Tom Tango has released the official 2009 Marcel the Monkey projections. They’re available here on FanGraphs in both the sortable variety and in all the player pages too!

Here’s exactly what they are:

“[Marcels] is the most basic forecasting system you can have, that uses as little intelligence as possible. So, that’s the allusion to the monkey. It uses 3 years of MLB data, with the most recent data weighted heavier. It regresses towards the mean. And it has an age factor.”

For those of you who missed last week’s post, or have not yet voted, Dave Cameron is up for a $10,000 college scholarship because of the fine work he’s done blogging over at U.S.S. Mariner. He is currently in 2nd place, down by approximately 700 votes, with voting open through Thursday night.

Dave has consistently done exemplary work here at FanGraphs, providing you with what I believe is some of the best baseball analysis on the web. If you’ve read Dave’s work even once this season, or even if you haven’t and just visit FanGraphs for the stats, please go and vote.

It only takes 3 mouse clicks, and I’m certain that if everyone who visits FanGraphs votes, we’ll be able to help award Dave this much deserved scholarship.

I’m doing a preview for an undetermined amount of time (maybe permanent depending on the reception) of the new My Team feature.

There are a few minor changes to the site:

1. You’ll notice there is a login bar right below the navigation bar on the site. If you have already signed up for the forums, there is no need to re-register. Just enter in your forum username and password. If you have not signed up for the forums, you’ll need to register to create your own team. Nothing else has changed. You do not need to register or log in to access any of the other FanGraphs features.

2. Once you log in you’ll notice that you can go to “My Team”, which is essentially a customized leaderboard for only the players you select. There won’t be any players in it, but you can add players from that page. You can also add players from their individual pages by clicking on the “Add Player” button which will appear if you are logged in.

3. You can share your team page with anyone by just giving them the web address. Only you will be able to alter your team page, but no team page can currently be made private. For instance, here’s my fantasy team from last season.

4. This is really just a first step in customization for FanGraphs. The way the system is set up should let us do some pretty cool things in the future.

I think that’s it. If you notice serious errors or minor glitches, please let me know. If you have suggestions, we’re taking those too and we’d really appreciate them.

Update: Things seem to be running smoothly enough that this probably won’t be a preview and I’ll just add features and correct bugs as we go. So feel free to use the new My Team feature to your hearts content. However, it should still be considered in beta.

Every so often, I will check my e-mail and find a hidden gem from our captain, David Appelman. The messages usually discuss any pertinent baseball topics we may have interest in covering, but, every now and then, inform us writers of new statistical updates at the website. This is my favorite type of e-mail, one of which I received yesterday, that almost gave me a sabergasm. See, we have some new stats on this site that are not only incredibly useful, but are incredibly interesting to peruse as well. You can find these new statistics on the individual player pages as well as the leaderboards.

To get the suspense out of the way, the statistics are: First-strike percentage for both batters and pitchers, Plate Discipline stats for pitchers, and Pitch Type stats for batters. The percentage of first strikes tells us, for pitchers, which ones get ahead 0-1 in the count most often; it also counts a ball put in play on the first pitch as a strike. For hitters, we can see which get behind 0-1 the most or least, with plate appearances ending with just one pitch intermingled as well. For instance, did you know that Corey Hart of the Brewers had a 68.9% F-Strike this year? Yeah, over two-thirds of his plate appearances began with him down in the count 0-1, or ended after just one pitch.

On the flipside, Chipper Jones had the lowest F-Strike for a hitter at just 48.3%. Albert Pujols finished at a somewhat distant second with 49.7%. From a pitching standpoint, Barry Zito threw a first-pitch strike just 51.5% of the time, with Edinson Volquez and Oliver Perez finishing close behind. Inversely, Mike Mussina led all of baseball with a 67.6% F-Strike. Close behind him were Ervin Santana, Cliff Lee, Greg Maddux, and Dan Haren, all of which exhibted exemplary control during the 2008 season.

The plate discipline stats for pitchers are not what some may think. No, it isn’t hitting stats for pitchers, explaining how often Joe Blanton swung at pitches out of the zone. Rather, these include the O-Swing, Z-Swing, etc, stats, but for hitters against pitchers. So, if you go to Joe Blanton’s page, and find the plate discipline section, you will be able to see how often hitters swung at his pitches in the zone, out of the zone, how often he threw in the zone, how often did hitters make contact on his pitches, and more along those lines.

This is an amazing addition to the site, and something I will delve into much more next week, but as an appetizer, I will say that Daniel Cabrera, by far had the lowest percentage of swings at pitches outside of the zone. Jake Peavy, however, induced the highest percentage of such swings. In fact, here’s an interesting nugget: Peavy led the league with a 32.4% O-Swing, and threw just 47.6% of his pitches in the zone. Meanwhile, Barry Zito, who had the lowest F-Strike%, threw a league-low 47.2% of his pitches in the zone, but only induced 26% swings on those pitches. Essentially, while both he and Peavy threw the same amount of pitches in and out of the strike zone, Zito could not get as many hitters to swing, which amounts to a large difference in strikeouts and walks.

