Fliners and Things to Come

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.