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.

The ZiPS in-season projections have just gone live on the site and all the pre-season projections are now hidden by default. You can still see the pre-season projections by clicking on the “Show Projections” button right below each section’s heading.

There are two separate in-season ZiPS projections:

RoS = Rest of Season, or what a player will do for the remainder of the season.
Update = An updated full season projection for the player in question.

Huge thanks to Dan Szymborski of Baseball Think Factory for allowing us to use these again this season!

It’s come to my attention that the 2010 Contact% and Swinging Strike % numbers looked a bit off. The 4 stats impacted (Z-Contact%, O-Contact%, Contact%, and SwStr%), will be corrected in tonight’s data load are now fixed.

I’m pleased to announce FanGraphs’ newest partner: SBNation! We’ll be highlighting their awesome content right here on the FanGraphs player pages, in the form of player specific related content, and on the home page and blogs.

And from SBNation.com you’ll be just a click away from FanGraphs stats and articles on their player pages and blogs.

We think this cross-integration of our content will help both FanGraphs readers and SBNation readers be even more informed as baseball fans!

It’s always a mystery to me how long it’s going to take to get the site in a state where it can load the next year’s stats. Fortunately, everything appears to be working (after a hiccup that caused all the player pages to error out) and all one game of 2010 stats have been loaded successfully! Remember that pitch type stats usually run one day behind and UZR is updated every Sunday.

Stats are typically updated nightly around 4am Eastern Time.

Tomorrow night I’ll switch over all the default views to 2010 stats.

After each and every game this season, you’ll have the opportunity to vote for the players of the game:

You’ll be able to award 3, 2, and 1 stars (3 stars being the best) to whichever players you think are most deserving and then we’ll tally the votes in real time. The ballot will open as soon as the game is “Final” and it will remain open for the following day as well, but then it will be closed permanently.

After each week we’ll tally up the votes and award a FanGraphs fan chosen player of the week, month, and season.

This is a collaborative project with Tangotiger and insidethebook.com.

Check out our live win probability pages as soon as the game ends to vote!

In conjunction with Tangotiger and insidethebook.com, we’ll be hosting the results of the Projection Challenge this year, but the great news is that you’ll be able to (optionally) see how your individual fan projections rank against the rest of the field!

If you want to participate, you have one week left to fill out your fan projections with as many players as you want. The cutoff time to enter projections will be Sunday the 4th at 6pm Eastern Time.

We hope to award prizes to the top 10 FAN Projectionists and we’ll have more details on that later.