I was feeling the player comments was a bit of a false start, so in an effort to try out some new features, it’s been replaced by the Player Links section, which I think could be particularly useful for both our readers and writers.

For any player you can enter in a link to a particular article that is relevant to that player along with a brief description of the article or short quote from the article. Feel free to submit links to your own work as well as links to whatever news, analysis, or commentary you feel would be useful to FanGraphs visitors for that particular player.

You may have noticed that the look of FanGraphs has changed slightly. It is now 200 pixels wider, in some places. The homepage for instance takes advantage of this space, while most pages don’t quite take advantage of the space yet.

I’ll be working hard to fill in this space with hopefully useful sidebar boxes that give extra information about the player. In some spots, the data tables with be widened instead to allow for more stats and easier viewing. If you have any ideas for what you’d like to see in that space, now is the time to speak up.

However, it’d be disingenuous of me to say that the only reason I’ve widened the page is to just add more content. I’ve been reluctant to put real ads up on the site for some time, but unfortunately there will have to be some advertisements to help pay for the site’s expenses.

With that said, I’m not going to clutter up the entire page with ads or anything and will attempt to keep them to a minimum with tasteful placement that doesn’t disrupt any of the site’s content.

All the UZR stats on the site have been updated thanks to Mitchel Lichtman’s outfield arm and double play ratings!

– UZR now inlcudes outfield ARM runs and Double Play runs.
– ARM and DPR (Double Play runs) are broken out separately in the fielding sections.
– All player Win Values have been updated to include these additions.
– There have also been some slight changes to UZR that adjust for how fielder’s choice plays were being calculated.

The changes are available in all sections of the site including the player pages, leaderboards, team pages and my team pages.

For the sake of transparency, there was a bug on the team totals page for pitchers values only where some pitchers who switched teams mid-season were not being included in the team totals.

This did not effect any of the individual pitcher values, only the team totals.

Update: There’s been one additional change made where relievers are now not as highly influenced by leveraged. This change was made to properly align positional player win values with pitcher win values. Only pitchers who pitched in extremely low leverage, or extremely high leverage situations will be effected, and at most by about 1 win.

The Oliver projection system for batters is now available in the player pages, projections pages, and you can get a customized player list using the my projections feature.

Huge thanks to Brian Cartwright for allowing us to use his projections and you can read all about them at Statistically Speaking.

Pitcher Win Values are now available in the leaderboards, team pages, and the MyTeam section.

Two fun facts:

After the park, league and replacement adjustments for 2008, it looks like Roy Halladay was ever so slightly more valuable than C.C. Sabathia by our calculations. Though for all practical purposes they were equally valuable. Neither of them the Cy Young award, though Sabathia did change leagues making it particularly difficult for him to win. (C.C Sabathia 7.68 wins vs. Roy Halladay 7.71 wins)

Remember when Eric Seidman wrote about how awful Brandon Backe was and how he couldn’t understand why he was still allowed to pitch in the majors? Well, of all the qualified starting pitchers in 2008, Backe finished dead last in wins, with -0.8 of them.

I’ve made a few improvements to the win values section, so the numbers across the board will all be slightly different.

The main change is a switch to different park factors. We’re now using the exact same methodology as Patriot’s park factors. This will effect the pitching win values more than the hitting win values.

The other change is with the dynamic runs to wins converter in the pitching win values. It’s now weighted properly by innings pitched per game so it’s no longer a straight average of league runs per game and a player’s FIP, converted to wins.

Pitching Win Values (wins above replacement) are now available in the player pages. Huge thanks to Dave Cameron and Tangotiger for making the calculations pretty simple to implement.

The categories are as follows:

Starting – Runs above replacement as a starting pitcher.
Start-IP – Innings pitched as a starter.
Relieving – Runs above replacement as a reliever.
Relief-IP – Innings pitched as a reliever.
Value Runs – Starting + Relieving
Value Wins – Value Runs converted to wins.
Dollars – Value Wins converted to free agent dollars.
Salary – What the player actually earned.

Some things you should know is that these are all park and league adjusted, the calculations are based off FIP (using RA and not ERA), and the runs to wins conversion is different for each player since pitchers have a huge hand in creating their own run environment.

This will be in the leaderboards and team pages soon enough and Dave Cameron will dive into the real details later on.

The CHONE Projections are now up in the player pages, the projections section, and you can get a customized player list of projections using the MyTeam feature.

Huge thanks to Sean Smith for allowing us to post the projections again this year and don’t forget to check out baseballprojection.com to see any player’s projection in more detail.

I just finished a fairly large minor league stats update. A number of standard statistics have been added such as IBB, SF, SH, etc… so any stats that should have included those now actually do include them. This will mainly effect things like all the wOBA stats.

Things you can look forward to in the coming months and next season are minor league game logs, improved leaderboards, batted ball data (LD/FB/GB), and the addition of the Dominican, Venezuelan and Mexican leagues.

All of the minor league player-ids have also been updated, but you shouldn’t notice anything different on your end. If you do see any problems please let me know.