Swinging Strike Percentage (SwStr%) is now available in all the leaderboards.

We’ve added new PitchFx charts to our game charts. They’re pitch location charts vs right and left handed batters from the catcher’s point of view. These are modeled after much of Dave Allen’s work:

FanGraphs now has a Facebook page where you can easily get a feed of the latest posts on FanGraphs. This will be especially useful for those of you who are Facebook users, but not necessarily Twitter users where we do pretty much the same thing.

A couple months ago we released the “Dashboard”, which gave you quick access to the stats that we thought were some of the most useful. Now you can build your very own!

If you’re logged in and go to the new settings page, you’ll be able to select which stats and the ordering (and separators), you’d like to see first on any of the player pages.

There are also two other options.

– If you don’t like the Dashboard at all, you now have the option to remove it completely.

– You can now hide minor league stats on major league players pages by default.

If you create a custom dashboard, but would like to remove it, just clear all your custom stats selections and it will be gone.

It’s worth noting that you are not limited to the number of stats you’d like to put in your custom dashboard, but space is a bit limited right now and it’s probably best if you keep them around 17 individual stats. Here’s an example of the one I’m currently using:

Please let us know if you encounter any problems (this is still considered a beta product) or if you have any suggestions.

6/3 Update: There was a bug that I accidentally introduced around 10am this morning. Everything should be working again.

Full historical WAR for all position players has been added to the site! It’s available in the career leaderboards and on the individual player pages currently and will work its way to some other sections of the site pretty soon. We’ll do full WAR for pitchers eventually, but right now that’s still only 2002 onward.

The other new feature are the WAR graphs where you can compare up to 4 players at a time in various ways:

Just a quick note that these two graphs in particular were inspired by work done over at Beyond the Box Score.

Some additional notes about our historical WAR:

– We’re using the best fielding metric publicly available at the time, so for anything 2002 onward, we’re using Mitchel Lichtman’s UZR and anything pre-2002, we’re using Sean Smith’s Total Zone. Total Zone prior to 2010 is also available in the fielding section of the site which has replaced Range Factors.

– The batting component is based on wRAA (based off wOBA / linear weights) and uses 5 year regressed park factors going all the way back to 1871.

– Positional adjustments prior to 2000 are based off Sean Smith’s positional adjustments by decade. 2000 onward are based on Tangotiger’s positional adjustments.

– Replacement levels are adjusted slightly by season. They’re all right around 20 runs with the exception of a few years and a couple leagues.

– The run to win converter is also adjusted by season, but it’s generally going to be right around 10.

If you want to know more about how WAR is calculated for position players, read the 7 part series.

Our advertising policy strictly prohibits any sort of non-prompted audio, popups, or takeover ads. Earlier today there was an obnoxious non-prompted audio ad that displayed on the site for which we received some concerned e-mails and tweets.

Our policy when we’re alerted to such an ad, or see one ourselves, is to remove every ad from the site until the offending ad can be tracked down and removed. We deal with a number of different advertising networks, and, while the majority of the time they provide ads that meet our standards, there are some rare instances where this is not the case.

We are heavy users of FanGraphs and it annoys us just as much as it annoys you to see obnoxious ads on the site, and we’re committed to keeping the site free of ads that are overly intrusive.

Ultimate Zone Ratings (UZR) home and away splits are now live in the splits sections for position players! And on the subject, I’ll add a quote from Mitchel Lichtman’s revised UZR primer, which we’ll be posting later today.

…if you still don’t trust a certain player’s UZR because of the park factors issue, you can check out his road numbers. Keep in mind that you will see lots of random differences between some players’ home and road numbers which have nothing to do with park effects – they are simply an artifact of small sample sizes. Remember also that even large sample sizes can have large random fluctuations as well.”

I’d like to share some additional information about the Community Blog approval process. We will be selecting on a daily basis the ones we consider the best to appear in the blog.

The approval process can take up to 48 hours and we will probably not be looking at posts on the weekend. If your post is approved it will then appear in the Community Blog. We may feature exceptionally high quality posts on the homepage.

Below are some of the criteria we will use to decide whether we believe the post will be informative and/or entertaining to our readers.

1. The article is well written and well constructed, with minimal spelling/grammatical errors.

2. There is a clear and interesting point to the article.

3. The article is original and if the article contains stats based analysis, the use of stats is creative and relevant to the point you’re trying to make.

4. The article is factually correct and does not blatantly misuse baseball statistics.

5. All articles submissions should be at least 250 words.

We really appreciate the time and effort that goes into all submissions and if your article is not published and you would like additional information, you can contact us at community@fangraphs.com where we will give you feedback on why your post was not accepted.

Many of you have submitted articles to FanGraphs that we’ve been unable to publish because there just hasn’t been a place for unsolicited article submissions. With the FanGraphs Community Blog, we now have a place where we can accept your original work.

Anyone with a FanGraphs account can now submit an article using our standard WordPress interface. Here are the basic rules:

– Each article is subject to approval. We have no idea what kind of volume we will get on article submissions, but we will do our very best to get to every single article within 24 hours.

– Your submission must be your original work. Do not submit articles you have not written yourself or that have a large amount of material that is not of your own creation.

– Your submission does not need to be unique to FanGraphs. If you have written a piece for your own blog and think it would work particularly well on FanGraphs then you may submit it for approval.

– You may submit a maximum of 2 articles per week. Submitting an unreasonable number of articles will result in having your posting privileges revoked.

Other than that, we’ll see how it goes and adjust the rules accordingly. Once the blog gets some posts in it, we’ll start to further integrating those posts into FanGraphs and give it some additional publicity.

If you already have an account, click here to submit an article: New Post

If you don’t have an account, you’ll need to register for one here: Register

If you have any questions, or issues submitting your posts, please fill out a contact form.

This week there’s been a lot of discussion on The Book Blog about creating a save style metric based on WPA. The end result of the discussion was to create two stats: Shutdowns and Meltdowns.

A Shutdown is when a reliever accumulates greater than or equal to 0.06 WPA in any individual game.

A Meltdown is when a reliever’s WPA is less than or equal to -0.06 in any individual game.

The entire discussion of Shutdowns and Meltdowns was started off by Jeff Zimmerman’s “saves rant” over at Beyond the Box Score and then the creation of the new metric was hashed out on The Book Blog here and here.

The number of Shutdowns are scaled to Saves + Holds, which is where the .06 thresholds originated.

Both these metrics: Shutdowns (SD) and Meltdowns (MD) are available in the Win Probability leaderboards and teams sections and will eventually make it into the player pages. Remember you will either need to click on “All Players” or “Relievers” since starting pitchers are not eligible for Shutdowns or Meltdowns.