Thanks to all your suggestions earlier this off-season, the FanGraphs Library has now been re-edited and rejuvinated in preparation for the 2012 season. Every stats page has been updated with new context tables — they are not year-specific anymore — and each page has been beefed up with more detailed and accurate information.

— Curious about what the formulas are for xFIP, wRAA, or SIERA? We have those, and many more.

— Wondering what the wOBA weights were for 1990, or maybe 1945? Or even 1900? Got it.

— Where can you find historical FIP constant values? We have those too.

— Need to find the league-average ISO back in 1956? Or league-average HR/FB rate in 2002? You can find links to historical, league-average leaderboards on every statistics page.

— Need a handy context chart for a specific stat that you can copy and paste into a blog article? The new context charts are easy to highlight and copy/paste from setting to setting.

There are more changes planned for the coming months — additions this time, not just edits — so stay tuned.

The 2012 Marcel Projections courtesy of Tangotiger are now available in the usual sortable format and in the player pages!

If you are unfamiliar with the Marcel the Monkey Forecasting System, please read the FAQ and all subsequent links.

The comparison graphs section has received an overhaul and now contains much of the functionality that our WAR Graphs tool contains, but for many of the other stats on the site, including standard counting stats.

You can easily embed them in your blogs in either static versions (where the data doesn’t change) or in updating versions where the data is always kept up to date.

Here’s a graph of cumulative home runs by age:

Source: FanGraphs — Barry Bonds, Albert Pujols, Alex Rodriguez

And these work for pitchers too:

Source: FanGraphs — Clayton Kershaw, Felix Hernandez, Tim Lincecum

Back in October, Bojan Koprivica wrote an excellent research piece on determining the difficulty of blocking every major league pitch.

Our WAR implementation now includes Bojan’s pitch-blocking algorithm dating back to the 2008 season. This impacts catchers only, with a maximum range of +/- 7 runs per season. The vast majority of catchers will see a change of +/- 2 runs or less per season.

We’ve also included two new stats in our fielding section: CPP and RPP.

CPP – The expected number of passed pitches.
RPP – The number of runs above / below average a pitcher is at blocking pitches.

You can check out these leaderboards to see which catchers have benefited the most since 2008 and here are the RPP leaderboards for individual seasons since 2008.

Much thanks goes out to Bojan for helping us get his metric up on the site! We will be updating CPP rand RPP weekly (possibly daily) throughout the 2012 season.

The 2012 Steamer Projections are now available on FanGraphs courtesy of steamerprojections.com. Massive thanks to Jared Cross, Dash Davidson, and Peter Rosenbloom for putting these together and letting us display them on FanGraphs.

The Steamer projections did quite well in last year’s Forecaster Challenge.

All the usual bells and whistles apply, including FanGraphs+ integration on the projection pages, integrated 5×5 ADP rankings, projections on the player pages, and active roster team filtering.

We are only displaying players that have more than zero plate appearances or innings pitched. AVG/OBP/SLG for batters and ERA for pitchers are projected for additional players in the downloadable spreadsheets.

Mock Draft Central’s 5×5 Mixed League Average Draft Position values are now available in all the projection pages under the heading ADP.

These are updated daily as new drafts happen. If you see a 999.0 as the ADP value, it means that player has not been drafted at all.

The 2012 ZiPS Projections courtesy of Baseball Think Factory and Dan Szymborski are now available in the sortable projections pages and on the player pages!

The new Custom Teams feature will replace the My Team and My Projections feature and now have the ability to create as many different team lists as you’d like, all while utilizing the existing leaderboards and projection pages.

If you’ve been using the old My Teams feature, your team will already appear in your custom team list as “My Team”.

To get to your team once it’s created, just click on the Leaders or Projections link.

The FanGraphs+ player profiles section now includes team and position.

Also we’ve found a few missing profiles including Billy Butler, Johan Santana, Kendrys Morales, and Franklin Gutierrez.

I’d also like to gauge whether or not we should explore putting the FanGraphs+ content into an eBook / PDF format. Poll after the jump:

Read the rest of this entry »

All sizes of FanGraphs T-Shirts are now back in stock! Huge thanks to all those who have already bought them to show their support for the site!

If anyone has ideas for what they’d like to see on future FanGraphs T-Shirts, please send us a note via our contact form.