Just thought I’d throw this in the blog for archival purposes:

I was browsing through the Win Probability leaderboards and noticed that Troy Tulowitzki is in the top 10 in Win Probability Added for the season with 2.32 wins. A quick glance in the Batting Runs Above Average column shows he’s the only player in the top 50 who is below average with -1.75 runs. His Clutch hitting has netted him an additional 2.08 wins over what he should have, considering how well he’s hit. So far this season, Tulowitzki has been the most clutch hitter in baseball.

His latest and greatest hit of the season came just two days ago on June 25th when he hit a three-run-homer against Bob Howry to give the Rockies a 9-8 lead against the Cubs. Unfortunately, Rockies closer, Brian Fuentes, couldn’t nail down the save, making his big hit for naught.

With the exception of last week, it seems that there are more or less the same players in the top 10 week after week. In an attempt to make things more interesting, let’s look at the top 11-20. But first, let’s pay homage to the actual top 10.

Alex Rodriguez, Barry Bonds, Albert Pujols, John Maine, Ichiro Suzuki, Derek Jeter, Josh Beckett, Jose Reyes, David Ortiz, David Bush. These guys round out the top 10. I have not been visiting Bush’s page a whole lot this week either. And I’ll continue to assert that he will turn things around. Onto the top 11-20.

11. Manny Ramirez – A previous fixture in the top 10, he’s fallen all the way down to number 11. Manny has really started to turn things around and is batting just about .350 in the month of May. He’s also wracked up a solid .42 WPA for the American League’s most winning team.

12. David Wright – He’s another player who started off a bit slow. He’s batting just under .300 for May and more importantly is starting to hit with some pop. He also stole 3 bases in last night’s game; a feat which has only been accomplished about 100 times in the past 5 years.

13. B.J. Upton – While he continues to challenge Ryan Howard for the major league lead in strikeout percentage, the main difference between the two is that B.J. Upton has pummeled major league pitching. He’s been a bit less stellar in May, but no one’s going to complain about a .916 OPS.

14. Daisuke Matsuzaka – Yawn. Dice-K is 4th in the AL in K/9; striking out just over a batter an inning. FIP suggests his ERA should be in the mid-3’s as opposed to the high-4’s. Giving up 10 runs to the Yankees has been his only problem.

15. Kelly Johnson – Though his batting average graph looks like a camel’s back, he still leads all second-basemen in OBP (.409). Unfortunately, he hasn’t been walking much this month either and the graph looks eerily similar to his batting average.

16. James Shields – He only threw 9 innings of 3 hit ball the other day. Despite his obscenely high WPA of .766 in that game alone, his team still didn’t get him a win. He’s good.

17. Jonathan Papelbon – The Red Sox closer currently has a 1.35 ERA. Last year he’d only given up 1 run at this point in the season. This year, he’s already given up 2. For shame.

18. Roger Clemens – He’s back with the Yankees, but you probably knew that already.

19. Chien-Ming Wang – His ERA now sits at 5.40 after a disastrous outing against the Rangers. If it weren’t for his 2 hit gem against the Mariners, his ERA would be over 7. He was a hot topic for debate this off-season and so far things are not looking good for Wang.

20. Dustin Pedroia – Alex Cora really tore things up while Pedroia was riding pine. The big difference between him and Cora is that Pedroia can actually take a walk. Despite his troubles, Pedroia should continue to be out there everyday.

You may have noticed there’s a new tab in the player pages called “Play Log”. This will give you every single play for the selected player in any given year. It’s currently sorted by WPA so you can easily tell which plays were the most/least important.

It’s a little slow for my tastes and I’ll see what I can do to speed it up. Sorting is currently disabled because it was extremely slow. If you desperately want to do sorting, you can add “&sort=wpa” query string to the end of the url. The options for the querystring are “li”, “braa”, “wpa”, and “day”. Update: Sorting is now enabled, but you can no longer click on the play to find out the pitch sequence. I’ll get that fixed soon enough.

This is still pretty bare-bones right now, but I’m sure as the season goes on there will be substantial improvements.

I haven’t been blogging much in the past couple weeks, but I’m hoping to turn over a new leaf with this past week’s FanGraphs top 10. There are more than a few surprises:

1. John Maine – The momentary Major League ERA leader (1.35) is also this week’s #1 player on FanGraphs. He’s been getting a lot of hype and some skepticism lately. I think everyone can agree he’s not as good as his 1.35 ERA, but I think there’s still a lot to like.

2. Barry Bonds – He hit 2 home runs this week and is now just 12 shy of breaking Hank Aaron’s record. He’s playing like the past 2 years didn’t happen.

3. Alex Rodriguez – Since hitting 2 home runs on April 23rd, A-Rod has now gone 41 at-bats without a single home run. I wonder if for every record breaking streak, there’s an equal (and opposite) record breaking slump?

4. David Wright – The other New York third-baseman has been in a season long slump. He’s both walking and striking out more, while his Isolated Power (ISO) has been cut in half. What’s the statistical culprit? A failure to get the ball off the ground.

5. Derek Jeter – The other and still “true” Yankee always seems to make the top 10. He’s having a pretty nice season which isn’t all that different from his MVP seas… oh wait… nevermind.

6. B.J. Upton – The rookie is having a phenomenal year and apparently everyone wants to see what all the hoopla’s about. Upon further inspection, he’s striking out only 38% of the time which puts him right there in Ryan Howard and Adam Dunn territory (sans the high walk rate). My magic 8 ball tells me this about his hot start: “Outlook Not So Good”. That’s how I do all my analysis, by the way.