The other addition is pitch type stats for hitters. Haven’t you ever wondered what percentage of pitches certain hitters see in a given year? I know I have. Countless times this year I wondered what percentage of fastballs Ryan Howard saw, given that he really cannot hit anything else. Well, with the additions here, I know now he saw 51.2% fastballs in 2008, the fourth lowest percentage in the sport. Hunter Pence, at 49.8%, actually saw the lowest percentage, with Dan Uggla, Aubrey Huff, Ryan Howard, and Geovany Soto close behind. Basically, this bottom five consists of sluggers who struggle with breaking pitches, and therefore see a wide array of such pitches.

Click the leaderboard again, to sort by descending order, and we get: Gregor Blanco (70.5%), Jason Kendall (70.0%), Chone Figgins (69.1%), Placido Polanco (68.1%), Willy Taveras (68.0%). Pretty much the opposite group, as these guys are by no means whatsoever power threats, but five hitters who rarely strike out. Moving further, we can also take a look at the average velocities these hitters faced.

Did you know that the AL East had a very high average fastball? It must have, since Kevin Youkilis led the league with a 91.8 mph heater faced, while Manny Ramirez, Alex Rodriguez, Dustin Pedroia, and Jacoby Ellsbury all found themselves in the top five. Reverse the list and we see that Chone Figgins, who saw one of the highest percentages of fastballs, led the league by seeing the slowest average fastball, at just 90.1%. I’m sure myself and my colleagues here will be using these stats much more moving forward, but hopefully this serves as a nice introduction to the new types of information now accessible.

They’re here!

The 2009 Bill James Handbook projections are now available on FanGraphs in the individual player pages. Big thanks to Baseball Info Solutions for letting us run these for the 3rd year in a row! If you want the sortable stats version and are not content with seeing one player at a time, you will have to purchase a copy directly from them.

If you were happy for the election to end so that you could stop having people asking for your vote, I’m sorry, but I’m extending the vote request window.

Over the weekend, I was nominated for a $10,000 college scholarship thanks to the work I’ve done over at USSMariner, and weirdly enough, the winner is chosen by public voting. So, if you’ve enjoyed any of my writing and want to help out, just click the link, vote for David Cameron, and I’ll be one step closer to $10,000.

All your support is greatly appreciated.

The team pages have just been updated to be a lot more useful in my opinion. Instead of being directed directly to the team that won the last World Series, you will initially be directed to the team stats page which has team totals for everything available on the leaderboards.

No longer do you have to wonder which team has been the best in Clutch batting, or which team’s relievers have the best K/BB ratio.

From the team page you can drill down on any particular team you want and get all the stats available in the leaderboard section, including the ability to filter by month and the last 7, 14, 30 days.

Feel free to let me know if you have any suggestions or if anything is broken.

With the Red Sox forcing a game 7 last night with their win against the Tampa Bay Rays, I thought it’d be fun see just how similar this series looks to last year’s ALCS when the Red Sox played the Indians.

A couple years ago I combined all the Win Probability charts of the 2004 ALCS. Here’s what the 2007 and 2008 ALCS look like when superimposed. 2008 is in red and 2007 is in black.

The Rays have thus far had a much better chance at winning the series than the Indians ever had. In the top of the 7th with Rays runners on 1st and 2nd and no outs, they had a 99.3% chance of winning game 5. The Indians in 2007 had, at their best, a 57.9% chance of winning game 5, and never had better than a 50% chance to win game 6 and game 7.

When compared to the 2004 ALCS, the Yankees at one point had an 83.8% chance of clinching in game 4, and then an 87.8% chance of clinching in game 5.

Update: Just a reminder that we’re still accepting applications. If you plan on submitting an application, please do so by Friday.

FanGraphs is currently looking to hire Fantasy Baseball writers for a soon to be released fantasy baseball blog. These will all be paid, part-time positions with an expectation of 7-15 posts a week.

Please consider the following questions before applying:
– Can you write in a clear and concise manner and self-edit your work?
– Are you extremely familiar with the stats and graphs available on FanGraphs?
– Do you have strong analytical skills?
– Are you available to take on a consistent workload of 7 – 15 posts a week?

In your application please include writing samples, links to current blogs, fantasy baseball experience, or anything else you feel would be useful in evaluating your qualifications.

If you have applied for a position at FanGraphs in the past, please feel free to apply again. Send all applications to david@fangraphs.com with the heading Fantasy Application 08.

Good news! Win Probability and Run Expectancy stats have all been park adjusted for 2008. It looks like the run environment during the season was set a little too high, so you’ll notice batter stats are slightly higher, while pitcher stats are a bit lower. Other than that, not much changed. Manny Ramirez is still #1 in WPA for batters and Cliff Lee is still #1 for pitchers.