Don’t worry Cactus and Grapefruit Leagues; you have not been forgotten. 2007 Spring Training stats are now included in the FanGraphs player stats pages. Unfortunately, the stats are very basic. But, at least you can get a feel for how your favorite players are doing.

These will be updated nightly and Spring Training leaderboards should be up sometime tomorrow.

Just thought some of you might be interested in an article I did for SI.com about the four different projection systems available on FanGraphs.

It looks at which players the systems are in agreement with and which one’s they’re at odds on using OPS and ERA.

“Everyone expects [Ryan Howard] to be very good, but there’s certainly some question about how great he’ll actually be. At least CHONE and ZiPS seem to think Carlos Delgado is in for a rather steep decline next year, while the other two think he’ll keep chugging along at his .900+ OPS.”

Anyway, take a look if you get a chance; I thought some of the differences and similarities were quite interesting. You can find the article here.

As promised, the Minor League Leaderboards are up! It’s worth noting that instead of the actual minor league team, the leaderboards show the affiliated team in their respective league. Also, qualified batters are 2.7 plate appearances per game and pitchers 0.8 innings per game. Other than that, just pick a league and sort/filter away!

If you have any ideas or suggestions on how to make these better, just send us a note and we’ll throw it on the to-do list.

After some painfully annoying work, we’ve managed to integrate the full set of 2006 Minor League stats into FanGraphs. Our plan is to eventually backfill minor league stats for all major league and minor league players. We’ll also have nightly updates for Minor League stats during the 2007 season.

Our plan is to have Minor League leaderboards (in the usual FanGraphs style) up and running by the end of the week. Additionally, we’ll be figuring out the best way to include the Minor League stats in the season graphs.

As always, please let us know if you have any problems, comments, or suggestions!

Dan Szymborski was kind enough to let us post the ZiPS projections he provides to Baseball Think Factory. Here’s a bit about ZiPS:

“Disclaimer: ZiPS projections are computer-based projections of performance. Performances have not been allocated to predicted playing time in the majors – many of the players listed above are unlikely to play in the majors at all in 2007. ZiPS is projecting equivalent production – a .240 ZiPS projection may end up being .280 in AAA or .300 in AA, for example. Whether or not a player will play is one of many non-statistical factors one has to take into account when predicting the future. “

Just like with the Bill James projections, we’ve used the Batting Average, On-Base Percentage, Slugging Percentage, Runs Created, Runs Created/27 and ERA supplied in the original file instead of calculating it ourselves.

I’m fairly certain this will be the last addition to the projections this season, which leaves us with a grand total of four projections (Bill James, CHONE, Marcels, and ZiPS) to choose from.

As always, if you notice any problems or errors, please let us know and we’ll do our best to fix the problem immediately.

In addition to the Marcel & CHONE projections, the projections from the Bill James Handbook are now available in the stats pages courtesy of Baseball Info Solutions. They will not be available in the leaderboard format on FanGraphs, but you can purchase them from Baseball Info Solutions here.

Just a quick note about how the projections are integrated: Batting Average, On-Base Percentage, Slugging Percentage, ERA, Runs Created, and Runs Created/27 were left as-is from the Bill James Handbook and were not calculated using the projected raw statistics; unlike the Marcel and CHONE projections.

This will probably be the last set of projections we add, unless someone else volunteers to throw their hat in the ring.

The 2007 Marcel & CHONE projections are now available in the regular stat pages. They will remain there until the 2007 regular season starts and will then be hidden to make way for the real 2007 stats. You’ll still be able to use the “Show Projections” button to see the stats after they are hidden; they just won’t be visible by default.

We’ve also added Balls and Strikes for batters, and corrected a bug in the daily split graphs.

Hopefully you won’t find the projections intrusive to your usual stat browsing. Please let us know what you think, especially if you don’t like it.

Both Tom Tango and Chone Smith were both kind enough to let me post their 2007 player projections.

The Marcel (the Monkey) Forecasts are “the minimum level of competence that you should expect from any forecaster.” You can read exactly how they’re computed here: Marcel Methodology.

Chone Smith, on the other hand, has put a great deal of time and effort into his CHONE Projections. You can read more about his projection system and efforts here: Chone Projections.

There are two things I should make note of: I have used the FanGraphs positions for filtering by position where we have the player in our database. There are a number of minor league players in CHONE that aren’t in our database (yet) and for their positions we use those supplied in CHONE’s original file. And for the Marcels, we took the average of projected earned runs and base runs-earned runs and used that to display ER. This was how ERA was calculated in the original file anyway.

While I’m at it, there have been a few excellent discussions of projection systems recently:

The Hardball Times’ David Gassko did five part, Projection Roundtable, II, III, IV, V.

And Tom Tango recently asked “Who’s Smarter Than a Monkey?” followed by an insightful discussion in the comments.

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