Once upon a time, all we had were box scores. We might know a player went 1-3 with a double and a walk, but we wouldn’t know how exactly all of the game’s events unfolded. We’ve come a long way since then, getting play-by-play data, pitch-by-pitch data, video tracking, PITCHf/x, and Statcast. We have results data stretching back more than a century, but the way those results came about gets easier to understand with new information.

What direction was the double hit? How far did it go? Who fielded it? Hearing a player hit a double seems like specific information, but there’s plenty more you might want to know about that event. One of the ways we communicate that information is through Spray Charts.

There are certainly other ways to communicate information of this nature, but one implementation is to display it visually on a diamond graphic and you can find our implementation of spray charts on the player pages here at FanGraphs.

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You’ve probably had a chance to peruse our leaderboards and player pages, and hopefully you’ve had a chance to check out our posts about getting the most out of the leaderboards and player pages. Another thing you might have seen on the site, or being shared on the internet, is our live win probability graph. It looks like this:

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There are a lot of reasons you might have arrived at FanGraphs. Perhaps you’re here for the articles or you’re just trying to find a detailed fantasy baseball game, but there’s a good chance that our various statistics are a big part of the draw for you. We host a lot of numbers and there’s a lot you can do with them if you know where to look. Last year, I put together a primer on how to use the FanGraphs Leaderboards to aid readers in their efforts to manage the information we provide.

If you’re new to the site, that’s a great place to start, but if you’re somewhere between newbie and expert, this post might help you get the most out of what we have to offer. When you’re thinking about baseball, there are a lot of questions you might want to answer. How do these two players compare? How does this player measure up historically? How rare is this particular thing?

Today, we’re going to use Bryce Harper’s exciting 2015 season to explore some of the features available at FanGraphs. This isn’t an exhaustive run down of the tools, simply an explanation of some of the more useful ones that don’t get enough recognition. If you’re reading this in the future, the screen grabs for 2015 are current through July 18, 2015, but the links will update automatically with new data.

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In addition to the daily analysis and normal statistical offerings, FanGraphs has added some pretty useful and powerful features over the last couple of years. Anchoring a lot of those features are the Depth Charts, which in addition to providing information on their own, power the playoff odds and projected standings we host on the site.

The Depth Charts are pretty simple in theory. They blend together two of the leading projection systems (Steamer and ZiPS) and then scale those projections to our expectations about playing time. The Depth Charts are updated constantly to provide the most up-to-date snapshot possible for the current state of a team, league, or position. You can think of the Depth Charts as the baseline projections for the entire site, as they are the input for the projected standings, playoff odds, and game odds.

As far as the basic Depth Charts are concerned, there are essentially three different views. You can look at a team’s Depth Chart, you can look at Depth Charts by position, and you can look at the summary data of both of those at one. To generate each the charts, we take a 50/50 mix of Steamer and ZiPS for the rate stats and then our staff manually allocates playing time based on what we expect teams to do with their lineups and injury histories.

Steamer and ZiPS update nightly throughout the season and our playing time estimates change every 15 minutes (if necessary). If a player gets hurt, we update their playing time. If a player gets moved to the pen or changes positions, we update the Depth Charts. Also, the Depth Charts are showing what we expect to happen for the rest of the season, not the stat line we expect them to end the season with.

As always, when you’re dealing with constantly updating information, there are occasionally bugs. If you see something that looks obviously wrong, it’s likely just a database error that will resolve itself once the system updates in a few minutes.

As far as viewing options, you can look at the Depth Charts in team view, in position view, or in summary view. In team view, you get a breakdown of a single team by position, meaning on the Blue Jays page there’s a box for catchers, first basemen, etc with the expectation that each position for each team will receive 700 PA per season. Obviously that will vary a bit, but it’s a good rule in general. Each team also has a box for all positional players and all pitchers, as well as a box on the right that shows you where they stand overall.

In position view, you can look every team’s Depth Chart at any one position. For example, here is the page for catchers. This allows you to compare positions around the league and see which group of backstops is most valuable. Obviously these rankings are based on the projection systems and our playing time estimates, so if you believe playing time will shake out differently that we do, you might expect to see a different overall ranking.

Finally, this handy grid collapses those two views into one. You can’t see all of the players in that view, but it puts together each team’s expected WAR at each position so that you can quickly compare how teams and positions stack up against each other.

The Depth Charts are very useful for a couple of reasons. First, they blend two projection systems together without you having to do any of the work, and that’s helpful because aggregate projections are better than any one system. Second, playing time is controlled by humans. While projection systems are much better at forecasting performance than people, projection systems aren’t very good at figuring out how much playing time a player is actually going to get. Finally, the Depth Charts gather a lot of information in one place. We’ve had projections on the site for years, but having them built into the system like this allows you to make a lot of comparisons and see where teams are strong or weak.

So as you get back into the swing of things this season, the Depth Chart pages will be a valuable resource if you want to look into the future. Obviously, the charts are only as good as their inputs, but if you care at all about the inputs, the way the data is presented is really helpful.

The mission of the FanGraphs Library is to make it easier for readers to understand and use our data and site. This means providing information about the statistics and principles we use, but it’s also a place to point out the various features of the site and how to get the most out of the metrics we offer. A couple of months ago, I wrote about our leaderboards and today I will discuss everything you can do on individual player pages.

We’ll be using Lorenzo Cain as an example because he’s the rising star of the moment. The pitcher pages are only different in the specific statistics they offer, but the basic format and set of features are the same.

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In addition to updated glossary entries and blog posts extolling the virtues of various sabermetric statistics and principles, the revitalized FanGraphs Library is also going to be a place where we highlight features available at the site that will allow you to get the most out of our data.

Below, you’ll find everything you ever wanted to know about the FanGraphs Leaderboards. If you’ve been a long-time reader who never misses a single post, a lot of this might be old news. If you’re anything short of that, there’s a good chance you’ll pick up a few tricks to get the most out of the site.

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