Chase Utley was hit by three pitches in today’s game to tie a Major League record. Oliver Perez hit him twice and then Scott Schoeneweis decided that twice wasn’t enough and hit him again! Utley was actually hit a fourth time if you count Carlos Delgado’s errant throw which nailed him right in the back.

The last player to get hit three times was Nomar Garciappara on July 3rd, 2006.

Johnny Cueto made his second big league start and struck out 8 with no walks in 6.1 innings of work. He gave up 5 hits and 1 home run in what turned out to be a no-decision instead of a loss thanks to….

Eric Gagne! The 2003 Cy Young award winner blew his second save of the season by giving up a solo shot to Corey Patterson. Gagne has now allowed 2 home runs in 3 innings of work. His fastball velocity appears to be at 88.5mph, which is down 4 from last year’s 92.3mph. It may be is just a sample size issue and considering the Brewers other options, I think it’d be wise to give Gagne a bit of breathing room.

Mark Reynolds hit his MLB leading 5th home run tonight and he’s making a strong case for his Reynolds being Reynolds approach at the plate. Apparently his hitting coach believes he’s been chasing pitches outside the strike zone considerably less. His hitting coach is indeed correct since the data shows that he’s cut down on swinging at pitches outside the strike zone by 6%.

In some site related news, FanGraphs has updated it’s leverage index (LI) tables to Tangotiger’s latest and greatest. You may see some very (very, very) slight changes in LI related stats.

The Great Clutch Project tracker page has been updated and now includes BABIP. Also, the wildcard players now have gray backgrounds so you differentiate between them.

2008 minor league data has started rolling in and will of course be updated daily. The minor league stats are available in both the leaderboards and the stats pages.

We’ve also reluctantly updated the Devil Rays name to the Rays.

And spring training stats are now hidden by default, but if you still want to see those oh-so-meaningful stats, you can always click on the “Show Spring Training” button.

The results are in for Tangotiger’s clutch project and you can read all about them over at The Hardball Times. Over here, we have the clutch scoreboard up and running where you can already track how well your selections are doing.

The site is now up to date with 2008 stats and will of course be updated nightly. The new pitch data usually runs a day or two behind and that’s why all the pitchers in yesterday’s game have undefined pitch type and velocity data.

Couple quick reminders:

– We’ll have live win probability data all season long including the all-star game and playoffs.

– The live play-by-play data is different from the data that becomes “official” in the nightly loads, which often causes WPA values to change slightly from those found in the live data.

Tangotiger is running his Clutch Project to see if you know which players on your favorite team are clutch. All you need to do is vote for which player you’d want to have at-bat when the game is on the line.

Once the votes are in, we’ll be compiling the results on a daily basis during the season. In the mean time, go vote!

Just as the title says, there are now play logs and box scores for live data. Unlike the graphs they do not update automatically, so you’ll have to refresh the page if you want the latest data. I might change that if enough people would prefer to have it update automatically every 30 seconds to a minute.

The following spring training games should be available with live Win Probability and of course we’ll have all regular season, all-star, and playoff games with live Win Probability as well.

3/18/2008 4:05PM OAK TEX
3/18/2008 4:05PM KC CHC

3/19/2008 12:05PM TOR BOS
3/19/2008 4:05PM COL CWS

3/20/2008 1:05PM TB CLE
3/20/2008 1:05PM FLA STL

3/21/2008 1:05PM TOR DET
3/21/2008 1:10PM WAS NYM

3/24/2008 1:05PM STL MIN
3/24/2008 4:05PM SD LAA

The leaderboards are up for Pitch Type & Velocity! There are a couple standard leaderboard functions that do not work with the Pitch Type tab.

-Starters and Relievers cannot be broken down yet.
-You cannot filter by league.
-You can select the minimum IPs.
-You can select only qualified players.

If there’s a % sign in the column, it’s the percentage of pitches thrown and if there’s a “v” after the pitch type, it’s the average velocity of the pitch.

Quick refresher on what means what: FB – Fastball, SL – Slider, CT – Cutter, CB -Curveball, CH- Changeup, SF – Split-fingered Fastball, KN – Knuckleball, XX – Unidentified, PO – Pickoff Attempt

I put up something new today which I think is very cool. Under each pitcher page, in the very bottom table, you can now see the percentage of each type of pitch a player threw and its average velocity. These stats are available from 2005-2007 and will be updated daily when the season starts.

Some quick things to note:

-The average velocity is in parenthesis next to the % of the pitch thrown.

-The percent of any known pitch type is a percentage of only known pitch types thrown. XX is an unidentified pitch type and is taken as a percentage of all pitches thrown.

-PO are pickoff attempts and are calculated as a percentage of all pitches thrown.

A huge thanks goes out to Baseball Info Solutions for allowing me to do this. This is a work in progress and there’s more that can be done with stats like these so feel free to chime in with suggestions.

Update: I’ve removed SW (Screwball), FO (Forkball), and SI (Sinker) and moved them into SF (Split-fingered Fastball). There were just so few pitches categorized as those three, it didn’t make sense for them to have their own bucket.

FB: Fastball, CT: Cutter, CB: Curveball, SL: Slider, CH: Changeup, SF: Split-fingered Fastball, KN: Knuckleball, XX: Unidentified, PO: Pickoff Attempt

Because the FanGraphs glossary sucks so much, I’ve decided to update the glossary by posting one article each day on a particular statistic.

They’ll be easily accessible through the blog and eventually the glossary tab once all the stats are completed. Until then the old glossary will remain intact. Overall, I’m trying to make them fairly thorough, but feel free to comment and add new links and information if you feel what I post is incomplete or inadequate.