FanGraphs Feature Focus: RosterResource Probable Pitchers

If you’ve ever even glanced at a RosterResource team page, you’ve probably noticed there’s an upcoming schedule table at the top that includes probable pitchers for the next 10 days:

That’s all well and good if you only care to look at one team, but if you’re a fantasy player, roster freak, or just chronically ill with baseball fever, the Probables Grid is that little upcoming schedule box blown up to its extreme.

While the full Probables Grid will still only show you the next 10 days, the grid has a couple advantages to clicking around the 30 team pages. (We believe going any further out than 10 days for probable pitchers is akin to going beyond 10 days in a weather forecast: ever-decreasing in our confidence of its accuracy.)

First, I’d be remiss if I didn’t once again mention that exporting to Excel is a Members-only feature. If you wanted to, say, easily figure out how many pitchers, and which ones, are projected to make three starts in the next 10 days, that’s the best way to do it.

I also recently added a toggle at the top so you can easily flip back and forth between who the team in each row is starting and who the team is facing, which is also exportable to Excel. The Excel exporter will only download whichever of the two tables you have displayed, not both at once.

While this is a pretty straightforward feature to use, I wanted to also highlight the data itself as a part of this Feature Focus. We source all starting pitcher information from Rotowire, which does a really nice job forecasting, and Jason Martinez and I override as needed. But until a team officially announces its starters (usually one series at a time, soon before the series starts), nothing is official. For example, a team may be planning on giving a starter an extra day of rest and inserting a spot starter a week from now, but we don’t know that for sure yet. Things change, and we update our probables data accordingly.

Openers throw another wrinkle into this, because teams don’t tend to announce those until the day before the game or perhaps even the day of. Those will show up on the Probables Grid and team pages with “OP:” for “opening pitcher,” before their name, and will always be accompanied by a “PP” (“primary pitcher”) on the next row. Teams are, of course, under no obligation to disclose their primary pitcher, when he’ll come into the game, or how long he’ll pitch. That can, in some situations, make predicting rather fraught even on the day of the game. So, user discretion is advised.

If you notice a definite error based on something a team or reporter has said, please let us know at rosters@fangraphs.com and we’ll get it fixed as soon as possible.