The FanGraphs Library
We tend to use a lot of numbers around here, and a bunch of them are not numbers you generally see during television broadcasts, so I know that this place can be a little intimidating to new readers. We’ve never done a great job at giving people a place to start from the beginning, and I know there’s a learning curve to reading the site.
Well, over at FanGraphs, we’re trying to fix that problem. Yesterday, we introduced The FanGraphs Library, which is a pretty extensive resource of explanations for every metric you’ll see talked about here, as well as a lot of the concepts that we believe in. It includes some pretty nifty tools, including charts that show the spread of performance in each metric (what’s good, what’s bad, what’s normal), and link out to explanations of how the metrics were derived if you’re into reading those kinds of pieces.
Hopefully, the FanGraphs Library will make the learning curve for blogs like this one a little less steep. Steve Slowinski is going to be blogging about saber education over at the Library going forward, so if you have any questions about this kind of stuff, he’ll be more than happy to help you.
I am a relative newcomer to SABR and have little understanding of statistics. I have taken to regular reading of this site and Fangraphs which has sometimes been enlightening and sometimes mystifying. I browsed the library yesterday and the material at the Fangraphs Library is really good stuff. Recommended.
Regular reader, rare poster. Thanks for the info at Fangraphs. It’s great stuff. Also thought some might like what Graham over at LL did last year: Sabermetrics 101.
That’s excellent, thanks for the heads-up.
I fully expect (and agree) that a link to the library is an appropriate response in the future, if I or other posters are misusing or misunderstanding how some stats are used and how USSM regulars do player evaluation.
I’ll try to read up on it.
Thanks for this – it’s very useful!
For instance, that initial beautifully simple table was fascinating. I imported it into excel and started fiddling around with it and had a lot of fun. Example: I would have thought the ratio of ISO to SLG would be more or less constant, right? (Extra bases/AB)/(Total bases/AB), right? But it’s not, which made me think about why that’d be true, and next thing I knew, a half hour had slipped by. Already the baseball season is fun to think about!
Pretty good stuff over there. I’ve always wondered if there’s anywhere on fangraphs where they show all their formulas? I know different places use different numbers for WAR and wOBA, so seems interesting.