Update: The submission deadline for applications has been extended to Friday, February 8.

As the 2019 season approaches, I’m pleased to announce that FanGraphs is now accepting applications to join our staff as a contributing writer.

Contributors typically write three times a week. Familiarity and comfort with the data here on FanGraphs is a requirement, but just as importantly, we’re looking for writers who can generate their own ideas and questions while providing interesting analysis or commentary on the game of baseball. From free agent signings to statistical analysis, teams’ top prospects to in-game strategy, we endeavor to cover it all, highlights to lowlights. Sometimes we do that with a bit of silliness; other times, we’re more serious. But what all of our work has in common is a commitment to asking interesting questions and using rigor, creativity, and the latest analytical tools to find the answers for our readers.

This is a part-time, paid position. Prior writing experience is strongly preferred, though the bulk of that experience doesn’t necessarily have to be of the baseball variety. We know baseball analysis is more interesting and complete when diverse perspectives and voices are brought to bear on the questions and trends in today’s game, and encourage writers of all backgrounds and identities to apply. When applying, please include samples or links to work you’ve published previously, or some new, original content you feel best demonstrates your writing abilities and interests. You may also include a resume, but it is not required for the initial application. Please send us an email at wanted@fangraphs.com with your application materials, using the subject line “FanGraphs Writer Application – 2019.” The subject line is important, as it helps us keep all of the applications organized and ensures that yours does not slip through the cracks.

If for some reason you are unable to submit your application using the wanted@fangraphs.com e-mail address, simply fill out a contact form with the same subject (“FanGraphs Writer Application – 2019”), and you will be provided an alternate e-mail address for submission.

However you send us your application, please do so by Friday, February 8.

If you feel like you’d be a good fit as a contributing writer for FanGraphs, please drop us a line. We cannot promise to respond to every application we receive, but we’ll make sure every applicant receives serious consideration.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Here’s your chance to vote for the 2019 SABR Analytics Conference Research Award winners.

The SABR Analytics Conference Research Awards will recognize baseball researchers who have completed the best work of original analysis or commentary during the preceding calendar year. Nominations were solicited by representatives from SABR, Baseball Prospectus, FanGraphs, The Hardball Times, and Beyond the Box Score.

To read any of the finalists, click on the link below. Scroll down to cast your vote.

Contemporary Baseball Analysis

• Wayne Boyle, Sean O’Rourke, Jeff Long, and Harry Pavlidis, “Robo Strike Zone: It’s Not as Simple as You Think,” Baseball Prospectus, January 29, 2018.
• Jonathan Judge, “The Performance Case for DRC+,” Baseball Prospectus, December 3, 2018.
• Travis Sawchik, “Baseball Positions Are Starting to Lose Their Meaning,” FiveThirtyEight, August 28, 2018.
• Jeff Sullivan, “Banning the Shift Is a Solution in Search of a Problem,” FanGraphs, December 5, 2018.
• Meredith Wills, “How One Tiny Change to the Baseball May Have Led to Both the Home Run Surge and the Rise in Pitcher Blisters,” The Athletic, June 6, 2018.

Contemporary Baseball Commentary

• Patrick Dubuque, “A Hymn for the Index Stat,” Baseball Prospectus, December 3, 2018.
• Jeff Passan, “Here’s Why Baseball’s Economic System Might Be Broken,” Yahoo! Sports, January 16, 2018.
• Sheryl Ring, “The Human Side of the Cubs’ Addison Russell Decision,” FanGraphs, December 6, 2018.
• Eno Sarris, “The Next ‘Moneyball’ is Already Happening All Around Us, in the Wild West of Player Development,” The Athletic, December 7, 2018.
• Neil Weinberg, “Building Better Statistical Incentives,” The Hardball Times Annual 2018, January 25, 2018.

Historical Analysis/Commentary

• Britni de la Cretaz, “The Hidden Queer History Behind ‘A League of Their Own,’ ” Narratively, May 30, 2018. 
• Steven Goldman, “Placeboball: When Baseball Proves Itself Nonessential,” The Hardball Times, June 7, 2018.
• Ben Lindbergh, “The Sabermetric Movement’s Forgotten Foremother,” The Ringer, February 20, 2018.
• Rachael McDaniel, “Doug Ault and the Triumph of Joy,” Baseball Prospectus, January 11, 2018.
• Dayn Perry, “The White Sox Ballpark in Chicago That Never Was and Could Have Changed History,” CBS Sports, April 10, 2018.

