You may have noticed (or not) that I haven’t been writing much recently. That’s because I’ve been working away at putting together a Win Probability section which can be found under the “teams” tab. We’re going to try and plot each and every game during the season and include the Win Probability Added for each player on each team. You can read all about Win Probability here:

The Hardball Times: The One About Win Probability (Dave Studeman)
Major League Baseball Graphs (Dave Studeman)

Since we’re automating these graphs, our calculations might vary slightly from other WPA charts you’ve seen, but they should be “good enough” until I can tweak them to death. All credit/blame for each play is assigned to the pitcher or batter. We do not take good/bad fielding into account. Hopefully there aren’t any bugs, but if you find any, please let us know.

Click Here For Win Probability Graphs…

Much to my surprise, FanGraphs actually works with 2006 stats which are now up and available for viewing. There will be some additional site enhancements later this week.

While I’m waiting for the first night of stats to come in, I decided to launch a pet project of mine. You may notice a new section on the site called “News” and then under each player there is now a new tab “Blog News” and potentially two links below the player information.

What this is (should be) are links to blog posts that have information about that particular player. Matching player names with articles is hardly an exact science but I think it does a pretty good job of locating relevant articles about each player. We currently look at 89 blogs and are certainly open to adding frequently updated baseball blogs to the list.

Hopefully this will add a new dynamic to FanGraphs which will be beneficial to everyone. If you have any comments, suggestions, or concerns please feel free to contact me.

As promised, I’ve added HBP, SF, SH, WP, BK, and GDP to the stats pages. HBP and SF has also been added to the OBP formula and HBP has also been added to the LOB% formula. We’ll probably look into using a more complicated version of RC/G too. This was a rather annoying fix, hopefully nothing broke in the process. If you find any errors please let us know. Also, all the graphs have been wiped (200,000 graphs was taking up a lot of disk space).

Quick reminder to all bloggers and anyone wishing to use the graphs in their work. If you want the graphs to be permanent you must save the graph and host it yourself.

I was informed today by Baseball Info Solutions that they will now be tracking “Fliners” which are a new categorization of batted balls. They’ll be breaking down these “Fliners” into two categories for us: Fliner-Fly and Fliner-Liner (that sounds kind of funny). I really like the fact that they are breaking down Fliners into Fly Balls and Line Drives so we’ll still be able to look at Fly Ball/Ground Ball/Line Drive data without Fliners if desired.

So, while I’m here, I may as well give a quick update on what’s coming to FanGraphs this season.

1. Hit by Pitch (HBP) data is on its way. This was an initial oversight, but it should be up this weekend and included in all the stats and graphs where it wasn’t previously included. We’re also going to add SH, SF, WP and BK data (and maybe some other stuff) to the stats pages. This should be available when the Hit by Pitch data goes live.

2. We have made arrangements with Baseball Info Solutions to display raw “pitch data” for retired players! This is currently a work in progress on the programming side of things, but I hope to have the raw data available for each retired player sometime in the next month. We currently only have the 2005 season, but we’ll be receiving 2006 data and are considering the 2004 data.

3. We’ll be trying out a new column called “Speed Plot” which will essentially go through the previous day’s games and point out various performances in an abbreviated Daily Graphing style. Consider it the Daily Graphing lightning round so we can hit on more than one player a day. I’m not sure how it will work out, but we’re going to give it a shot anyway and see what happens.

4. I’ve been slacking a bit on the Daily Graphing column but it should resume being pretty much daily when the regular season starts. We’ll be doing some preliminary Fliner analysis as the 2006 data starts to become significant. Obviously we’ll have to until 2007 to see year-to-year trends.

5. Nightly stat updates will occur between 2am and 5am each night of the regular season. Hopefully everything will go smoothly on the first night, but incase of unforeseen events, we’ll be working round the clock until FanGraphs is working properly with the 2006 data!

We’re very excited about our first full major league season. (I think if FanGraphs were a baseball player, it’d still have rookie status). Hope everyone will find our 2006 offerings useful and insightful, and of course, FanGraphs will remain 100% free.

I decided to add two additional graphs today. The first is Bill James’ Runs Created per Game (RC/G) and the next is Dave Studeman’s Left on Base Percentage (LOB%).

LOB% – From the Hardball Times: Is the percentage of baserunners allowed that didn’t score a run. LOB% is used to track pitcher’s luck or effectiveness (depending on your point of view). The exact formula is (H+BB+HBP-R)/(H+BB+HBP-(1.4*HR)). Note: I’m currently excluding HBP in the formula for FanGraphs, but it will eventually be in there. The difference should be minimal.

RC/G – Is how many runs a team would score if its lineup was comprised of entirely the same batter. I’m using the stolen base version of runs created which looks something like this: (((H + BB – CS) * ((1B + (2 * 2B) + (3 * 3B) + (4 * HR)) + (0.55 * SB)) / (AB + BB)) / (AB – SO + CS) * 27). There are many more complicated versions out there, which I may explore using in the future.