On the very first day of my freshman year of college, my Journalism 101 professor quoted a line from All the President’s Men: “Follow the money.” Over four years as an undergrad, I’d hear that maxim more times than I could count. Enough that after more than 10 years in the business, it’s been incorporated into my subconscious so thoroughly that I can hear my old professors and mentors (and sometimes Hal Holbrook) repeating it without needing them to be physically present.
Obviously, we at FanGraphs would like nothing better than for some of your money to be spent on a Membership. Your support funds valuable tools like the RosterResource payroll pages, my favorite way to follow that famous principle of journalism. Read the rest of this entry »
Over the next month, we at FanGraphs will be highlighting a number of site features and showing you how we use them. The goal is to make your visit to the website more enjoyable, and to help you get the most out of the features we’ve added over the years. Today, I’m going to walk through the various ways we deploy projections to make predictions about the future. Let’s explore our projected standings and playoff odds pages.
Before I ever worked at FanGraphs, I spent countless hours messing around with the playoff odds page. I like learning about the future, or at least learning about many possible futures, and I always found the slow-changing nature of projections early in the season to be soothing as a Cardinals fan. Stressed about last night’s crushing loss? On May 15? I could always look to the odds page, see that the team’s chances had barely budged, and calm myself down.
Five years into working here, I still use many of the same pages I did then, but they’ve been upgraded a good deal in the meantime. Let’s start with the nerve center of our predictions, the page that shows everything that feeds into our much-discussed playoff odds: the Projected Standings. You can find them using the navigation bar at the top of the site:
Writing a book is a Herculean task to begin with, and in my inimitable way, I made it even harder when writing my 2017 book on the Hall of Fame, The Cooperstown Casebook, by challenging myself to compose concise 200–250 word summaries of the 220 major league players who were enshrined at that point as well as a few dozen past, present, and future candidates. My goal in doing so was to give the reader a thumbnail guide to these players’ careers while shining some fresh light on even the most familiar ones using advanced statistics. I had no shortage of options, but even so, I wish I had all the tools then that I do now. Here I’d like to highlight one of them as part of our series on useful site features you’ll find at FanGraphs.
Consider the case of Dazzy Vance, a colorful and dominant right-hander who made his name with the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1920s and ’30s. Vance was 24 years old when he debuted with the Pirates in 1915, but a variety of arm troubles limited him to just 33 major innings through his age-30 season. Finally pain free after elbow surgery (probably to remove bone chips), he resurfaced with Brooklyn in 1922, and on the strength of his combination of a blazing fastball and a sharp overhand curve “with a sweep that would shame a windmill,” as one writer described it, he led the NL with 134 strikeouts that season, and proceeded to repeat the feat in each of the next six seasons as well. His 262 strikeouts in 1924 was the highest total by any NL pitcher besides Christy Mathewson in the 1901–1960 span, and the highest by any pitcher in either league between the start of the Live Ball era (1920) and the United States’ entry into World War II (1941).
While I had enough confidence in my research to lead Vance’s Casebook capsule with, “Relative to his league, Vance struck out batters at a higher rate than [Nolan] Ryan, [Roger] Clemens, [Pedro] Martinez — any of them…” I worried that by explicitly quantifying his skill in this area that I’d either open myself to error or make even more work for myself, since the temptation was to go into further detail on the subject and perhaps calculate such data for every enshrined pitcher. Little did I know that within a year of the book’s publication that I would not only join the staff of FanGraphs but propose the creation of a leaderboard to tackle such questions with a few easy clicks. Read the rest of this entry »
As David Appelman mentioned in yesterday’s State of the Union, over the next month we’re going to be highlighting some of FanGraphs’ features, sometimes off the beaten path, that can help you have a more productive, entertaining visit to our fair website. Today, I want to highlight some of our custom data options.
There are lots of ways to use FanGraphs, but as an individual of rather numerate inclination, I tend to get a lot of data from the site. I did that back when I was blogging at Baseball Think Factory and writing for ESPN, and I certainly haven’t curtailed that impulse as an employee of FanGraphs. Quite often, it’s simply easier for me to get things directly from the site than to go through my massive hoard of invariably unhelpfully named spreadsheets and databases. And one thing that I use a lot is the custom reports feature. We have so much data all over the site that it’s no simple matter to just get one massive export to rule them all, and in the Dark Mode, bind them. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s been almost two years since we talked about how FanGraphs is doing, and with Opening Day fast approaching, I thought it would be a good time to give you an update on where the site stands now. Read the rest of this entry »
The SABR Analytics Conference Research Awards will recognize baseball researchers who have completed the best work of original analysis or commentary during the preceding calendar year. Nominations were solicited by representatives from SABR, Baseball Prospectus, FanGraphs, the Internet Baseball Writers Association of America, and Sports Info Solutions.
To read any of the finalists, click on the link below. Scroll down to cast your vote.
Results will be announced and presented at the SABR Analytics Conference, March 8-10, 2024, in Phoenix, Arizona. Learn more or register for the conference at SABR.org/analytics.
The application period for this position is now closed. Thank you for your interest.
FanGraphs is now accepting applications to join our staff as a full-time associate editor.
The associate editor will work with the managing editor and the FanGraphs staff to publish daily baseball analysis and help shape the site’s editorial strategy. From free agent signings to statistical analysis, baseball’s top prospects to in-game strategy, we endeavor to present a holistic view of today’s game to our readers. Familiarity and comfort with advanced statistics is a requirement, as is a firm understanding of the current public research landscape. Just as importantly, we’re looking for an editor who displays good editorial judgment, as well as a talent for helping writers sharpen their ideas and hone their authorial voice. The associate editor will also manage FanGraphs’ social media accounts, and will have the opportunity to contribute written work of their own. Read the rest of this entry »
Postseason stats are now available in our leaderboards!
The leaderboards can be accessed in the Leaders navigation bar, or by using the “Season Type” filter in the leaderboards themselves. Read the rest of this entry »
Our 2024 Free Agent Tracker is now live! There are currently close to 200 players on the list; more will be added following the postseason as decisions are made on 2024 options and teams begin to clear space on their 40-man rosters. The tracker will be regularly updated throughout the offseason as qualifying offers are made and accepted or rejected, and as free agents find their new homes.
You can filter by status (signed/unsigned), previous team, and signing team, and export the data for your own analysis. You can also sort by a player’s handedness, age, and 2023 WAR. Shortly after the postseason ends, projected 2024 WAR will be available, as well as the results of our annual contract crowdsourcing project, which include median contract total, years, and average annual value. Read the rest of this entry »
These Cy Young Projections utilize a simple model created by Tangotiger. The original Cy Young Points model has predicted the top two vote getters with high accuracy through 2020. The FIP Adjusted model may be a better predictor of more recent voting behavior.
Along with current season stats (featuring FIP, WAR, and RA9-WAR), you can also use the top nav bar to toggle over to any of the in-season projection systems we carry to show a player’s projected end-of-season stats.
New data tools and the entire site are supported by our Members. Please consider becoming a FanGraphs Member if you enjoy our work!
