and ‘writer’ at least, though he’s still working on ‘play’ and ‘famous.’ Working in financial markets made him interested in the decision-making and game theory aspects of baseball; he’s now answering the truly important questions, like whether Matt Carpenter should swing more on 3-0. He lives in New York but will soon be moving to San Francisco.

Twitter handle: @_Ben_Clemens

Audrey Stark
Audrey attended her first MLB game in June 2003 with her Girl Scout troop. While watching Albert Pujols through binoculars from an upper section of Busch Stadium II, she realized that baseball was the best sport on the planet. Audrey began writing for SBNation in 2016 at Beyond the Box Score; she has also contributed to Viva el Birdos and Federal Baseball. She has a degree in political science.

Twitter handle: @HighStarkSunday

Octavio Hernandez
Once a beat writer in the Venezuelan Winter League before becoming the assistant GM for Leones del Caracas in that same league, Octavio currently works for Diablos Rojos del Mexico as the chief of the Advanced Metrics department. Now he’ll return to his roots as a writer, focusing on Latin American major league players along with providing some insight into what’s going on in the Mexican League and the Caribbean Winter Leagues. He is a man with a mission: to help Latin American baseball get on board with advanced metrics. He hopes you will join him on his ride.

Twitter handler: @octaviolider

You’ll begin to see work from these six writers appearing at FanGraphs soon. We hope you’re as excited for them to get going as we are.

We decided to make a leaderboard that combines THE BOARD! with our Minor League Leaderboards. There are a ton of new features to review, but if you are the type of person that attempts to assemble furniture without reading the instructions, here’s the link:

https://www.fangraphs.com/prospects/the-board-scouting-and-stats

If you are still with us, we have a lot to cover. This combined leaderboard is similar to a feature we tested on our prospects landing page where the prospect list that Eric and Kiley have compiled is joined with our minor league stats.

Here’s a list of the new features:

• THE BOARD: Scouting + Stats!
• Revamped Minor League Leaderboards
  • Added the ability to select multiple seasons
  • Added the ability to filter by organization
  • Added three new league filters: Upper (AAA/AA), Mid (A+/A), and Low Levels (A-/R)
• Revamped Custom Reports
  • Your custom reports can be displayed as a tab (blue instead of green) on the leaderboard.
  • The interface to add and change stat columns is all-new.
  • You can choose to include row numbers in your report.

THE BOARD: Scouting + Stats!

You can think of the combined leaderboard as a Venn diagram or a SQL inner join. Minor league players who are not in the selected prospect list will not appear on the combined leaderboards. Likewise, players without any minor league stats (Shohei Ohtani) are not available on this leaderboard.

Unforunately, you also can’t mix batting and pitching stats on the same leaderboard; these are still different data sets (pictured in the above data join diagram). The scouting report data is position agnostic, but the stats data still behaves like our traditional leaderboards, so you can only combined one stat data set with the scouting data set.

The filters are organized by the source of data they control. For example, scouting grade filters are on the scouting tab, while the playing time filter appears on the stats tab.

Since there is the possibility of duplicate filters for position and organization, we have those two filters located under common filters. Both filters use data from the scouting data set, so you could look at the stats of a traded prospect regardless of what system he accrued those stats. The position filter uses Eric and Kiley’s classification, instead of what position our leaderboards have for a player. This might change in the future if we deploy more advanced control options.

Important Notes:

• A leaderboard can only contain either batting or pitching stats.
• Right now, we are only including scouting information from prospect lists. There are plans to include draft and international players in the future.

Minor League Leaderboards

The Minor League Leaderboards have been redesigned, and we added a few new features. We added the ability to select multiple seasons and either aggregate them (default option) or have them split into multiple years. The “Split Seasons” option splits the player’s stat line by both season and team. An organization filter has been added so you can group stats across levels by the MLB organization instead of just being able to filter using the affiliate teams. We also included a few new league filters that groups tiers of levels: Upper (AAA/AA), Mid (A+/A), and Low Levels (A-/R). These will allow you to aggregate stats across those tiers.

We don’t always carry legacy tools, but we are keeping the old minor league boards around at least for a bit. These will be available in the leaders menu, but they won’t be the main link. You should be aware these might not always exist, and we are not going to continue developing them. If you are using them as a data source for research, please considering migrating to the new Minor League Leaderboards.

Custom Reports

The Custom Reports for the combined leaderboard and the Minor League Leaderboards are all-new. While FanGraphs has well-established stat groups: Standard, Advanced, and Batted Ball, combining scouting and stats data left us with too many combinations to include everything; this is where the new custom reports come in.

Like the old custom reports you are able to create a leaderboard with your choice of stat columns, filters, and players, but now they can be displayed as blue tabs on the leaderboard for quicker access. You can create a new report by clicking the plus button.

All of your reports for the specific leaderboard are housed in the Custom Reports dialog box accessible from the Custom Reports button on the data grid. In that dialog box, you can manage your reports including loading them into the tab bar and making them load in to the tab bar by default.

The interface to change the stat columns on the table is also completely new. You can either double click (long press on mobile) or drag/drop stats to customize your report. The columns are organized by the default tab they appear in. Once again, you can’t mix batting and pitching stats, but mixing scouting columns is cool.

Important notes:

• Each report has an owner.
• The owner is the only one who can modify, save, or delete that report.
• You also must be signed into your FanGraphs account to modify, save, or delete any report.
• However, every report is viewable by anyone if you have the URL with the report id in it.
• You can create a copy of a report by viewing it and clicking to create a new report.
• “Edit Table” allows you to choose different columns on the table.
• Turning off the “Include Filters” button allows you to create a report that is agnostic to filters including custom players. This can be used if you want to create a tab with certain stats acting like native tabs.
• Your older minor league reports are still available, though you won’t be able to save them.

Future Notes

• We are in the process of determining how to handle the “current” level for prospects. It’s an addition we want to add to THE BOARD, but it’s not ready for this update.
• While these tools are conceptually connected, they don’t share data between them, so going from the Minor League Leaderboards to THE BOARD: Scouting + Stats! won’t retain settings and filters.
• Custom Reports “belong” to the tool you created them in, so you can’t make one in the leaderboards and use it with the combined leaderboard. This might change in the future, but it’s a restriction for now.