Just like last year, I’m making a post for the 2008 All-Star game that includes the Win Probability graph and stats since it’s about to go poof from the site.

A couple weeks ago Retrosheet released its 1999 dataset, and now it’s available in the FanGraphs variety.

We now have full win probability statistics for 1974 – 2008.

One of the best parts of this site is the accessibility of David Appelman and his willingness to improve and/or update the site to feature more statistics and new parameters for those numbers. The newest addition to the Fangraphs statistical team is calendar year rankings. By going to the leaders page you can now sort not only by month or last 7/14/30 days, but also by the last 1, 2, or 3 calendar years.

For instance, did you know that Ryan Howard, with 145 home runs, has the most in the last three calendar years? Or that Alex Rodriguez ranks second, with 131, fourteen less than Howard?

How about the best and worst WPA counts for hitters in this same span?

BEST
1) Albert Pujols, 18.68
2) Lance Berkman, 17.49
3) David Ortiz, 17.29
4) Vladimir Guerrero, 12.57
5) Ryan Howard, 11.88

WORST
5) Jose Lopez, -3.59
4) Yuniesky Betancourt, -3.73
3) Jack Wilson, -3.86
2) Brandon Inge, -4.24
1) Ivan Rodriguez, -4.93

Hmm. Of the worst five contributors over the last three calendar, two are from the Tigers and two are from the Mariners. In terms of context-neutral wins (WPA/LI), Pujols and Berkman switch places; Berkman’s 17.34 comes in ahead of Pujols’s 16.69.

How about starting pitchers and WPA?

BEST
1) C.C. Sabathia, 9.06
2) Johan Santana, 8.92
3) Roy Halladay, 8.89
4) Brandon Webb, 8.67
5) John Smoltz, 7.91

WORST
5) Dave Bush, -1.94
4) Carlos Silva, -2.79
3) Livan Hernandez, -3.46
2) Jason Marquis, -3.64
1) Matt Morris, -7.83

Wow. Numbers 2 and 3 combine for -7.10 and Morris still comes in 7/10 of a win worse than them. In terms of WPA/LI, Johan reclaims his spot atop the throne with a 10.77, a full 1.60 wins ahead of second-place Brandon Webb’s 9.17. Santana also has the best K/BB (4.45) in this span, as well as the highest LOB% at 78.7%.

It has been reiterated recently that instead of using current seasonal statistics to evaluate players it would be much more accurate to use a rolling projection. While these calendar statistics do not necessarily weight the past any differently they do allow us to see which players have been good enough recently so as to trounce atypical poor early performance.

FanGraphs now has Win Probability statistics for 1974 onward, with the exception of 1999. They are also now park adjusted with the exception of this current year. I’m working on that.

Roger Clemens leads all pitchers in WPA with 75 wins. Greg Maddux is second with 55 wins.

Barry Bonds leads all batters in WPA with 124 wins. The next best batter is Rickey Henderson with 67 wins.

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.