The 2015 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 really don’t follow a team, just pick one. You’ll only have to do this once.

After you’ve selected a team, there are 9 categories 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 2015, 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 this year 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 show up on the player pages after there have been 5 ballots submitted.

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

A couple of weeks ago, we announced a renewed commitment to the FanGraphs Library and promised regular updates to glossary entries and blog posts. You’ve probably noticed our weekly FanGraphs Q&A chats at 3 p.m. EST on Wednesdays, but the other changes to the library aren’t necessarily obvious on the site’s main page.

If you haven’t had a chance to check out the changes to the library, the entries on Weighted On-Base Average (wOBA) and Weighted Runs Created Plus (wRC+) have been updated and include more current information, a more thorough explanation of how and why you should know and use these stats, and for the first time at FanGraphs, information on how to actually calculate wRC+.

Additionally, you’ll find the library’s blog populated with a couple of posts discussing the importance of learning wOBA and wRC+.

If you’re looking for information on other statistics we offer, on how to make use of various FanGraphs features, or if you have related questions, check out the weekly chat, comment on this post or posts in the library blog or contact me on Twitter @NeilWeinberg44. We’ll roll out more educational posts and glossary updates each week, so be sure to check often.

Entering play on Thursday night, Kyle Seager owned a .274 batting average. Chris Johnson’s average was a nearly identical .273. The two third basemen have played in a similar number of games and have come to the plate close to the same number of times. If you use batting average to evaluate these players’ seasons, you’d come to the conclusion that Seager and Johnson are essentially equivalent players this year.

They’re not. In fact, it’s very clear Seager is substantially better than Johnson. Let me rephrase that: It’s very clear Seager is better than Johnson — but only if you’re well-versed in the language of baseball statistics. If you know how to properly value walks, extra base power, baserunning and defense, the difference between Seager and Johnson is impossible to miss.

At FanGraphs, our writers use statistics and metrics like wOBA, wRC+, FIP and WAR to evaluate baseball players and teams. We provide those tools, and more, so others might conduct evaluations on their own. Want to know Miguel Cabrera’s wOBA against lefties? You can find that on FanGraphs. But what if you don’t know what wOBA means, how it’s calculated or why you should care about it more than batting average?

You can find some of that information on FanGraphs. A well-motivated, self-starter could show up at the site, notice something called wOBA on the leaderboards, go to the glossary and figure out what it means and why it’s important. But it can be intimidating and challenging for people who are just starting out to make sense of everything we offer.

In an effort to make advanced statistics easier, and to understand and to better use the data and features available at FanGraphs, we’re relaunching and promoting the FanGraphs Library. There’s a lot of great information there already, but this revamped library is even better. There’s a steep learning curve, though, so I’ve been tasked with making things a bit simpler.

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With the addition of the new heatmaps, we have a new tool that lets you whip up league average heatmaps.

The tool can be conveniently accessed under the “leaders” section in the site’s main navigation.

I’m pleased to announce that we’ve rolled out new heatmaps to the site!

There are a number of ways to customize each heatmap:

– Options to choose either a traditional 5×5 grid or a more granular 10×10 grid.

– Choose a heatmap from the viewpoint of either the pitcher or the batter.

– For the 10×10 grid, you can choose your own level of smoothing, which will change the weighting of adjacent buckets.

– Filtering on single or multiple years, handedness, and count.

– A variety of different stats to choose from.

The color grading on the heatmaps is always compared to an MLB average player for the selected time period and handedness.

By popular demand, we’ve added K% – BB% (K-BB% on all pages) to all pitchers stats sections, including leaderboards, player pages, splits, etc….

Enjoy!

We’ve updated our WAR Graphs tool to include pitcher comparisons:

Source: FanGraphs — Pedro Martinez, Clayton Kershaw, Sandy Koufax

It’s also now possible to compare batters and pitchers on the same graph:

Source: FanGraphs — Clayton Kershaw, Felix Hernandez, Justin Verlander

The game log section on the player pages will now give you an extra line of data that displays the totals for the dates you selected.

For instance, if you wanted to see all of Mike Trout’s games since September 1st, 2013, you’d see he’s had a wRC+ of 172 over that same time period.

This feature is available for the minor league game logs too.

There are now splits options on the FanGraphs leaderboards that allow you to see exactly how a player performed at an individual position. These positional splits also include a Value tab, so you can see a player’s WAR totals and components at a specific position.

Please note that these are different from the existing positional filters, which filter on qualified players (25% of games played) at a particular position. The new splits will only show the stats for a player while he was playing a specific position.

This is particularly useful at the team and league level where you don’t want full season stats from players who play multiple positions in your leaderboard.

For every game this year we’ll be projecting the odds of each team winning on our live scoreboard. We’ve also added an extra experimental line on live Win Probability graphs that adjusts for the newly calculated game odds.

To calculate these game odds we’re doing the following:

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