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.

This has been FanGraphs’ 3rd full year in production and I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge all the hard working people that make FanGraphs possible:

Our Writers – Dave Cameron, Eric Seidman, Marc Hulet, Matthew Carruth, R.J. Anderson, David Golebiewski, Peter Bendix, and Brian Joura have become in my opinion one of the best writing teams in the business.

Tom Tango – The creator and inspiration behind many of the stats on FanGraphs including, but not limited to wOBA and everything Win Probability. His support of FanGraphs has been invaluable.

Mitchel Lichtman – Who graciously provides us with UZR fielding model to bring you the most advanced fielding metrics possible.

Our Projection Providers – Sean Smith (CHONE), Dan Szymborski (ZiPS), Baseball Info Solutions (Bill James), Tom Tango (Marcels), and Jeff Sackman (MINER) for allowing us to display their innovative projection systems.

Steve Moyer and Damon Lichtenwalner – Our go-to stats providers at Baseball Info Solutions are continually working to provide us with the best and most accurate data in the business.

Our Supporters – Anyone who has ever linked to a story or player on FanGraphs this past year, we could not continue to exist without your support and I’m grateful you feel our content is worth informing your readers about.

Our Readers and Visitors – In the past year you have turned the site into not just a destination for baseball stats, but a growing baseball community. It is you who inspire us with your contributions and visits to continue to try and make FanGraphs the best it can possibility be.

Happy New Year!

There’s a new section in the batting player pages which does the job of calculating a player’s runs over replacement and wins over replacement. Major thanks goes to Dave Cameron, Sean Smith, and Tangotiger for instructing me on the best way to do this.

Under each “Value” section you’ll find:

Batting – wRAA (Runs Above Average) with a park adjustment.
Fielding – The sum of a player’s UZR.
Replacement – The replacement level adjustment set at 20 Runs / 600 PA.
Positional – The positional adjustment set using Tangotiger’s values (see this link)
Value Runs – The sum of Batting, Fielding, Replacement, and Positional.
Value Wins – Value Runs converted to a wins scale.
Dollars – Value Wins converted to the following dollar scale:

2002 – $2.6m / win
2003 – $2.8m / win
2004 – $3.1m / win
2005 – $3.4m / win
2006 – $3.7m / win
2007 – $4.1m / win
2008 – $4.5m / win

This will all eventually be in the leaderboards and team pages, probably later this week.

We will occasionally be making some updates to the UZR data on FanGraphs over the next couple months thanks to some improvements in methodology that Mitchel Lichtman (mgl) has been working on!

While there will be no drastic changes in the UZR data, just wanted to make it clear to everyone that the numbers won’t be completely finalized until just before the start of next season.

We will of course keep you informed when the updates do occur.

There’s been a bunch of requests for a Firefox search plugin so here it is!

FanGraphs Search Plugin for Firefox and IE7

Just go to the link, click on “FanGraphs Player Search” and you’ll now have an option in your search box to search for FanGraphs players right in your browser.

Another useful tool for writers that I haven’t mentioned in a while and incidentally has no link anywhere on the site is the FanGraphs Player Linker. Just copy and paste the text of your post into the linker, hit the “Link Players Now!” button, and all player names will be linked. Players with the same name won’t link but other than that it will link both major and minor league players.

Tonight we’ve completed the phasing out of Runs Created (RC) and Runs Created per 27 Outs (RC/27). In their place you will find two run stats based off wOBA, which is a sounder metric than the previously used Runs Created.

Big thanks to Tangotiger for both creating the stats and walking me through how to calculate them correctly!

wRC – This is total runs created based of wOBA. It is calculated as (((wOBA – lgwOBA) / wOBAScale) + (lgR/PA)) * PA

wRAA – This is the number of runs above average based off wOBA. It is calculated as (wOBA – lgwOBA) / wOBAScale * PA

wOBAScale is typically around 1.15, but changes slightly from year to year depending on the weights used in wOBA.

Also, the previously named BRAA has been renamed to RE24 to clarify that it is based off the 24 base/out states.

I’m pleased to announce that UZR (ultimate zone ratings) stats are now available on FanGraphs!

This would of course not be possible without MGL (Mitchel Lichtman), and I’m extremely grateful that he allowed us to use his fielding model. He’s put in a tremendous amount of work getting the stats ready for use on FanGraphs and I really can’t thank him enough.

Unlike other versions of UZR, the ones that appear on FanGraphs use Baseball Info Solutions location data instead of STATS location data. Also, this UZR data does not currently include outfield arms and double plays are treated as regular outs. Here are the definitions for all the UZR stats available:

DG (defensive games): The number of outs made by an average fielder at his position given the exact distribution of balls in play for that player divided by the number of outs an average player at that position makes per game.

exO (expected outs): The number of outs plus reached base errors that would be made by an average fielder given the distribution of balls in play while that fielder was on the field.

RngR (range runs): The number of runs above or below average a fielder is, determined by how the fielder is able to get to balls hit in his vicinity.

ErrR (error runs): The number of runs above or below average a fielder is, determined by the number of errors he makes as compared to an average fielder at that position given the same distribution of balls in play.

UZR (ultimate zone rating): The number of runs above or below average a fielder is in both range runs and error runs combined.

UZR/150 (ultimate zone rate per 150 games): The number of runs above or below average a fielder is, per 150 defensive games.

The UZR stats can be found in the fielding section on the player pages or in the fielding section on the leaderboards. Later this week I’ll have them integrated into the team sections. Additionally, the plan is to update these stats at least weekly during the 2009 season.

Update: The team pages now have fielding data too!