Crowdsourced Contract Project
At FanGraphs we talk a lot about contracts, but we’ve never had contract data on our player pages or in an easily exportable form.
We’ve already got the ball rolling by entering about 300 contracts, but there’s still a lot of work to do. Our staff will of course continue to enter in contract data, but if you want to speed up the project you can help us by entering in missing contract data.
Any contract data you enter will be sent for approval to an editor. Assuming the contract data is correct and mostly complete with proper attribution, it will shortly appear on the player pages along with attribution to your FanGraphs username.
All the contract data is available for easy export here and is updated as new contracts enter the system.
You can enter a contract from any player’s page page by clicking on the “Add Contract” link. If a player already has a contract, you can edit it if you think there’s incomplete information, or you can add a historical contract if you like.
If you run into any errors, issues, or have any questions about entering contract data, please let us know. Thank you for helping make FanGraphs better!
David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.
The beginning of the end of Cot’s, eh?
How is service time entered?
Cot’s uses 6.153 for 6 years 153 days.
I see FanGraphs rounds off to 2 decimals
Fixed! You can now add up to 3 decimal digits.
Nice I was just thinking that I wish fangraphs had more up to date info on that. Salary only goes up to 2008 in the value section. Will the per year info be updated in the Value section under salary now? This makes it easy to see how much a player is getting paid next to roughly how much they were worth that season.
Yes, these will definitely be updated once we get a little more data. Very soon though!
Crowdsourcing in this way is an amazing idea just from a business perspective. Kudo’s to whoever came up with this idea. Hat tip to you sir!
This has officially taken over my afternoon. Yay contracts!
This is a great and much needed addition. I’m sure it’s on your to do list, but how the player came to the league ie via draft round and pick w/bonus or international signing with the bonus information would also be very sweet. Thanks and love the site.
This is unrelated, but seems as good as place as any to share this: I was wearing my fangraphs shirt at the futures game last summer and walking in the concourse when some guy says to me, “nice shirt.” I look up to see Keith Law who I would have walked right by otherwise. He was gracious and took time to talk with the small group that gathered around us. Anyway, just wanted to say I would have missed out on that highlight if I weren’t wearing that shirt.
I also sat by a scout and a director for a team (I’ll leave name out) behind the plate who were also awesome once they realized I was an unhealthy prospect fan and not a “can I see what you’re doing guy”. Needless to say – that was my favorite baseball experience I’ve in some time.
What contract type should draftees who signed Major League deals fall under? I selected “other” for Rendon and Harper.
Yeah, I think for now it make sense to put those in the “other” category. Maybe it’s worth having a special category for that, but not entirely sure.
Since the new draft rules prohibit ML contracts to draftees, I’d guess it’s probably not worth the effort. Thanks for the response!
Fangraphs should check out a company called CrowdFlower. They could complete a task like this in a few days saving everyone a bunch of time without sacrificing on accuracy. Worth a shot.
Surely you don’t wish to sully the peerless ethics of FG with this contporary innovation in global labor exploitation, do you now?
Eh, we’re still cheaper (at least for Fangraphs). Besides, we can take pride as we look at a player’s page and say, “That contract? I entered that contract.” 🙂
“Contporary” is not a word I’m familiar with. The same applies to dictionary.com. Unfortunately I was dumb enough to check.
on the apple stuff, the “m” is right by the backspace. i always screw up my typing on my phone. i bet this guy was using an ipad, so instead of adding an “m”, he deleted the “e”. for his sake i hope so, anyway.
Is there a way to see if there has already been a contract submitted, but awaiting approval?
Just gave everyone access to the approval page: http://www.fangraphs.com/contractmake.aspx?admin=2
I see no one has entered in Ryan Howard’s contract details yet. Is that task reserved for Joe Morgan or something?
I just tried to enter one and got an error. This may owe to the fact that it was Ken Griffey Jr.’s record 2000 contract with the Reds and some data was incomplete (I didn’t enter any year-to-year data because I couldn’t find it.)
However, it seems to me very useful to record old contracts as well as new. I know Junior’s old contract isn’t sexy anymore, but it was the largest baseball contract in history in 2000. I would love to let Fangraphs users start uploading this sort of information.
Before I start to make a big wish list, this is really great and I appreciate it a lot.
How about letting us add trade histories too?
By any chance did you just leave the salary columns blank (deleted the $0), or do anything like that? That’s the only thing I can think of that would cause an error.
You can definitely load in old contract data. Someone entered in the 1993 Barry Bonds contract the other day.
I think trade histories we can probably deal without crowdsourcing since most of that data is more or less readily available. Just a matter of getting it in the database and formatted properly. I’ll add it to the to-do list.
I tried it again and it worked. It may be that I didn’t add any service time the first time, or that I entered the contract value in millions (i.e., $112.5) and I think I might have included an “m” to indicate that…
I submitted 2 contracts for Carlos Gomez, one for his 4.3 MM 1 year deal and another for his 3 year extension he just signed, but only one showed up on the approval page. How should we enter players who have an extension on the books but also don’t have a current contract on Fangraphs?
Extensions should be treated as separate contracts and not include any future / present years of the previous contract. You entered Gomez’s correctly! 🙂
At some point, B-R and Fangraphs are going to just have to break the tension and “do it”. We all know it’s gonna happen. And yes, I do mean “it”.
Hey guys – currently filling out a contract form. What is “Hat Tip (Link)”? What should I put there?
Excellent! We are currently in the process of creating a similar database for Baseball Mogul, for all active players (and including salary impact for 2013 and all future years).
We can contribute this data to your effort when we are done, although I see two things that probably should be reconciled:
1) We are using the same IDs as Baseball-Databank.org and Baseball-Reference (e.g. Dustin Pedroia = pedrodu01).
2) We have the same flags for contract types, but have added the following two: “Player Option” and “Team Option”.
Clay
http://www.sportsmogul.com
You can specify player option / team option for each option year once you actually selection the number of option years.
We have a good lookup table for IDs, so I don’t expect that should be an issue. When you feel like you might want to start contributing, send me a note and we can figure it out. (david-at-fangraphs.com)
Note, If you enter a contract, the source needs to be more than COTS contracts, it needs to be the original reporting source. Thanks.