Updates for the Fourth

Happy Independence Day!

I didn’t get quite as much done this Fourth of July weekend as I had hoped. There were other household tasks – getting the front and back yards mowed, gutter guards installed, rotting fascia boards replaced. There were computer-related tasks – installing a new UPS (the old one had spaced out twice in the past three weeks) and putting in a new OS (upgrading Suse by .3). There was the day job, calling me in this morning for four hours to troubleshoot missing data in the blended TPW.

But I like what got out just the same. The main thing to notice is in the DTs, either the ones arranged by organization or the ones by league. Instead of a simple list of player names on each line, you will find a link that carries you to a page for every minor league player. Right now I only have them up for players active in 2011 – expanding those to other years is todo list item 5 on the whiteboard beside my desk.

On those pages you will find a full DT for every player – including years prior to 2011, so that you can see this season in context with his past performance. They are always arranged with a “real” section – those are real stats, untranslated. The next section is a regular DT, which is the level of play that can be reasonably expected by translating his current performance directly to the major leagues. And finally there is the peak DT section, which incorporates his age and assesses what kind of peak (“age 27” season, for all practical purposes) can be expected, given his performance in that season. Players whose peak doesn’t clear a .240 eqa (for a hitter) or get under 5.00 (for a pitcher) are unlikely to make the majors.

On those individual pages there a couple of other new features. There is a search box, which is working, although it searches my entire minor league database. Some of the names, many of them in fact, have not have player cards built for them yet. There are also two links for player split data, although I didn’t finish writing thse scripts this weekend as I’d planned. They should be up by next weekend., I hope. I already have the split data for all the players on the site, but arranged by teams. You can currently look up Bryce Harper in the Washington org page, and you can get all the different splits for the organization as a whole (with Harper included), but there’s no one-stop lookup for all of Harper’s split data. At least, not until I get those links active. The year-centric stats will arrange the splits like this

2009 All
Left
Right
2010 All
Left
Right
2011 All
Left
Right

The split-centric ones, by contrast, will arrange like this

All 2009
2010
2011
Left 2009
2010
2011
Right 2009
2010
2011

Depending on what I’m doing, these are the two ways I most frequently want these stats arranged, so I figured I’d script ’em up both ways and leave the option to the user.

Finally, I passed through a moderately-sized reset of the DTs, in a way that effectively increased the difficulty gap between the majors and minors (and, in the process, made minor league DTs look worse than I had ben ranking them). Check back in later this week, and I’ll explain what I changed – and why I thought it was necessary.

Clay