As you know, I pimp the site Fangraphs on this blog a lot. It has a ton of information that is tremendously difficult to find elsewhere, as well as up-to-date, daily archives of Win Probability Added and Leverage Index (the metric created by Tom Tango measuring a player’s performance and how it relates to his play when situations in the game become more critical) that you can not find anywhere else in a timely manner. Not only all of that, but I just happen to write the Astros team blog for that site during the season.
Recently, there have been a number of excellent additions and modifications to the site. These are the most outstanding of those updates:
Pitch Type and Velocity - for each current pitcher, there is a new table at the bottom of their page that lists the percentage of different pitches thrown and their velocity from 2005-2007. For example you can now find out that in 2005, Daniel Cabrera threw 65% fastballs at an average speed of 96 mph and he threw 28% sliders at an average speed of 88 mph. In 2007, those numbers changed to 74% fastballs at 94 mph and 23% sliders at 83mph. Total pitch counts and undocumentable pitches are also accounted for.
Projections updates - Fangraphs works with a number of projection outlets to post each player’s projected numbers for the upcoming season on their stat pages. Recently, the ZiPS projections and the recently invented MINER projections have been added to each player’s page. These are now included in addition to the Bill James, CHONE and Marcel predictions that were already listed. Looking at a player like Jorge Posada, who last year had career numbers of .338/.426/.543, not one of the projections has Posada pegged at a batting average higher than .288 or a SLG% higher than .469.
Spring Training Stats - If you put a lot of stock into that type of thing, Fangraphs will be updating spring stats for each major leaguer. I guess we can all follow along as we see how long this Ichiro spring hitting drought continues…
And don’t forget that the Astros Fangraphs blog will resume again after the start of the season as we discuss all things good (offense) and all things bad (everything else) from the Win Probability and Leverage Index perspective.
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