Good news everyone!

Minor league stats are updated for 2010 and will continue to be updated throughout whatever’s left of the season. We also have added the 2010 Mexican League, Venezuelan Summer League, and Dominican Summer League and plan to have the the winter leagues as well.

There’s still a little bit of cleanup that needs to be done in terms of player matching (Strasburg for instance has 2 pages still), but that should be completed this weekend.

For those of you who are still making up your minds about whether or not to come to the very first FanGraphs live event in NYC this Saturday, August 7th at 9am, here are the full details:

Location: Florence Gould Hall (55 East 59th Street)

Tickets: $15 online (+$1.36 surcharge). $20 cash only at the door.

NY Baseball (9:00am – 9:40am)

Joe Pawlikowski, Mike Axisa, Benjamin Kabak (All RiverAveBlues.com), Matthew Cerrone (MetsBlog.com), and Mark Simon (ESPN) will be discussing all things baseball in NY. Moderated by Carson Cistulli.

Baseball Media (9:45am – 10:30am)

Jonah Keri (Bloomberg Sports) will host a panel comprised of Will Leitch (Deadspin, New York Magazine), Michael Silverman (Boston Herald), Matthew Cerrone (MetsBlog.com), Alex Speier (WEEI.com), and David Biderman (WSJ) to discuss how baseball media coverage has changed in recent years and will continue to evolve.

Baseball Stats (10:40am – 11:15am)

Jon Sciambi (ESPN), Mitchel Lichtman, Sky Kalkman (Beyond the Boxscore), Dave Cameron, and David Appelman will discuss where advanced baseball stats are right now and where they’ll be headed. Moderated by Carson Cistulli.

Bloomberg Sports Presentation (11:20 – 11:35)

Bloomberg Sports will make a presentation of a brand new product.

FanGraphs Q&A (11:40 – End)

Dave Cameron, Carson Cistulli, Bryan Smith, Joe Pawlikowski, Mike Axisa, and David Appelman will take questions until we’re officially kicked out (a little after 12:00).

Afterparty (3:30pm – Game Over)

Additionally, we’re going to host a game-watching party for attendees to gather at a local watering hole and view that afternoon’s Boston-New York match-up together. Those who make it to the event will be invited to join us for several more hours of fun later in the afternoon. Details and directions will be given at the event.

A couple weeks ago Sean Smith released a revamped Total Zone system which included Gameday location data. You can read all about it on baseballprojection.com.

On FanGraphs you can now find the new Total Zone numbers for the 2005-2009 season in the player pages under the heading TZL in the Advanced Fielding sections. Here’s what Carl Crawford’s numbers look like:

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.”