In Canto IV of his Inferno, the poet Dante — led by other, more dead poet Virgil — enters a level of hell reserved predominantly for those people who had the misfortune of predating Christ. One can ask reasonable questions about the justice of this arrangement — is it the fault of Socrates, for example, that he was died before the arrival of an unborn prophet? — but neither Virgil nor Dante nor even the occupants of this region appear to be lodging any serious complaints.

While this intermediate state, known as Limbo, is technically situated within the first circle of hell, it doesn’t feature any of the punishments typically associated with the underworld. No fire or rivers of fire or anything involving fire, really. It’s mostly a bunch of guys sitting around.

Today, we find ourselves in a kind of baseball Limbo*, occupying a place on the schedule that’s technically situated within the regular season but possessing all trappings of a postseason game. It is very strange.

*It’s possible that Dante’s Purgatorio actually serves as a more apt metaphor for these Game 163s, but the author hasn’t read it and has no plans to do so for the moment.

Indeed, the purpose of post is less to meditate on the finer points of a long Italian poem and more to announce that a number of FanGraphs writers will be attempting to understand the strangeness of baseball Limbo in real time today during an extended “live chat” that will start around 1pm ET and continue for the duration of this afternoon’s divisional tiebreakers. Chats for the Wild Card games on Tuesday and Wednesday will follow, as well.

Here’s the playoff chat schedule for the next few days. Times in ET and presented in sophisticated 24-hour format. (Note: prospect and fantasy chats not included here.)

Monday
13:00 Game 163s Live Chat Jubilee

Tuesday
20:00 National League Wild Card Game

Wednesday
20:00 American League Wild Card Game

Whatever their flaws as human people — and there are too many to catalog in this brief post — lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen and lead prospect analyst emeritus Kiley McDaniel have nevertheless acquitted themselves well in their attempts to analyze all prospects.

Within the last year, they have evaluated every player with a 40 FV or better, ranked and re-ranked the top rookie-eligible players in the game, examined the next three draft classes in as much depth as is reasonable, provided daily notes on in-season developments for pro prospects, both introduced and updated THE BOARD, and (most recently) launched a weekly podcast dedicated to prospect evaluation and air-horn sound effects.

Given the volume of content produced by Messrs. Longenhagen and McDaniel, it makes sense to create a space where readers can find it. Accordingly, we’re introducing today the FanGraphs Prospects landing page.

From the Prospects page, one can access the site’s most recent prospect-related posts, podcast episodes, and rankings. Accompanying the addition of the Prospects page are also a couple new features — namely, a statistical leaderboard featuring only those players who have appeared on a prospect list, a graduation tracker to monitor which players are about to exhaust (or have recently exhausted) their status as a prospect, and a miniature version of THE BOARD.

In addition to hyperlinks like this one, the FanGraphs prospects page is also accessible via the Blogs drop-down menu on FanGraphs’ main page.

Finally, it would be foolish and also very rude not to mention the contributions of Sean Dolinar to the construction of the Prospects page. Dolinar’s work on the project has been invaluable.

We are debuting a new leaderboard today, the Season Stat Grid. It’s a little different than most of our leaderboards. Instead of having multiple stats in columns for each player, we are showing just one stat on the page and displaying multiple different seasons across the columns. This will allow readers to compare players to other players and themselves across several years.

You are able to select from most batting and pitching stats available on the player pages. There is a “Popular” stat menu which will always contain WAR along with other frequently used or otherwise important stats.

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We have a new feature on the site: live-updating daily leaderboards! These leaderboards update as games are played without having to reload the page, providing live-updating daily stats for every player along side our existing live scoreboard, win probability graphs, box scores, and play log.

These leaderboards are aimed specifically at showing single-game stats, including ones not available on our traditional leaderboards such as swinging strikes, called strikes, and foul balls for pitchers, and granular batted ball stats for batters.

The live leaderboards also offer the option to filter by different position types, a feature geared toward fantasy owners. They include categories like infielders, middle infielders, and corner infielders.

Finally, these leaderboards allow you to filter by multiple teams. Just click “Filter by Team” and pick the teams you’d like to see. This makes it easy to compare opposing starting pitchers side-by-side, since each team is listed above/below the team they’re playing that day.

The purpose of this post is to announce that this week’s chat schedule — because of the deadline and also because of Kiley McDaniel’s extensive contract rider — is slightly different than during other weeks of the year. The amended schedule appears below, with times presented in the more sophisticated 24-hour format to reflect the sophistication of this site’s readers.

Monday
14:00 Dan Szymborski

Tuesday
12:00 Justin Mason
15:00 Kiley McDaniel and Travis Sawchik Deadline Chat
16:00 Brad Johnson

Wednesday
12:00 Jeff Sullivan

Thursday
12:00 Jay Jaffe
14:00 Eric Longenhagen

Friday
12:00 Meg Rowley
15:00 Paul Sporer

Journalism is necessarily a job in which many need to act as mercenaries, but as mercenaries go, I make a rather poor one. Going back to 2001, there are only two places for which I’ve primarily written: ESPN.com and Baseball Think Factory née Baseball Primer. I joined both of these places not just because they were interested in my work or, in the case of the former, also wanted to give me money, but because I believed in their mission statement.

Starting today, I’ve taken a new role in another project I believe in, joining the FanGraphs team as a full-time, senior writer.

I’ve always been a fan of FanGraphs and, even more importantly, the group of people that David Appelman has assembled over the last decade. (Even Carson, at least until I find the rest of his horcruxes.) I haven’t had the opportunity yet to meet everyone involved — baseball analytics is a much larger world than when I first became involved 20 years ago — but I consider many of the FanGraphs writers personal friends and all of them valued colleagues.

What cemented FanGraphs for me in my mind as a great place to work was at Sabermetrics Day for the Staten Island Yankees in 2016. For those who weren’t around or just don’t remember, the Staten Island Yankees had a special theme day in June of that year, inviting Carson, Dave Cameron, Jonah Keri, Ben Lindbergh, Meg Rowley, Emma Span, and myself for a panel and a barbecue. Apples brought the whole crew along, so while I was familiar with FanGraphs writers, many of whom I had known for a very long time (20 years in the case of D-Cam), I had never seen FanGraphs work together as a unit.

One thing I noticed was how much this group of writers enjoyed working with each other, respected each other, and even if they don’t all come to the party with the same point-of-view, have this incredibly collaborative vibe. My traveling companion, who is not at all into baseball and has never quite figured out what it is I do — a full story for another time, but she was once under the mistaken impression that I was part of a composite of characters that Jonah Hill played in Moneyball — came into that weekend feeling a bit of an outsider. Despite this, the FanGraphs crew made a real effort to make her feel included in the festivities, completely unasked, something which has always touched me.

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The FanGraphs Auction Calculator now calculates in-season values and values off Rest of Season projections.

Some Notes:

• Rest of Season auction value calculations are available for Steamer, Depth Charts, ZiPS, and THE BAT projection systems.
• Dollar values for Rest of Season projections are pro-rated for how many days are remaining in the season.
• In-season auction value calculations are pro-rated for the number of days into the season.
• Positional eligibility for in-season calculations is determined via positions played in 2018. Please adjust your position qualifications accordingly.

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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