Since its inception in May of 2010, the Community Blog has (a) provided a space for some excellent work by the FanGraphs readership but also (b) occasionally fallen through the editorial cracks (and not in the gross way that you’re imagining).

After some serious-type conversations and more than one fistfight, however, we believe that we’ve established a sustainable way of reviewing submissions in a timely and efficient manner. Today, for example, we’ve published James Lewis’s article proposing a totally creative and equally unlikely solution to the Cardinals’ shortstop hole (again, not disgusting).

Please acquaint yourself with the guidelines for submission if you’re interested. Ready to submit a post? You can do that here with your FanGraphs user name (register here, if you don’t have one yet). Already published an article somewhere? Feel free to cross-post.

We’re looking forward to your submissions.

K% and BB% for pitchers have been added to the player pages and leaderboards in the “Advanced” sections.

They are both calculated using Total Batters Faced. SO/TBF and BB/TBF.

Due to popular demand and to decrease general confusion, K% has been changed from K/AB to K/PA.

On average, you’ll see players’ K% drop about 2% and, at the very most (rare cases like Adam Dunn), about 6%.

This is a site-wide change and impacts stats pages, splits, leaderboards, and graphs that contain K%.

Last night we rolled out some changes to the menu bar in an attempt to improve navigation on the site:

If there’s something that you would like to have quicker access to, that isn’t already in the menu bar, please let us know!

If you don’t see the menus correctly, please hit refresh on your browser.

Last year during our very first FanGraphs Event, we gave out FanGraphs t-shirts to everyone who attended and up until this day, those were the only FanGraphs t-shirts that were let loose into the world! Turns out we had some left over, and now we’re selling them for $19.99 each, which includes shipping and handling.

For you t-shirt aficionados, they are Fruit of the Loom brand, 100% cotton, and actually fit quite nice. They come in navy blue, and white. The supply of these is fairly limited, and some of the white ones are out of stock. If there’s demand, maybe we’ll make another batch.

They’re on sale now!

I’m pleased to announce that FanGraphs is now carrying a comprehensive base running stat: Mitchel Lichtman’s Ultimate Base Running (UBR).

UBR is now being included in WAR for years where UBR is available (2002-2011).

Though 95% of all players will have their WAR changed less than .4 wins in any particular season and less than 1.3 wins over their careers, we feel that the inclusion of UBR in WAR will help properly credit/debit players who truly excel or are particularly awful on the base paths.

UBR is available under “Bsr” or “Base Running” in the player pages and leaderboards.

Here’s an excerpt from the UBR primer that we’ll be posting later today:

Base running linear weights or base running runs, or Ultimate Base Running (UBR), is similar to the outfield arm portion of UZR. Whatever credit (positive or negative) is given to an outfielder based on a runner hold, advance, or kill on a batted ball is also given in reverse to the runner (or runners). There are some plays that a runner is given credit (again plus or minus) for that do not involve an outfielder, such as being safe or out going from first to second on a ground ball to the infield, or advancing, remaining, or being thrown out going from second to third on a ground ball to SS or 3B.

Runs are awarded to base runners in the same way they are rewarded to outfielders on “arm” plays. The average run value in terms of the base/out state is subtracted from the actual run value (also in terms of the resultant base/out state) on a particular play where a base runner is involved. The result of the subtraction is the run value awarded to the base runner on that play.

There is now “rookie” filtering in the leaderboards.

The criteria to be a rookie is any season where a player has started the season with fewer than 130 at-bats, and fewer than 50 innings pitched. Roster time is not a factor in these, so there may be the occasional player that show up that is not technically a rookie by MLB standards.

What’s neat is you can combine this with the “Multiple Seasons” feature to get the best rookies of any decade (or any time period really). For instance, here are the top rookie seasons by pitcher WAR since 1980.

And here are the top rookie seasons by batter WAR from 2000 to 2009.

It’s worth noting that if you don’t check the “split season” box, it will combine all a player’s seasons when they were rookie eligible and it will not “split out” the seasons.

Anyway, there’s lots of neat ways to filter this data and please let us know if you run into any bugs.

2011 UZR data is now up on the site and will be updated during each Sunday night’s data load.

The UZR data will always include games through Saturday.

The FanGraphs iPhone App is discounted to $0.99 from it’s original price of $2.99 until the end of the weekend.

I’ve also added the in-season ZiPS projections, both “Updated” and “Rest of Season” to the player stats.

The ZiPS in-season projections courtesy of Baseball Think Factory’s Dan Szymborski are now live on the player pages making the pre-season projections hidden by default.

Remember:

ZiPS (R) – What a player is projected to do the rest of the season.
ZiPS (U) – A player’s full season updated projection.

Updated and Rest of Season ZiPS are also available in the sortable projection area.