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.

FanGraphs currently has two part-time fantasy blogging positions open for the RotoGraphs fantasy blog. These are both paid blogging positions.

Ask yourself the following questions before you apply:
– Are you able to write clear and concise fantasy oriented analysis using the stats available on FanGraphs?
– Are you available and able to make a real commitment to write 5-15 short posts a week?
– Can you come up with your own topic ideas and are you able to edit your own posts?

Please send all applications to david@fangraphs.com. Please include anything you think would be helpful including writing samples, links to previous work, a resume, etc…

In an attempt to make the site a little easier to use for newcomers or really just anyone, I’ve implemented a quick glossary in the player pages.

Just click on the quick glossary button in any section on the player pages and you’ll get a quick overview of all the stats in that section. This will probably make its way into the leaderboards too.

Someday we’ll get around to updating the actual glossary….

We’ve put up some PitchFx data on the site under a special PitchFx section for each pitcher. This is FanGraphs first real foray into PitchFx, so we’ll definitely be taking suggestions on this section and we’ll do our best to implement the ones we think make sense. We’d really like to make our PitchFx section as useful as possible.

A couple things to make note of:

-The averages are based on handedness. This was necessary for the horizontal and vertical movement averages.
-“FA” or fastball includes both the FF pitch type classification and the FA classification to keep things relatively steady from year to year.
-“FT” or 2 seam fastball includes both the SI and FT classifications for the same reasons.