Minor League Splits Blog

I’ve made several small improvements to the site in the last week or so.  Foremost among them is the addition of three new categories of leaders: August, Park Adjusted, and MLEs.  For instance, you can quickly find out who led the International League in HRs in August, who allowed the lowest park-adjusted batting average in the Carolina League, or who had the highest Minor League Equivalency batting average in the full-season Minors.

I also made several corrections to my method for calculating MLEs for pitchers, to bring my numbers into closer agreement with Sean Smith’s.  (I am using his method–I might as well do it right!)  Further, I now alter batted ball numbers for Park and MLE stats.  Since K’s, BB’s, and HR’s often differ from a player’s overall stat line, the number of batted balls changes–I just adjust the batted-ball totals to reflect that.

Other exciting new features are on their way!

Couple of things: now, on every splits table (player, team, or league), if you mouse over a walk or strikeout total, you will see the relevant K/PA or BB/PA rate.  That’s for both pitchers and hitters.

Also, you may have noticed that when players have no at-bats, their rate stats (AVG, OBP, etc.) are given as “0″ instead of “.000.”  That’s by design, but due to a mistake in my code, hitters with no at-bats but at least one plate appearance weren’t showing OBPs or OPSs.  That’s fixed.  Now all OBPs and OPSs should be correct–or at least consistent with the rest of my data.

Major improvement to batted ball tables: now, mousing over any entry in a table gives you a percent for that entry.  In other words, if you’re looking at Sean Smith’s batted ball table, all you see at first is a bunch of raw numbers: 376 total batted balls, 85 to them right, 34 of them groundball hits, etc.  To see the percentage equivalents, mouse over any number.  In the “Overall” column, you might see GB%, outs per fly ball, hits per line drive, etc.  In every other column, the percent given is the percent of balls (in that column) to reach that destination.

It’s simple, it’s fun, and it saves you an excel query!

I had just about forgotten about this until I found a note on a weeks-old list of possible improvements to the site.  All along, my databases have contained batted ball tables (like Corey Hart’s, here) for each team and league.  I just hadn’t made them available on the site.  It’s great data to have available–if you’re going to analyze the nuances of a player’s batted ball results, it’s much better to have aggregate league numbers to compare them to.

Now, you can see aggregate batted ball data for both pitchers and hitters for each team and league in Minor League Baseball.  For example, see team pitching data for the Altoona Curve, or total batted ball data for the Midwest League.  For some reason, total batting and pitching data doesn’t match up exactly–in the case of the MWL, it’s off by about two hundreths of a percent.  This happened when I first aggregated league splits, as well; I’ll eventually figure out what’s amiss and fix it up.

Also, I just fixed the script to generate a player’s cumulative stats (see Ryan Braun’s, here).  The way my data is stored, if a player has accumulated any stats for a certain split (say, batting as a leftfielder, or pitching in the third inning), there’s still a blank line.  All along, the regular team-specific splits table scripts edited out those blank lines before showing them to you.  I forgot to include that in the cumulative stat script.  It’s now fixed, so you’ll have far fewer useless zeroes to distract you next time you look at a player’s overall numbers.

Enjoy!