Like pretty much every blog out there, we’ve decided to make it easy for you to share an article on FanGraphs. I’m sure a lot of you noticed this already, but figured it was worth pointing out in case you missed it. Just hover over the share button to easily send the article to wherever you like:

Unfortunately, I was not well enough prepared for the trade deadline this season and the server FanGraphs is running on couldn’t quite take the traffic load. Sometime tonight FanGraphs will be down for approximately 30 minutes for server upgrades which will hopefully allow for a much smoother running FanGraphs. Thanks for your patience!

Update #2 – We are no longer accepting applications for these positions. Thank you for your interest and if you weren’t able to apply, but would have liked to, be sure to keep on the lookout for additional openings.

FanGraphs has openings for three part time research assistants. The job entails mainly research and data entry.

Here are some qualifications we’re looking for:

– experience using Microsoft Excel
– solid research skills and a strong attention to detail
– able to contribute about 5 hours per week

Please send all applications to david@fangraphs.com.

Update: Due to the tremendous amount of interest in these positions, the cutoff for applications will be at 6pm EST today.

Since it’s draft day and all, I thought it’d be appropriate to upgrade our minor league offerings so you can keep better track of how your favorite prospects are coming along.

Minor league players now have game logs. Now you can see just how many strikeouts Tommy Hanson had in each game, opposed to just knowing he struck out 90 batters in 66 innings while in AAA.

All the minor league game logs are interspersed in chronological order giving you a very complete view of how a pitcher did that year, even if he bounced around from the majors to the minors.

A couple weeks ago we debuted the Pitch Type Values for pitchers in the player pages allowing you to see how effective a particular pitch has been for any pitcher over the past 7 years.

We’ve now updated the player pages for batters so you can also see how well they fare against each particular pitch. In addition, this information is now available in sortable form in the leaderboards, team pages, and my team sections.

We had a technical issue calculating the in-season ZiPS projections this morning and many of you noticed that they mysteriously disappeared from the player pages.

The problem has been fixed and the updated projections are now back where they should be. Thanks for your patience.

You may have noticed a new section in the player pages called “Pitch Type Linear Weights”.

First of all a huge thanks goes out to Dave Allen and his tremendous work over at baseballanalysts.com. With his help, we’ve implemented his linear weights by pitch framework using the Baseball Info Solutions pitch type data.

What this section does is it uses linear weights by count and by event and breaks it down by each pitch type so you can see in runs the actual effectiveness of each pitch.

There are two stats for each pitch type. The first one is preceded by a “w” and this is the cumulative runs above average for a particular pitch type. Then there are the statistics trailed by “/C” which denotes runs above average per 100 pitches of that type.

This is kind of a first stab at the data and the weights we’re using are per an actual event, so singles, doubles, triples, etc… are weighted properly using data from 2005-2008. Behind the scenes we’re also calculating the data by batted ball type, so there’s always the possibility of displaying a “defense neutral” runs above average by pitch type as well.

Right now we’re only showing this in the pitcher’s stats pages and for the Baseball Info Solutions data. I expect over the next month that we’ll roll this out in the PitchFx sections and the leaderboards and maybe even for Plate Discipline stats.

On Sunday we added the in-season ZiPS projections to the player pages. Now they’re available in the projections section in the usual sortable format and also the my projections section if you’d like to customize your player list.

Once again ZiPS (RoS) is what a player is projected to do in the remaining part of the season while ZiPS (Update) is the player’s projected final season total.

Daily updated in season projections of the ZiPS variety are now available in all the player pages!

There are two lines, the RoS line which is what a player is projected to do in only the remaining part of the season and then the Total line which is what a player’s total season stats are projected to be at the end of the season.

All the credit goes to Dan Szymborski of Baseball Think Factory for letting me implement his projection system! And a hat-tip to Dave Cameron for pointing me in the direction of his in-season projection tool! If you want to mess around with in season projections yourself, you should download his spreadsheet here: 2009 ZiPS In-Season Projection Tool

In other news, we’ve hidden all the pre-season projections by default but you can still click on the show projection button to check them out. If they’re not hidden by default, just hit the refresh button on your browser or hit F5.

We’ve added Bill James’ Speed Score to the player pages, leaderboards, and team pages.

We’re using the 4 component version, which is an average of Stolen Base Percentage, Frequency of Stolen Base Attempts, Percentage of Triples, and Runs Scored Percentage.