April 18, 2014

Baseball Prospectus News

New Stat Reports and Site Upgrades

by Rob McQuown

Often, the content on the Baseball Prospectus website is driven by data collected during the research leading to an article. And readers can now benefit from some recent research on a daily basis, as six new reports have been added to the sortable statistics page, all of which will be updated daily throughout the season.

Player Pace Reports

You can now look up the pace (time between pitches) for individual batters and pitchers, as discussed at length by Ben Lindbergh on Wednesday.

Separate reports for batter pace and pitcher pace from 2010–14 are available here:

Batter Pace - Season

and

Pitcher Pace - Season

Both links are on the Statistics page (also accessible through the "Statistics" button on the navbar at the top of almost every BP page) under the respective headings OFFENSE and PITCHING.

Game Length and Attendance

We've added game length and attendance information, both at the league and individual team level. Want to know how long (and how well-attended) games were, on average, at the major-league level for any season since 1950, or at various minor-league levels back to 2006? Or do you want to look up the game length and attendance for a particular team over the same stretch? Now you can, through the following reports:

Game Information League Averages

Game Information Team Averages

Both links are on the Statistics page under the GENERAL heading.

Team-Level Catcher Framing

Last month, we announced the publication of the Advanced Catching Metrics report, which includes both blocking and framing ratings for catchers from 2008–14. Now, we've aggregated the individual ratings into team-level receiving ratings for the same span of seasons. You can access these team-level stats through the following report, where you'll see that the top-ranked team has already distanced itself by over a win's worth of value from the bottom-ranked team:

Catcher Framing - Team Totals

Both links are on the Statistics page. Data for individual players is found under the GENERAL heading, while team totals are found under the TEAM heading.

PITCHf/x Tools

Working with the pitch tracking and categorizing data provided by Harry Pavlidis and Dan Brooks, two products have been made current for 2014. First, the ever-popular PITCHf/x Leaderboards, which allow you to sort pitchers from various seasons by pitch velocity, pitch movement, and many other criteria.

We've also updated the Bullpen (Mis)Management Tool, which allows you to see which relievers a team has used most often, along with the average Leverage Index of their appearances:

You can access these (and other) PITCHf/x-based reports through the same "Statistics" button at the top of the page that contains a link to the sortables:

Player Card Improvements
The Player Cards have grown an additional section, Plate Discipline, which can also be sorted league-wide through the "Batter Plate Discipline" and "Pitcher Plate Discipline" reports on the Statistics page.

In addition, in a first step toward making the player cards more user-friendly, the reports combining MLB and minor-league (MiLB) stats on the player cards now show MiLB stats in italics, and allow a click-toggle to hide them all together (showing only MLB stats).

PECOTA at MLB.com
Lastly, while PECOTA projections have been available at Baseball Prospectus for months, they have now been incorporated into MLB.com player pages. An example from Mike Trout's page:

Thank you for your continued support of Baseball Prospectus. We hope you enjoy the new additions and upgrades.

Rob McQuown is an author of Baseball Prospectus. Follow @robmcquown
Click here to see Rob's other articles. You can contact Rob by clicking here