The results of the 2011 Fans Scouting Report are now available on the player pages and the leaderboards.

As always big thanks to Tangotiger for running them each year.

All the leaderboards now preserve sorting in the link, meaning you can sort by whatever you want and share with someone exactly what you were looking at. This is made even easier by the addition of the usual smorgasbord of “share” buttons to the leaderboard pages.

For instance, here are the qualified BsR (baserunning) leaders last season.

Also, sorting now sorts in descending order first. Fans of looking at the league-worst first will just need to click again. Someday we will just have the stats sort from best-to-worst, first, regardless of whether it should be ascending or descending. But in the meantime, having stats sort descending first should save an extra click most of the time.

On the exporting front, playerids are now listed by default at the end of the dataset when exported. Gone are the days of parsing out playerids and player names. Thanks to all those who found and shared workarounds while exporting wasn’t so pretty.

Hat Tip: @GiantsNirvana, @CajoleJuiceEsq, xiefrank

The Minor League leaderboards have been overhauled and now have a ton of new features including:

– Filtering by individual team.

– Custom stat lists, just like the major league leaderboards.

– The ability to group stats over multiple leagues.

– Custom player lists, allowing players to be easily compared.

– Custom reports let you save your custom stats / players for easy retrieval.

On the leaderboards, you can now filter by “Active Roster”, which currently displays the 40 man roster.

Please be aware of how this works:

– Team names next to a player are still denoted as the team they played on historically for the year of data selected.

– When you filter by active roster and you are looking at all players and not any specific team, it will show only players who are on active rosters.

– When you are looking at a specific team and you filter by active roster, it will show all the players who are as of this moment, on the active roster.

– If a player has never played in the Major Leagues, he will not show up on the Major League leaderboards.

One of the most frequent questions we get is: The players names and team names are garbled with HTML when I export data. How can I fix this?

Simple Tag Removal:

To remove any HTML tags from the data all you need to do is a quick Find & Replace All.

Fill in “<*>” (no quotes) into the Find what box, and then leave the Replace with box blank and hit Replace All.

And that’s it. You now have a worksheet completely free of all HTML.

Read the rest of this entry »

The leaderboards now have PITCHf/x data available.

All the functionality of the leaderboards should work with the new data, including custom leaderboards and custom player lists.

If you notice any issues, please let us know.

Also a quick note about qualified players. If you’re looking at multiple seasons for qualified players, it now defaults to 1000 PA or 300 IP. Single season qualified criteria remains the same. (Hat tip: Tangotiger)

In the player pages you’ll now find some new PITCHf/x sections that display data for pitch type, velocity, pitch values and plate discipline.

These are now there in addition to the BIS data that has always appeared in the player pages. If a section is not labeled PITCHf/x, it is Baseball Info Solutions data.

For plate-discipline stats, we’re using Mike Fast’s definition of the strike zone.

The pitch type abbreviations are as follows:

FA – Fastball (includes FF classification)
FT – 2-seam Fastball
FC – Cut Fastball
FS – Split-fingered Fastball
FO – Forkball
SI – Sinker
SL – Slider
CU – Curveball
KC – Knuckle Curve
EP – Ephuus
CH – Changeup
SC – Screwball
KN – Knuckleball
UN – Unknown

I’ve received a few reports today that there are some ads covering up content. If you see an ad in a place where it shouldn’t be, or if it’s playing unprompted audio, don’t worry, we’re not trying to destroy FanGraphs with ads. These types of ads annoy us as much as they annoy you (we use the site too) and they are not allowed on FanGraphs.

If we see one of these ads ourselves, we take the steps to remove it from the site immediately. If we only get reports of an ad and can not see it ourselves, it can be difficult to track down and the more information we can get about the ad the better.

The best thing you can do is to take a screenshot of the ad, or send us a description of the ad (what is the product?) and send an e-mail to ads+feedback@fangraphs.com and we will remove the offending ad as soon as we can track it down.

Update: It currently appears to be an issue with Internet Explorer only and ads in general. This should be fixed shortly.

Second Update: This should be corrected now. If you are still seeing issues, please let us know. For those interested, this was actually the result of a change in Google’s ad serving system and apparently it ended up breaking a number of website layouts in Internet Explorer that use third party ads in conjunction with DoubleClick for Publishers.

The 2012 Bill James Handbook Projections are now available in the player pages. Big thanks to Baseball Info Solutions for allowing us to publish these for the fourth straight year.

The Win Probability Graphs on the site were updated last night. They’ve been made interactive, so you can scroll over any point to find out the play, score, and win probability of the situation.

If you’re a blogger, you can now easily embed the charts into posts when you click on the little arrow button in the right hand corner of the graph:

Source: FanGraphs

The “Embed Code (Static)” will give you a non-changing version of the chart, but if you use the non static version, the graph will be updated automatically as the game progresses.