Best Resources for Projections/Advanced Stats/etc.

[jbupstate]

Apologies if this isn’t main board material. Please destroy if not.

In an effort to assist me in adding to discussion and to cherry pick why the Boston Red Sox are in fact awesome.

Can membership recommend their go to internets destinations where I can find projections? MLB and prospects.

Also any deeper dive data spots. Fielding, baserunning, usage, effing spin rates…

Super ask… Maybe a slight tutorial and where to start and what to look for?

 

[simplicio]

Fangraphs and https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/statcast_search for advanced metrics. I think it's worth just clicking through all the available tabs on both of those to see what data is available. There's a ton.

Soxprospects and jm3's posts in the milb channel for our minor league guys.

AAA got some statcast data this year but implementation is partial and sketchy; you only get access through individual game logs so a big picture view is lacking.

For projections, I guess Fangraphs has those in various flavors, but personally I ignore them entirely. I don't think they're useful.

 

[absintheofmalaise]

Baseball Reference is a very good site also. Their glossary has good explanations of their various stats and they also have a lot of links explaining their version of WAR, the history of WAR, etc. Fangraphs has one as well. Very useful if you're a fan of that stat.

 

[Yaz4Ever]

Definitely main board worthy, btw.

 

[simplicio]

Baseball Reference is a very good site also. Their glossary has good explanations of their various stats and they also have a lot of links explaining their version of WAR, the history of WAR, etc. Fangraphs has one as well. Very useful if you're a fan of that stat.

I find actually navigating bbref to be a tremendous pain and not worth the trouble generally. Fangraphs is set up to be much more usable as a tool.

 

[LogansDad]

There's a ton of places to go.

Stathead (through Baseball Reference) is spectacular for things like specific searches, player comparisons, individual/multi season kind of stuff. It is all results based, and there isn't really any projection system there (and the Stathead parts of the site a subscription only).

Savant is maybe the most amazing site in the history of baseball. It has results, but also all of the advanced metrics. Spin rate, exit velo, all the defensive stuff, and almost every play in the database since 2015 or so has a link to the video. Go spend a couple hours watching Brenton Doyle play defense. You might never come back.

Fangraphs does a lot more on the prediction side, with huge arrays of MLB level and minor league look aheads and look backs, and tons of articles released almost every day. I think most of their advanced searches are subscription based, but there's enough free stuff there to make you better than 80% of us on the board (myself included).

Finally, and it's not quite what you are looking for, but I use Rotowire for most of my daily fantasy baseball stuff. They are VERY fantasy focused, so you won't get a lot on defensive stuff, other than whether a player's defense is so bad it will keep them from playing, but put it here because I love their depth chart tool. The articles there are really well done, too.

Hope this helps!

 

[LogansDad]

I will also add that if you plan to export data to work with it in a spreadsheet/database, Fangraphs is the way to go for me because their base export includes their unique player IDs, something that B-Ref does not include.

 

[zenax]

While Project Retrosheet may not have the data broken down as you want it, you can get play=by-play data for many years...but you will need database software to handle it. There are also a number of studies written using that data available under Features.

Retrosheet's Game Collection
As of our most recent release, Retrosheet has compiled the following game data.

• Complete play-by-play data for all AL and NL seasons for 1912 and from 1917 - 2023.
  

  Some of these accounts are deduced from newspaper stories and box scores. Some games are deduced for the following seasons: 1917 - 1959, 1962 - 1968.

• Play-by-play data have also been released for most games for the 1913 - 1916 seasons (including Federal League games in 1914 and 1915).
• Box-score data have been compiled for the 1871, 1872, and 1874 NA seasons and the 1901 - 1911 AL and NL seasons. Box-score files are also available for all AL/NL(/FL) games played from 1912 - 1949 and for deduced games from 1950 - 1968.
• Negro League data have been compiled for the 1940 - 1948 seasons. In addition, Negro League data have been compiled for several hundred notable games played prior to 1940.
• Download all of Retrosheet's data here. (242Mb zip file).

 

[AlNipper49]

I've used this in the past. It's easy enough to install and it fairly intuitive once you get the hang of it.

https://github.com/jldbc/pybaseball