7. David Bush – I’m a big David Bush fan and it could just be me visiting his page ever so frequently that pushed him up to #7 of the list. Despite his ERA over 6, he has the 3rd highest K/BB in baseball. Good things should happen soon.

8. Manny Ramirez – As soon as A-Rod started slumping, Manny started to pick things up. Since A-Rod hit his last home runs, Manny has batted just over .300 with 7 walks and 3 home runs, including a 2 home run game on May 3rd.

9. James Shields – This guy is looking really really good and should be on everyone’s radar. Few pitchers in the history of baseball have struck out over a batter an inning while walking under 2 batters per 9 innings. In fact, there have been just 11 starting pitchers to do it in a single season. Bruce Sutter, Tom Seaver, Sandy Koufax, Jason Schmidt, Johan Santana, Ben Sheets, Roy Oswalt, Pedro Martinez, John Smoltz, Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson make up the 11.

10. Ichiro Suzuki – He’s off to a slow start, which apparently is concern enough for him to make his first top 10 list. He’s still getting infield hits but his BABIP is considerably below his norm. Fortunately for him, there’s still some 5 months of baseball left to right the ship.

If you haven’t noticed, there are a few new team blogs currently on FanGraphs. Garth Sears (Royals), Erik Manning (Cardinals) and our latest addition Tito Crafts (Red Sox) have been doing a fantastic job looking at games from a Win Probability angle, among other things.

If you have an idea for a baseball related blog, whether it be team specific or something entirely different, and you’re looking for a place to get started, feel free to send me a note. From there we can talk in more detail. You can either fill out a contact form, or e-mail me at david@fangraphs.com.

The 2007 Minor League stats are up and available for viewing in both the stats pages and the Leardboards. They will be updated every morning no later than noon Eastern.

Also, I’ve taken down the projections and spring training stats by default in the stats pages. You can still view them by clicking on “Show Projections” or “Show Spring Training”. I figured now that there was almost a full month of the season underway, the projections weren’t being used as much and they were causing some unneeded clutter. I’m open to putting them back up by default, but as long as I don’t hear complaints, they’ll stay hidden by default.

Bradford Doolittle wrote about WPA today in the Kansas City star and gives FanGraphs’ new Live Win Probability quite the favorable review. You can check that out here: These stats add something to the game

There’s also a Q&A session with me on his blog for those interested in some of the behind the scenes happenings at FanGraphs: Q&A With David Appelman

Last night we rolled in some changes to the way Clutch is calculated. For the most part, the results remained the same, but there are a few key differences which you should be aware of.

Clutch is no longer calculated using OPS Wins. Instead it’s calculated using WPA/LI, which is WPA divided by LI on a play-by-play basis. Take Alex Rodriguez for example who has a WPA of 1.03 and a pLI of 1.51. His WPA divided by pLI on a full season basis would be .68. Unfortunately, that is weighting each play incorrectly and does not correctly neutralize WPA. When you correctly weight each plate appearance by LI, his WPA/LI is 1.16. To get the new Clutch score, you merely do: WPA – WPA/LI.

Tangotiger goes into the details of what’s going on here in comment #5: What Exactly Clutch Measures.

This week’s top 10 most popular players on FanGraphs is devoid of Corey Hart and because of that it makes a lot more sense. Let’s get right to it:

1. Alex Rodriguez – You’ve not only managed to become number one in Win Probability Added (and nearly every other stat in the first week), you’re also the most popular.

2. Albert Pujols – Slipping from the top spot lats week, Pujols got off to a rough start by going 1-13 to start the season. But yesterday, he went 2-5 with one home run, signaling the end of the bizarro first week of baseball.

3. Derek Jeter – What has Jeter done this season to deserve such a prominent place on the FanGraphs top 10? Besides being Jeter, WPA says he’s the second most valuable Yankee thus far this season. Fitting he should be the second most popular Yankee.

4. Barry Bonds – His one home run this week puts him just 20 home runs shy of tying Hank Aaron’s all time best 755 home runs. At this rate he’ll have broken the record by September 3rd. Anyone know the vegas odds on that?

5. Felix Hernandez – His 8 inning — 3 hit — 12 strikeout performance gave him a Game Score of 87, which just happens to be the highest Game Score this season. Hopefully the weather will allow him make a second start sometime this season.

6. Todd Helton – He’s off to a decent start, but I’m not sure why he’s in the top 10. It could have something to do with the nosedive his Isolated Power has taken since the 2004 season.

7. Johan Santana – Why wouldn’t the best pitcher in baseball make the list?

8. Adam Dunn – The always intriguing Dunn is off to a hot start after having a scorching spring training. He’s batting an uncharacteristic .381 with 3 home runs so far this season.

9. Brad Lidge – Speaking of spring training, Lidge has been just as awful the first week of the season as he was during spring training. He’s pitched 1.2 innings, giving up 6 runs (3 of them earned) for an ERA just over 16. If he can’t get things together soon, he’ll definitely be out of the closers job, and possibly a job altogether.

10. Ryan Howard – Even though he’s batting just .217 with no home runs, he’s already drawn 7 walks, which ties him for the most in the National League with fellow teammate Jimmy Rollins. He only hit 1 home run in his first 11 games last year, so not much to worry about yet.

11-20: David Ortiz, Cole Hamels, John Maine, B.J. Upton, Jose Reyes, Ian Snell, Grady Sizemore, Roy Oswalt, Erik Bedard, Elijah Dukes.