Much like the update last month, nothing in how we calculate our playoff odds has changed, but we’ve added a new feature to the page. We are now reporting the distribution of wins from the Monte Carlo simulation.

Specifically:

• The 25th percentile;
• The 75th percentile; and
• A histogram of projected wins.*

*The average is already reported as expected wins.

You can find this if you select the new display option in the dropdown of the same name.

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Within our Leaders menu there sits a Combined WAR Leaderboard under the WAR Tools sub-header. It has pitchers and position players on one leaderboard to compare their WAR. We’ve made an update, so the leaderboard now displays “Total WAR”, and not just WAR from their primary role. This was necessary because a certain two-way player started playing in the league this season.

We retained the old WAR values from the previous version and labeled that “Primary WAR”, so a traditional NL pitcher will only have his pitching WAR in the “Primary WAR” column. The “Total WAR” column will display his batting (position player) WAR + pitching WAR. This is particularly interesting for pitchers like Madison Bumgarner.

The primary role is determined by looking at all the appearance the player has made, it works well with players in the traditional roles. Shohei Ohtani’s primary role is displaying as a position player. The primary role only affects the which WAR is reported to the “Primary WAR”. “Total WAR” is unaffected by roles. (As of 4/21/2018, you’ll find Shohei Ohtani on the second page of the leaderboard.)

This leaderboard is a candidate for additional overhaul and expansion, so let us know if there are additional features that would be useful for a combined WAR leaderboard.

Eric and I have been working hard the last few months to rank everything that we can, including produce at the grocery store and our friends and family. As far as the rankings that appear on FanGraphs, we’ve had Prospect Week, headlined by the annual top-100 prospects list and complemented by nine other associated pieces, including preseason draft rankings that were updated yesterday to account for what’s happened in the last 10 weeks.

In that spirit of ranking and constantly updating, along with the desire to show our work and give readers tools to make decisions, today we are introducing THE BOARD.

This represents just the first pass at a feature that is likely to be modified and improved upon. Feel free to submit any suggestions in the comments. (I, personally, have a list of about a dozen additions for the coming months.) While we could have continued to develop this before releasing it, we felt this was something from which readers could benefit ASAP. It also serves as a bit of an apology for the team prospect lists taking so long. We’ll still be releasing an article for each team as planned over the next couple weeks. In the meantime, though, every organization is included in THE BOARD, updated with full tool grades. Readers, for example, can check out some of those to-be-published audits, like the record-breaking Padres’ list featuring 43 prospects.

A big hat tip is in order to dark overlord David Appelman for making our crazy ideas a reality.

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The Playoff Odds page looks different! The playoff-odds data and simulation method remains the same; however, we have revamped our reporting page to make it easier to understand and more powerful.

The most noticeable changes are the table layout and the mobile layout. We’ve tried to make it easier to understand what the columns mean for users who are new to the site. The goal of the mobile layout is to allow users to reach the most important information more quickly. Every column on the desktop page is viewable on the mobile layout by clicking the “Full” button.

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Ultimate Zone Ratings (UZR), provided by Mitchel Lichtman, are now available for the 2018 season! These will update weekly as usual.

In addition to the the new 2018 data, the 2012 through 2017 data has been updated. You might recall that in 2017, there were some changes to the UZR methodology that were to be backported to 2012 – 2016. This has now happened. Here is a brief refresher on what those changes were.

– UZR now uses hit timer data (hang time) rather than hit type designations, which is an improvement on the methodology and thus the results.

– The methodology has changed a little that allows UZR to account for some of the noise associated with imperfect data. The net result of this change is that extreme UZR’s, which were likely caused by, to some extent at least, noise in the data, rather than extreme performance, will be slightly ‘dampened.’ We think that these new values, while very close to the old ones in most cases, more accurately reflect the actual performance of the players in question.

Below you will find the changes of 5 or more runs in each season:

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

None.

Good news everyone! You can now make your picks in FanGraphs: The Game for the 2018 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 the next year of their career.

Lastly, if you had autopick set last year, it has now been 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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Last week, I published KATOH’s 2018 top-100 list. It was the fourth such preseason list to appear at FanGraphs. Unfortunately, it will also be the last.

I am embarking on a new opportunity in the baseball industry that prohibits me from working in the public sphere, which means no more KATOH. As much as I’d love to brag about how awesome this opportunity is, unfortunately that is all I can say about it.

