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.

For pitchers there’s a new table in the splits section, Pitch Types, which shows the percentage of pitches each pitcher throws on any particular count. Here’s what the MLB averages looked like in 2009:

As you might have suspected, as the count gets more in favor of the pitcher, out come the breaking pitches. And typically, the more behind the pitcher gets in the count, the more fastballs are thrown.

Just some quick notes on the 2010 pitchf/x data:

– There appears to be some new pitch type categorizations that were breaking some pitchf/x pages. There is EP (Eephus Pitch), SC (Screwball), KC (Knuckle Curve) and FO (Forkball).

– SC and FO I have temporarily lumped into FT (Two-Seam Fastball). I’ve been explained that screwballs (and possibly forkballs) are not really two seam fastballs, but there have been a total of 19 screwballs thrown this year, 18 of them by Daniel Ray Herrera and then the other one was thrown by Dallas Braden. There have been 12 Forkballs thrown, 8 by Livan Hernandez and 4 by Kenshin Kawakami. Overall, these two pitches didn’t seem to warrant their own category, but I can be convinced otherwise.

– Eephus pitches (EP) I have lumped into the UN (Unknown) category. Vicente Padilla has thrown all 16 of them.

The first UZR updates of the 2010 season are in, and from here on out they’ll be updated every Sunday night.

There have been a few improvements made to UZR this year, which will also be reflected in prior year’s UZR data. The changes do impact a few players, but for the most part, each player’s UZR has remained unchanged or is within a couple runs of what a player was rated before the improvements. Mitchel Lichtman, the man behind UZR, outlines the changes below:

Park factors have been improved, especially for “quirky parks and portions of parks,” such as LF and CF at Fenway, LF in Houston, RF in the Metrodome, and the entire OF in Coors Field. Of course, park factors in general are updated every year, as we get more data in each park, and as new parks come into existence and old parks make material (to fielding) changes.

In the forthcoming UZR splits section, we will also be presenting UZR home and road splits, as a sanity check for those of you who are skeptical of park factors. Please keep in mind that regardless of the quality of the park adjustments, there can and will be substantial random fluctuations in the difference between home and away UZRs and it is best to evaluate a fielder based on as much data as possible (e.g., using home and road stats combined), as we do with most metrics and statistics.

Adjustments have been added to account for the power of the batter as a proxy for outfielder positioning, so that, for example, if an outfielder happened to have “faced” a disproportionate percentage of batters with less than or more than average power, the UZR calculations will make the appropriate adjustments (as best as it can). Obviously, these kinds of adjustments are more important for smaller samples of data than for larger samples, since, in larger samples, these kinds of anomalies (in terms of opponents faced) tend to “even out.”

For infielders, similar adjustments are made for the speed of the batter, as a proxy for infielder positioning and how quickly the infielders have to field and release the ball, as well as the speed of the throw.

When a “shift” is on in the infield, according to the BIS stringers, if the play was affected by the shift, the UZR engine ignores the play. As well, if an air ball hits the outfield wall and in the judgment of the BIS stringers, no outfielder could have caught the ball, the play is similarly ignored.

Also keep in mind that UZR does not include first basemen “scoops” or the ability of the first baseman to influence hits and errors caused by errant throws from the other infielders. According to my (MGL) research, yearly “scoops” numbers are generally in the 1-4 run range, which means that the true talent range of most first basemen with respect to “scoops” is probably in the plus or minus 2 runs per year range – i.e., not much.

I’m pleased to announce that Dave Cameron will be joining FanGraphs full time. Dave will continue to be the managing editor of FanGraphs and will have his duties expanded to other areas of the business.

Dave has played a pivotal role in the growth of FanGraphs since joining in early 2008. It’s very exciting to be able to bring Dave onboard in a larger capacity where he’ll be able to devote even more of his time to all things baseball, in addition to working on new and exciting FanGraphs projects.