Tangotiger just released the 2011 Marcel Projections. They’re also up and running on the FanGraphs player pages and in our sortable projection section too!

At FanGraphs we’re big fans of the heat map. And now customizable heat maps are now available in the pitchf/x sections for all pitchers. Much thanks to Dave Allen for helping me out!

The thing about heat maps is that one size does not always fit all. Depending on the density of pitches and how many pitches are thrown, it’s not always a clear cut case how to display the data. Sometimes you want the points bigger, sometimes you want the “intensity” of each point to be more and sometimes you really want a different color scheme. For instance here’s the same chart, but with the settings changed.

And here is a third chart, with the settings changed one more time, where the points are made smaller but very intense in monochrome.

There’s a lot to play around with here and a lot of options to try and get the best picture possible.

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!