Happy (belated) New Year everyone. If you haven’t noticed, FanGraphs now has all historical players dating back to 1871 after heavily massaging the data found at baseball-databank.org. More on that later.

With the 2007 season sneaking up on us, I thought I’d announce two things that FanGraphs has in store for next season that I’m very excited about.

1. FanGraphs will have nightly, accurate, minor league stats updates for all affiliated minor league teams. Sometime this month the 2006 minor league stats will be up on the site and we’ll continue to backdate minor league stats for as many players as possible in the hopes of having a complete as possible minor league database.

2. Real Time Win Probability will be available for all major league games. We’ll possibly have a beta/preview version up and running midway through spring training and try and squish all the bugs by the time the season starts.

On a side note, we’ve stopped collecting news data from blogs for the time being. I was not happy with how things were being categorized and found the whole thing not that useful. I’m hoping to have a new and improved system in place eventually.

In the meantime, enjoy the new historical stats & graphs and feel free to give us your feedback.

There’s another article of mine up on Baseball Analysts about how the strike zone expands/contracts as the count changes and how different some pitchers take advantage of it.

“Ideally, a pitcher is going to try and get ahead in the count and when this happens the pitcher has effectively “expanded the strike zone” since the batter is now on the defensive and will be more prone to chase pitches outside the strike zone. Conversely, when a pitcher is behind in the count, a batter will be less prone to chasing bad pitches. Looking at OSwing by count this becomes fairly evident.”

You can find the rest of the article here: Expanding the Strike Zone

I figured I’d share a little tool that FanGraphs and Baseball Analysts have been using internally for a little while now. Basically you paste the text of an article into the text box, select whatever parameters you want, and then hit the link button.

All the properly spelled, full player names will have hyperlinks to the stats pages on FanGraphs, giving your readers the option to see more detailed stats about that particular player.

Feel free to send us your suggestions and if you have any special requests that would make using the tool easier for your particular site, don’t hesitate to ask.

To access the tool, click here . . . .

Career postseason stats have been added to the stats pages and 2002-2005 postseason game logs have been added to the game log pages

Post season stats will be updated throughout the playoffs with a 24-48 hour delay.

A number of Win Probability aficionados have pointed out that So Taguchi was inacurately credited with -0.193 wins for his 8th inning lead-off walk. The problem has now been fixed and he has been accurately credited with 0.096 wins.

It’s worth noting that in this same game, Albert Pujols‘ home run was worth 0.624 wins and it was the 4th time this season he’s had a single at-bat worth more than 0.5 wins. He’s the only player, in the five years of win probability data I have, that has 4 hits worth over 0.5 wins in a single season. Since 2002, he’s had 6 such regular season hits, which is also the most in the majors. Make it 7 if you count his one post-season hit worth 0.716 wins:

Playoff Win Probability graphs have been added for the 2002-2005 seasons. Relive the joy/pain of the 2003 Aaron Boone home run, or see just how close the Giants were to winning it all in 2002.

From now until the playoffs we’ll be updating the various sections of the site with playoff stats to compliment our regular season stats. Also, don’t forget that FanGraphs will continue to have daily updated Win Probability graphs and all the usual stats throughout the 2006 playoffs.

Tangotiger is doing his fourth annual fielding survey: The 2006 Scouting Report by the Fans for the Fans. The balloting ends soon, so don’t forget to fill out a ballot before the 2006 “Globe Gloves” are awarded.

I thought I’d give everyone a little sneak peak at our long overdue leaderboards. The 4 different stat pages for batters and pitchers include pretty much all of the stats in the usual player pages. All the stats are sortable; just click on the stat name and it will sort in ascending order first and then if you click it again, it will sort in descending order.

The leaderboards are not integrated into the regular site navigation yet, but you can access them if you click here.

If you find any problems or errors, please let us know and feedback (bad or good) is always welcome.

Quite a few feature additions just went into production.

-First off, WPA is no longer expressed as a percentage. Every player still has the same value, it’s just 100 times less.

-WPA is now displayed in each player’s game log and all the dates in the game logs are linked back to the correct Win Probability graph.

-There’s a new table for both batters and pitchers in the player stat pages that include the following Win Probability & Leverage stats:

WPA: Win Probability Added.
-WPA: The total of a player’s negative contributions towards their team’s win/loss.
+WPA: The total of a player’s positive contributions towards their team’s win/loss.
pLI: Average Leverage on a plate-appearance basis.
inLI: Average Leverage when a pitcher starts an inning.
gmLI: Average Leverage when a pitcher enters the game.
exLI: Average Leverage when a pitcher exits the game (game ends not included).
Pulls: Number of times a pitcher has been pulled from a game before it ended.
G: The number of games pitched in.
phLI: Average Leverage when pinch-hitting.
PH: Pinch-hitting opportunities.
OBP Wins: Player’s wins in a context-neutral environment.
Clutchiness: Difference between WPA and a Leverage adjusted OBP Wins.

For more information about these stats, take a look at the following links:

-Tangotiger’s Critical Situation Series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.
–Clutchiness: The Blog.
–The One About Win Probability.

If you notice any problems, please let us know and we’ll fix them as quickly as possible.

In the past, navigating you’re way through the Win Probability graphs was probably a bit of a pain since you had to go game by game until you got to the correct date. This was finally fixed today with the addition of a calendar where you can easily go directly to the game you’re looking for.

Additionally, the calendar is color coded so you can see which games were won (green) and lost (red) on each particular day they played. This may bring back some painful memories of some of the worst months in recent history like the Tigers’ 3-win April in 2003, or the Orioles 24-loss September back in 2002.

All the best months are in there too, such as the Athletics’ 17 straight wins to finish August in 2002 and the Red Sox’s 21-win August in 2004. Try it out and let us know what you think!

Update: It should be working for mac users now, but the formatting is going to be a bit off in safari until I can figure out what’s causing the issue.