My Team Beta Preview
I’m doing a preview for an undetermined amount of time (maybe permanent depending on the reception) of the new My Team feature.
There are a few minor changes to the site:
1. You’ll notice there is a login bar right below the navigation bar on the site. If you have already signed up for the forums, there is no need to re-register. Just enter in your forum username and password. If you have not signed up for the forums, you’ll need to register to create your own team. Nothing else has changed. You do not need to register or log in to access any of the other FanGraphs features.
2. Once you log in you’ll notice that you can go to “My Team”, which is essentially a customized leaderboard for only the players you select. There won’t be any players in it, but you can add players from that page. You can also add players from their individual pages by clicking on the “Add Player” button which will appear if you are logged in.
3. You can share your team page with anyone by just giving them the web address. Only you will be able to alter your team page, but no team page can currently be made private. For instance, here’s my fantasy team from last season.
4. This is really just a first step in customization for FanGraphs. The way the system is set up should let us do some pretty cool things in the future.
I think that’s it. If you notice serious errors or minor glitches, please let me know. If you have suggestions, we’re taking those too and we’d really appreciate them.
Update: Things seem to be running smoothly enough that this probably won’t be a preview and I’ll just add features and correct bugs as we go. So feel free to use the new My Team feature to your hearts content. However, it should still be considered in beta.
David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.
I’m liking it. Got in habit last year of using stats pages for last 14 or last 21 days as i scanned for free agents … this is good too.
Keep up the good work!
This is awesome. Thanks. FanGraphs is quickly becoming the best resource for baseball statistics on the internet.
I’ll offer a few suggestions: allow users to have multiple teams; allow users to include league averages and league averages by position as a line in the reports; allow users to have custom stat selections, so that we can pull exactly those stats that are relevant to our fantasy team, or that we find most interesting, or whatever. I know that adding these sorts of features isn’t always easy, but they are certainly the ones that I would like to see.
Multiple teams and custom stats selection are on the to-do list. I like the idea of having the league/mlb average as a line somewhere. I’ll look into that. Thanks!
The My Team feature sounds great. I just registered in order to check it out. FanGraphs is the best!
Now all you guys need to do is add +/- to the site, and there will no longer be any need to go anywhere to get the numbers.
Thank you Fangraphs!!!
David,
Here are some suggestions:
1. Allow multiple teams
2. Allow each team to be “tagged”. The tag acts like a Fantasy League’s name. This way, when you click on the tag’s name, you get back a list of all Fangraphs users who have that tag. Ideally, it would be only those guys in that player’s Fantasy League.
When the person creates the tag, you should come back with a list of userids, so that the person knows he’s got the right tag (league name). If not, he can change it.
3. It will only be a matter of time until someone asks you to be a full-time admin on this, and actually track the dates that players were added and removed, so that you can be a full-service Fantasy tracker. And, you can certainly charge money doing this.
Tom thanks for the suggestions: I’ve been thinking about tagging and I think that tagging might take care of multiple teams too. Kind of like how gmail doesn’t have folders, only tags.
The only problem I see is that it doesn’t allow one user to enter in all of the teams in his fantasy league, it’d have to be done separately by each person. I’m not sure if this is such a problem right now.
In any event, it’s the 1st thing on the to-do list for this feature and I’m still thinking of best way to handle it.
3. I actually do date the player adds in the database, but removes are not tracked, but that’s easy enough to do. There’s really a lot of cool stuff that can be done. During the season you’ll be able to see your team’s stats pile up real-time too.
As far as charging money goes, I only see that as a last ditch effort to keep FanGraphs alive. I really like having the site 100% free (advertisements nonwithstanding) and will do everything in my power to keep it that way.
Would it be possible to change the mouse-over text from “click here to sort” to what the acronym stands for (i.e. CT% text would be “Percentage of Cutters Thrown/Seen”), and maybe a link to the glossary that would explain each in more detail?
Well if there was a fantasy service, and it happened to be free, I’d throw a donation. I can’t wait to be done with yahoo and its garbage.
Looks awesome so far!
Redsauce: That’s one of my top priority projects for this off-season.
First of all, great work on the team features stuff… this site is becoming better by the day.
I sent some extra suggestions (which I realize, involve money…) in by e-mail a little bit ago. Here it is again… thanks.
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Hey guys… I thought of a suggestion for the site. Being that you have plate discipline data for 2005-2008, I thought it’d be nice to see some hot/cold zones… you know, red for a batter over .300, neutral for around .200-.300 and cold below that. It’d be really cool to see… FoxSports has that data up, but only for one year. I think that’d be an EXCELLENT feature.
One more thing — do you think you guys could add some type of baserunning/defensive stats? This site carries a lot of (great) offensive data — what would make this a central spot, though, would be if you added some baserunning and defensive data.
I’d really appreciate it, and I’m sure so many other of your readers would too.
Keep up the great work.
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This site is great — thanks for everything, guys.
David,
Like the other users, I find this awesome. The only suggestion I have would be to add the 2009 projections as an option, so in the year dropdown, you could select, for example, 2007, 2008, 2009 Bill James, 2009 Marcel, etc. Great work!
Rob
Yes, definitely. People are grabbing the Marcel forecasts individually to make it for their team.
Having it team-ready would be a huge boon, that’s for sure. (And for the other forecasts as well.)
Projections are now available! I don’t really archive projections so 2007 and 2008 are out, but I doubt there’s going to be a whole lot of interest in old projections anyway.