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.

Our boxscores just got a major overhaul after being neglected for several years! Here’s what’s new:

– The Game Graphs, Play Log, and Box Score sections were merged into one single page.

– Almost every FanGraphs stat is available in the boxscore both on the individual player level and team total level. Every stat comes in its own familiar section, just as they’re laid out on the player pages and leaderboards.

– Each section is fully sortable with much improved sorting performance.

– Each stat can be hovered over for a tooltip style quick definition.

– Stars of the Game voting and viewing can be conducted on the boxscore page. Please remember to vote!

All the new boxscores are available for both live games and any game dating back to 1974.

Big thanks to Amazin’ Avenue for thoroughly trashing our previous boxscore layout.

It seems like everything is working properly with the 2011 stats, with the exception of a lot of negative FIP values. That’s what happens when you only have six MLB games and the FIP constant is 1.72. If you see anything else that doesn’t look right, please let me know!

Daily data loads from here on out should be complete by 5am every morning.

Last night I rolled out ERA-, FIP-, and xFIP- to the site. These are all park and league adjusted and basically your pitching equivalent of wRC+, except that lower is better, with 100 still being average.

You can read more about ERA- (or as it’s called in the article, aERA) here.

These are now available in all the player pages and leaderboards.

One other quick addition was adding Shutdowns (SD) and Meltdowns (MD) to the player pages.

I made a change last night to xFIP that adjusts the major league HR/FB rate on a seasonal basis. Previously, the average was set at 10.5%. In recent years the average HR/FB has been somewhat lower than 10.5%, which is what prompted the change.

2007 – 9.7%
2008 – 10.1%
2009 – 10.1%
2010 – 9.4%

Overall a player’s 2010 xFIP will tend to be a little bit lower, at most around 0.20 runs, but generally more in the 0.05 to 0.10 range.

This year’s latest ZiPS projections, courtesy of Dan Szymborski of Baseball Think Factory are now live in the player pages (you’re welcome, Carson) and the sortable projection sections.

If you’d prefer them in excel format you can download the full spreadsheet here.

We’ll be updating these every day of the 2011 season, as usual!