Bill Baer of Crashburn Alley yesterday wrote an article titled, “FanGraphs Fan Projections Are Craaaaazy”. And there certainly was something crazy going on with some players on the Braves.

Long story short: I’ve made some updates and the Braves projections have returned to sanity and now look like this:

Player       Fans   CarAvg    Diff
Heyward, J   .393   .376      .017
McCannn, B   .360   .364     -.004
Uggla, D     .365   .359      .006
McLouth, N   .337   .343     -.006
Prado, M     .351   .352     -.001
Freeman, F   .332   .213      .119
Gonzalez, A  .294   .298     -.004

Player        Fans    CarAvg    Diff
Hanson, T     3.25     3.38    -0.13
Lowe, D       3.94     3.80     0.14
Minor, M      3.83     3.77     0.06
Jurrjens, J   4.02     3.85     0.17
Hudson, T     3.98     3.82     0.16

I’m pleased to announce that Joshua Maciel’s original WAR Grids are now automated for you to create your very own. Also a big thanks to Dave Allen for his help.

Here’s what one looks like for the top 25 WAR leaders since the year 2000.

click to make big

The selection of multiple seasons that was made available in the leaderboards section has now been rolled out to the team pages and My Team section sof the site.

Now it’s easy to find which Yankees player had the most WAR since 1996.

Or, which team had the worst offense since 2006.

On the leaderboards you can now filter by multiple seasons going all the way back to 1871.

There are a couple caveats, in that some sections of the leaderboard only go back so far. The Batted Ball, Pitch Type, Pitch Value and Plate Discipline sections can only go back to 2002, and the Win Probability section only goes back to 1974. Splits will also only go back to 2002 and monthly splits currently only for single seasons right now. I’ve included a label which shows exactly which seasons you’re looking at, even if you’ve selected something else.

For instance, if you’ve selected dates between 1980 and 2004 and you go the the Batted Ball section, you’ll only see the dates between 2002 and 2004.

If you’re filtering huge date ranges, please be a little more patient than usual because it may take a few seconds more to grab all the data.

This feature will be making its way to the other sortable stats sections fairly soon.

On all the leaderboards pages, you can now filter by all sorts of splits, including handedness, batted ball type, home/away, leverage, etc…

Want to know who the 4th best qualified pull hitter was last season according to wRC+? No problem; it was Paul Konerko.

How about which second baseman hit the most home runs against right handed pitchers?

Or even which pitcher had the lowest FIP on the road?

Splits filtering can also be done at the full team level, in the team pages, and in the My Team sections of the site.

For a limited time the FanGraphs iPhone app is on sale for $0.99.

Existing and new owners of the app will also find the 2011 Bill James projections in the player pages. I can also confirm that the app will include live and updated data for the 2011 season.

I’ve added a new stat to the PitchF/x section, “Pace”, inspired by this post over at Beyond the Box Score, which shows how much time each pitcher takes in between his pitches.

The way I calculate Pace, is by taking the difference between the start time of the first pitch in the plate appearance, and the end time of the last pitch in the plate appearance. I then divide by the number of pitches in that plate appearance (minus 1). Pickoff attempts are considered just another pitch, since they don’t have time stamps of their own. Anything that looks like a game delay between pitches is thrown out. The average pace is about 21.5 seconds.

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Kicking off projection season, as usual, are the 2011 Bill James Handbook Projections, courtesy of Baseball Info Solutions.

They’re available right now in the player pages!

The leaderboards and team pages now have a bunch of new features!

– There’s a new Dashboard tab which mimics the stats shown the player dashboard area.

– wRC+, tERA, FSR, and TZL (Total Zone w/ Location Data) have been added.

– The Fans Scouting Report has been given its own section.

– WAR data for both batters and pitchers can now be filtered on a monthly basis. This is done by pro-rating UZR and Positional adjustments based on playing time.

– You can now go back as far as 1871 in both the leaderboards and team sections.

Here are some additional notes:

– All positional filtering is done on a qualified player basis. If a player played in 25% or more of his games at a particular position than he’s qualified.

– Reliever/Starter filtering pre-1974 right now will filter only on pure starters/relievers and any dual-role pitchers will be left out. This will be fixed in a future update.

If you notice any problems or spot any bugs, please let us know!

I’m pleased to announce that FanGraphs is now carrying the results of the Fans Scouting Report, conducted each year by Tangotiger. We currently have 2009 and 2010, but plan to eventually get all the years going back to 2003.

Right now it’s available in each of the player pages in both the “Advanced Fielding” section and its own section. It will soon make it’s way to the leaderboards and team pages.

The one thing that you probably need to know is:

FSR – Runs above average for fans scouting report.

Other than that, everything is on a 0 – 100 scale, with 50 being the average.