FanGraphs Feature Focus: Intro and Ranked Leaders

Welcome to the FanGraphs Feature Focus, a new semiweekly series highlighting some of the overlooked site tools at your disposal as a FanGraphs user. With so many great tools, leaderboards and stats here at FanGraphs, it can be easy to lose track; my goal is to shed light on them. Since I spend about half of my time working on RosterResource and the rest helping to develop new features and improve old ones, I’ve gotten very familiar with everything the site has to offer. What’s more, because I am extremely online, I’m very attuned to how others use FanGraphs, which means I have a good sense of which features aren’t getting as much traction as their utility suggests they should.

These posts will take on different forms depending on the FanGraphs Feature being focused upon. Sometimes they’ll be quicker “Hey, this exists, have fun!” pieces; sometimes they’ll be in-depth tutorials explaining how our more complex tools work. If there’s an unfamiliar feature in our site menus that you’d like to know more about, drop it in the comments below. It might become a future Feature Focus!

Today’s highlighted feature is the Ranked Leaders page, which can be found under the Leaders site menu:

This page allows you to select from three ranking modes, with the resulting view of the rankings structured similarly to an Excel pivot table. We’ll begin with the Rank mode. There’s a lot available to you here, but the basic question this mode is meant to answer is: How has the leaderboard for [insert stat of your choosing here] changed over the years? The Rank mode only shows the top five players in a given statistic, but the default of 10 years can be changed to whatever range of years you’d like, all the way back to 1871:

The top menu bar gives you a variety of filtering options. In addition to the range of seasons, you can set a different playing time minimum or age range, look at AL- or NL-only, and swap out WAR (the default) for any batting or pitching stat in our extensive suite of options, including the newly-added stats involving ABS challenges:

In addition to the default Rank mode, in which one statistic is chosen and the view shows how the leaderboard for that stat has evolved, the top right selector also includes two other options: Compare Players and Compare Stats. As mentioned, the Rank mode shows how a leaderboard for a given stat has changed over the years, while Compare Players shows how a given set of players have seen their position on a given leaderboard for a stat change over the years:

Compare Players mode defaults to the top five players by WAR regardless of whether you select another ranked stat, but you can use the Set Players button to select a different universe of players. There’s no restriction on how many players you can select, though you will have to scroll to the right to see the rankings for additional players if you include more than five. You can also assign each player a color, which will highlight his cell in the table:

Lastly, there’s the Compare Stats mode, which (as its name heavily implies) lets you pick as many stats as you see fit and compare your set of players’ rankings in those stats over time. Here, I restricted my selection to 2026 and picked some offensive stats for the top five leaders in WAR:

While this feature is available to all FanGraphs users, some features that I’ll highlight in future Feature Focus articles are availably only to our Members. If you aren’t yet a FanGraphs Member, you can sign up here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our work. And thank you to our existing Members!