Voting will be open through 11:59 p.m. MST on Monday, February 11, 2019. Details and criteria for each category can be found here. Only one work per author was considered as a finalist.

Create your own user feedback survey

Mobile or Safari users, click here to access the survey

Results will be announced and presented at the eighth annual SABR Analytics Conference, March 8-10, 2019, at the Hyatt Regency Phoenix in Phoenix, Arizona. Learn more or register for the conference at SABR.org/analytics.

The 2019 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 don’t really follow a team, just pick one. You’ll only have to do this once.

After you’ve selected a team, you can begin projecting players. There are nine categories of interest 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 2018. 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 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 appear on a player’s page after five ballots have been submitted for him.

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

At last week’s Winter Meetings, we redesigned our search bar functionality, and we are launching it today. The search bar location and the main function haven’t changed. The search bar is in the same place, and by default has the most-viewed players. It allows you to search players and blog articles. We did a pretty significant under-the-hood update that returns more relevant results, and while we were at it, we made some interface updates.

If you are interested in the details:

• Players results are weighted by a combination of name match and the number of recent views.
• Active players are in bold. The partial match of a search term is also underlined the player’s name.
• Articles can be searched in a separate window. They are weighted by term matching, number of views, and recency.
• For now, we’ve only included main page articles, not articles from all of our the blogs. The other blogs will be added in the future.
• We included Team Pages in the results!
• The search is also available as a full page: fangraphs.com/tools/search

If you have ever wanted your writing to appear on the pages of FanGraphs, do we have good news for you!

After a brief hiatus, we are relaunching the Community Research page, a blog that features articles from our readers. This means you, your friends, your grandma, basically anyone with a (free) FanGraphs account can submit some baseball words to be run here on the site.

There are a few rules, of course. There are always rules:

• Every article is subject to approval. While submitted works represent a range of topics and exhibit varying degrees of polish, they do need to be appropriate, and meet a baseline of readability and relevance.
• Your submission must be your original work. Please only send us pieces that you have written.
• That said, your article does not necessarily have to be exclusive to FanGraphs. Have a piece from your own blog that you think would fit well here? Send it on over for approval. Just let us know where else it has appeared.
• You may submit a maximum of one article per week. We’d love to run every worthy article we receive, but realistically, we can’t. We appreciate your understanding.

That’s about it. If you have submitted pieces in recent months while the blog was on hiatus that did not run, and you still feel they are relevant, feel free to submit them again. We are starting with a fresh slate of submissions going forward.

If you don’t have a FanGraphs account (seriously, it’s free), you can register here.

Once you have an account, you can submit a post here.

We’re looking forward to sharing your research.

By now, you’ve no doubt heard the news that current managing editor of FanGraphs, Carson Cistulli, is departing the site for the chilly northern climes of Toronto and the Blue Jays’ pro scouting department. Carson is a great editor and baseball mind, as well as a generous writer, friend, and podcast host, and while we’ll soldier on ably in his absence, I doubt we’ll ever hire anyone with exactly his same delightful perspective again. The Blue Jays will be richer for that, FanGraphs poorer.

You also may have heard that I will be stepping into his shoes as managing editor. What does that mean for you, the reader? Not much, as it turns out.

Since its inception, FanGraphs has delivered sabermetrically driven analysis that asks interesting baseball questions and tells interesting baseball stories, and it will continue to do so in the future. You, the reader, will still get to read the same smart, funny, incisive writing. You’ll enjoy the same rigorous statistical work, the same insightful prospect coverage, and the same thoughtful player and industry analysis as you always have, though I hope you’ll learn to tolerate a less fanatical devotion to hyphens.

My work as a writer here and as the managing editor of The Hardball Times had been animated by a desire to understand the game from the seams out; to bring the rigors of social science and statistical analysis to bear on baseball questions; to color the answers to those questions with philosophy and humor. To pick at, until we are satisfied, the “why” as much as the “what” and the “how.” To challenge what we assume we know about the game, those who run it and those who play it. All of that will inform my work as FanGraphs’ managing editor.

I’ll still be writing, chatting, and (for now) managing The Hardball Times. One thing that will change: I will serve as your new host of FanGraphs Audio. Chatting with folks about baseball is one of my favorite things to do, and I look forward to getting to do just that with members of our staff, as well as a few guests. But don’t you worry: Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass aren’t going anywhere.