Writing for FanGraphs was something I aspired to do since I stumbled upon the site as a teenager nearly a decade ago. I’ll be forever grateful to Dave Cameron and David Appelman, who hired me based on what was little more than an idea and stuck with me as I continually worked out the kinks. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Paul Swydan, who first brought me into the fold at the Hardball Times despite my undeveloped writing skills.

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Here’s your chance to vote for the 2018 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

• Glenn Healey, “The New Moneyball: How Ballpark Sensors Are Changing Baseball,” Proceedings of the IEEE (Vol. 105, No. 11), November 2017.
• Ben Lindbergh and Mitchel Lichtman, “The Juiced Ball is Back,” The Ringer, June 14, 2017.
• Harry Pavlidis, Jonathan Judge, and Jeff Long, “Introducing Pitch Tunnels,” Baseball Prospectus, January 24, 2017.
• Travis Sawchik, “Dictating the Action with Joey Votto,” FanGraphs, May 31, 2017.
• Stephanie Springer, “Get a Grip,” The Hardball Times, October 25, 2017.

Contemporary Baseball Commentary

• R.J. Anderson, “The Year of Catcher Concussions and MLB’s Battle to Do Better With Head Trauma,” CBS Sports, September 28, 2017.
• Emma Baccellieri, “Major League Baseball’s Statcast Can Break Sabermetrics,” Deadspin, December 18, 2017.
• Sam Miller, “Forget the Ninth Inning — Andrew Miller is Here to Save the Game,” ESPN The Magazine, March 30, 2017.
• Jeff Passan, “The Home Run is the King of Baseball. Is That a Good Thing?” Yahoo! Sports, September 19, 2017.
• Eno Sarris, “Matt Cain: The Giants’ Horse That Changed Baseball Stats … Twice,” The Athletic, September 27, 2017.

Historical Analysis/Commentary

• Grant Brisbee, “Why Baseball Games Are So Damned Long,” SB Nation, March 28, 2017.
• Jay Jaffe, “Analyzing the ‘Giant’ Controversy Surrounding the Indians’ 22-Game Winning Streak,” Sports Illustrated, September 15, 2017.
• John LaRue, “The Homogenization of Ballparks,” The Hardball Times, February 13, 2017.
• Rob Mains, “One Entire Season of Baseball from the 1960s”, Baseball Prospectus, September 11-14, 2017, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.
• Stew Thornley and Bob Tholkes, “From Recorder to Judge: The Evolution of the Scorer in the Nineteenth Century,” SABR Baseball Research Journal, Fall 2017.

Voting will be open through 11:59 p.m. MST on Monday, February 12, 2018. Details and criteria for each category can be found here. Only one work per author was considered as a finalist.

Results will be announced and presented at the seventh annual SABR Analytics Conference, March 9-11, 2018, at the Hyatt Regency Phoenix in Phoenix, Arizona. Learn more or register for the conference at SABR.org/analytics.

January 21st, 2011. That’s the day I got a phone call from David Appelman that changed my life.

I’d moved to California and was trying to make a full-time go of writing about fantasy baseball for a living, but my wife — as amazingly supportive as she’s been — had been wondering when I might be able to contribute more to the household. David’s call was a lifeline, a rope to a sinking writer, and I’ll never forget it. A job. Writing about baseball. Amazing.

Other than giving me a chance to do this for a living, David also gave me a chance to connect with you readers here at FanGraphs, readers I count as probably the best of the internet, and sometimes I feel like I’ve written for all of the internet. Maybe I have some authority on the matter. You guys are awesome, believe me.

This will be my last post for FanGraphs for now, post number 2,202 when you add them all up. Details to come, but I’m excited for this new chapter, and I will still see you around, but not on these pages.

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This morning, we’re launching The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2018!

This year’s Annual returns with a great line up of contributors from The Hardball Times and FanGraphs — folks like Jeff Sullivan, Eric Longenhagen, Kate Preusser, Adam Dorhauer, Jack Moore, Britni de la Cretaz, Carson Cistulli, Sarah Wexler, Chris Mitchell, Neil Weinberg, and Travis Sawchik, among others — plus a few special guests.

It’s our first online edition, which we hope will make the smart, incisive work in it more accessible and easier to share. And in an effort to bring you as many different kinds of baseball stories as possible, we’re pleased to feature another first — a fiction section.

We’re really proud of the work this team has done to bring you insight across Commentary, Analysis, History, and Fiction, and we hope the Annual helps you pass this slow offseason with a bit more ease. Thank you for reading!