I made a few updates to FanGraphs this afternoon:

– Clutch is now calculated as: “WPA / pLI – WPA/LI”. You can read the discussion on why it should be this way here: Baseball Fever Forum

– Pitchers now have WPA/LI (context neutral WPA) and Clutch. These are now available in the player pages and leaderboards in the same locations they would be for batters.

– 2007 WPA and all WPA related stats have been slightly adjusted to reflect the correct 2007 run environment in each league.

Finally the ZiPS Projections are now available on FanGraphs; just in time for spring training. Huge thanks to Dan Szymborski of Baseball Think Factory for letting us post them again this year. Enjoy!

I made a few highly requested changes to the leaderboards.

– You can now view the entire dataset on one page. This is on a page by page basis at the moment. When you’re done viewing the entire dataset and change your query parameters, it defaults back to 50 records per page. Of course, you can always change it back to full view when you’re ready to export data.

– Batting Average on Balls in Play (BABIP) is now in the batted ball section.

– You are now able to select the minimum plate appearances (PA) or innings pitched (IP). You can still select only qualified players and all players.

The 2008 CHONE and Marcel projections are now available in the stats pages and the projections board.

Big thanks to Chone Smith for his 2008 CHONE projections and Tangotiger for this year’s Marcels.

If you are looking for downloadable versions you can find them here: CHONE download ; Marcel download.

As of now, the 2008 Bill James Handbook projections are available on the player pages.

On a side note, all the minor league players have been synced with the major league players, so there will no longer be duplicate entries for minor league players that were called up last season.

In today’s New York Times, Dan Rosenheck uses some of the tools available on FanGraphs to delve into the Arizona Diamondbacks dubious Pythagorean record.

While I’m at it, I figure I’ll mention a few things that are going on at FanGraphs.

– Live Win Probability will continue through the post season. I’m sure there will be a few improbable comebacks, which will certainly be fun to follow.

– I will be traveling to Japan next week and will be attending a Yomiuri Giants game and Seibu Lions game. I’ll be sure to write about my impressions of the games along with posting various baseball related photos from my trip.

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.