Every editor brings with them their own vision and quirks, but each one’s success is largely the result of the writers with whom they work and the readers who consume all those good words. Our staff of full-time writers and contributors is in terrific shape, and you, our readers, are as thoughtful in your comments and generous with your reading hours as ever. We’ll miss Carson dearly, but we’ll press on. This is the new FanGraphs, same as the old FanGraphs. I couldn’t be more excited.

In April of 2009, FanGraphs CEO David Appelman announced that his growing site would be adding two part-time writers effective immediately or something like immediately. Having produced some vaguely analytical work for my own weblog, I sent a collection of story ideas, a CV, and an overwrought cover letter to the email address provided in his announcement. In a turn of events that speaks both to Appelman’s discretion as a leader and his capacity for identifying talent, he made a decision that would benefit FanGraphs for some time — which is to say, he hired someone else.

As if to prove, however, that even the most towering intellects aren’t immune from errors in judgment, Appelman and his future managing editor Dave Cameron would undo their good work just a few months later. Acting on a recommendation from Jonah Keri, who’s culpability in this process can’t be overstated, Appelman and Cameron invited me, at the beginning of August 2009, to begin contributing twice a week to fangraphs dot com.

To suggest that my first posts at the site were met with a “mixed response” would be to make full use of the rhetorical device known as “euphemism.” While I received no actual threats of bodily harm to my person, that didn’t prevent my person from crawling into the fetal position and weeping like a child. And while the vigor with which some readers expressed their dissatisfaction was probably unnecessary, the basic gist of their comments — namely, that I was single-handedly ruining whatever goodwill FanGraphs had cultivated with the public — seemed, at times, to possess merit.

When I asked Appelman if I should stop, lest I topple his fledgling empire, he suggested I not do that. “Keep going,” in fact, was more or less the tenor of his message. And whether that was the soundest advice or not, it seems in retrospect to have worked out. I have kept going for over nine years, enjoying (like other FanGraphs writers) an editorial freedom and collaborative spirit that is rare for any publication. One of Appelman’s great strengths as this site’s guardian has been to trust his writers. It’s an ethic from which I’ve benefited as a contributor and which I’ve attempted to preserve as an editor.

Starting today, however, I will no longer serve as a writer or editor for this site. After a tenure that has lasted far beyond even my most optimistic projections, I’m leaving FanGraphs to become a member of the Toronto Blue Jays.

Read the rest of this entry »

As the FanGraphs prospect team starts to roll out team lists this off season, we’ve updated THE BOARD! to include team lists as they are published. You also might notice we did an update on the interface.

Important Notes:

• Team Lists will be added as they are published. Once all 30 lists and the Top 100 prospects are published, the Team Lists will just become the preseason 2019 list.
• The Scouting section for 2019 is split into position players and pitchers. This is to accommodate the addition of columns for Tommy John surgery date and spin rate for pitchers.
• The MLB Organization and Position selection now behaves like our splits tool. If you select one team, say the Padres, it will only show players in the Padres organization. If you were to click on another team, say the Braves, it will show you players in both the Padres’ and the Braves’ organization.
• You can now search for players within a board using the search box. The search function is limited to the current board, so it won’t find a player on the 2018 International board if you have the 2019 Team Lists loaded. It’s effectively a custom filter that filters on the player’s name and signing/college information.
• A .csv data file of the current board with associated filters can be exported from the top right corner of the data grid.

Our 2019 Free Agent Tracker is now live, housing the results from our crowdsourcing effort from the last two weeks. It will update with new contract data as free agents sign.

You might notice a new interface: readers are now able to filter the board choosing multiple teams and multiple positions. Also, in the top-right corner, we’ve put links to leaderboards and projection boards for the free agents.

The crowdsourcing numbers include both the average values and the median values for prospective player deals. The projected WAR uses the Depth Charts projections available on the projection page and player pages. At this point in the offseason, the Depth Charts projections closely reflect Steamer, but the playing time might differ slightly. ZiPS will be added at a later point in the offseason.

In our never-ending quest to put a FanGraphs logo on everything, mugs are the logical next step. So, here they are!

They come in both black and white to match your preferred aesthetic and, at 15 oz., are also on the large size. These have quickly become the go-to mugs in my own household, to the point where certain unnamed spouses have attempted to monopolize them.

They are available now for $25, which includes shipping and handling. Supplies are currently limited. Quite honestly, these may be the first and last mugs we make, so get them while you can!