I’ve made some changes to the leaderboards. You can no longer display all the rows, but there is a handy export button which will let you export all the rows into either excel or a csv file. If this is a real issue for you, let me know, but I have my reasons for removing the show all rows feature. I’m hoping the export option makes this a non-issue.

I’ve also added a month select feature which will let you filter for any particular month, including the last 7 days, last 14 days, and last 30 days. Now you can know that for the last 7 days, Jay Bruce leads the majors with a 1.06 WPA.

There’s also been some minor changes to the game log pages. I’ve repeated the headers so you can figure out what each column is further down the table. This has always been an issue for me and hopefully the game logs are now considerably more readable. I’ve also added the same export options that are available in the leaderboards.

For those of you who don’t browse our post archives from many years ago, you may be interested in knowing that we have a tool where you can enter the text of your article and it will put html tags around the player names linking them back to FanGraphs.

It’s mainly use it internally, but there are some sites such as Baseball Analysts that have been using it on a regular basis for years now.

I made a few updates to the Linkifyer to make it work a little better. It’s not perfect, but it will now link Minor League players in addition to Major League players.

Just copy and paste your article text in the text box, hit the “Link Players Now” button and presto! You now have linked players.

Couple quick updates to the stats pages. Each section now has a header and each section is now linkable. So if you’d like to send someone to the Plate Discipline stats or the Pitch Type stats, you no longer need to tell them to scroll to the bottom of the page. Just click on the header you’d like to link to get get the appropriate link.

And if things look a little weird, just reload the page by hitting F5 or the reload button on your browser.

I’ve updated player searching. I think it works a lot better now and hopefully you will too. Minor league and major league players now appear on one page and the search algorithm is now much better at picking up misspelled player names and inexact matches.

I just wanted to point out a couple of new things on FanGraphs:

– In the leaderboard section you can now filter the pitch type by NL/AL and Starters/Relievers. This can be done for the new plate discipline stats for batters and the pitch type data for pitchers.

– The game graphs now have a sidebar with all of the games for that day. Hopefully this will make for easier navigation. There are also two new items in the sidebar: aLI and aWE. These stand for Average Leverage Index and Average Win Expectancy over the course of the entire game. The higher the aLI, the more “exciting” the game was, and the closer the aWE is to .5, the “closer” the game was (throughout the entire game).

– The scoreboard, with all the game graphs on it for one day should load much much faster. Hurray for caching!

That’s all I can think of that’s really new, except for a few changes on the homepage, but you should expect to see a few more seasons of Win Probability rolled out later this week.

The site has been updated with Win Probability stats for 1981 – 1988.

Please make note of Dwight Gooden’s 1985 season when he had a WPA of 9.94. The only player to have a higher WPA in the years that WPA has been run for is Barry Bonds. Bonds bested him in 2002 and 2004, but that’s it. His BRAA that season was 75, which is 10 runs better than any other pitcher in a single season for all WPA years calculated so far.

The next best player that season in terms of WPA was Eddie Murray who had 6.75 wins, more than 3 wins less than Gooden. And while Gooden unanimously won the Cy Young award that year, he was without a doubt the MVP that season too.

Finding a designated hitter is very easy. The skills required to be a successful DH aren’t rare, and there are an abundance of guys with offensive abilities and defensive problems that a team can generally count on getting quality production from the designated hitter spot. Unless, of course, that team is the Seattle Mariners, who simply can’t figure out how to find a guy who can hit and do nothing else. So far, in 2008, their DHs have combined to hit .208/.268/.308, a pathetic .575 OPS that translates into -0.71 WPA/LI. That’s brutal. For comparison, Arizona Diamondbacks pitchers are hitting .242/.292/.333 (thank you, Micah Owings).

The main culprit has been Jose Vidro, whose collapse was the easiest thing to see coming this side of a neon freight train. However, the Mariners haven’t gotten any improvement from switching to Jeff Clement a week ago, as he has struggled to adjust to major league pitching since coming up from the PCL. His problems ran so deep that the team used Willie Bloomquist to pinch hit for Clement in the 9th inning of last night’s game. Willie Bloomquist!

Greg Norton had 11 successful at-bats before he was discarded as a less useful part than Miguel Cairo, a decision so unfathomable that I don’t even know which wall to begin banging my head on.

The Mariners offense has been horrendous the last few weeks, and the lack of production from their DHs is one of the main reasons why. When you have a group of players whose entire value is derived from their offense and they’re getting outhit by another team’s starting pitchers, you’re in trouble. And the Mariners are certainly in trouble.

All win probability stats, game graphs, and play-by-play are now available for the years 1974 through 1980.

The most productive batter in terms of WPA over those 7 years was Rod Carew with 28.9 wins, closely followed by Mike Schmidt with 28.6 wins. Jim Palmer led all pitchers with 23.2 wins, with closer Goose Gossage not far behind with 22.1 wins.

I’m hoping to have 1981 – 2001 available soon.

On a side note: FIP is now correclty adjusted by year and FIP career totals are also weighted appropriately.

All the stats made available yesterday in the player pages are now on the leaderboards.

Interesting to see the afore mentioned Nick Johnson with the second best O-Swing% (percent of pitches swung at outside the strike zone) this season. He truly does have great plate discipline.

About two years ago I attempted to delve further into plate discipline with two articles: Dissecting Plate Discipline Part 1, Part 2.

And then a year later I took an additional look at plate discipline: More on Plate Discipline

All batters now have plate discipline stats available dating back to 2005. Here’s what they are:

• O-Swing%: The percentage of pitches a batter swings at outside the strike zone.
• Z-Swing%: The percentage of pitches a batter swings at inside the strike zone.
• Swing%: The overall percentage of pitches a batter swings at.
• O-Contact%: The percentage of pitches a batter makes contact with outside the strike zone when swinging the bat.
• Z-Contact%: The percentage of pitches a batter makes contact with inside the strike zone when swinging the bat.
• Contact%: The overall percentage of a batter makes contact with when swinging the bat.
• Zone%: The overall percentage of pitches a batter sees inside the strike zone.

What you’ll want to know is the major league averages for each stat:

Season O-Swing Z-Swing  Swing  O-Contact Z-Contact Contact   Zone
2005     20.3%   68.0%  46.0%      51.8%     88.3%   80.8%  53.8%
2006     23.5%   66.6%  46.1%      57.4%     88.5%   81.0%  52.6%
2007     25.0%   66.6%  45.9%      60.8%     88.2%   80.8%  50.3%

All the location data is from Baseball Info Solutions and you can find all these stats in the player pages at the very bottom: Vladimir Guerrero