An Equally Exciting Update to Our Player Cards | Baseball Prospectus

[My best Professor Farnsworth voice]

Good news everyone!

We are extremely excited and happy to announce a long overdue and labor-intensive update to our leaderboards and player cards! This post will focus mostly on the player cards, but in another bit of good news, there is going to be a massive amount of overlap between the options available on player cards and leaderboards from this point forward. So if you become comfortable using one, you’ll be quite content using the other as well.

Let’s start from the top down. Much of the information at the top of the card remains the same, with the biographical info, stats overview, and recent articles. The first major change is instead of a box that has, for several years, said the at-a-glance section will be coming soon…there’s actually an at-a-glance section!

For batters, that entails the old standbys, but also relevant swing decision information, launch angle, 90th percentile exit velocity, and defensive metrics.

For pitchers, you’re treated to Stephen Sutton-Brown’s excellent work that plots the movement of each pitcher’s offerings on the right-hand side, with the corresponding StuffPro grades on the left-hand side. This also, necessarily, will provide you with the full complement of each pitcher’s repertoire, as tagged by PitchInfo.

That visual will be available for all pitchers who have the data we need to generate it (which should include Triple-A and some lower minors pitchers), but those who do not will instead get a table akin to the batters, with pertinent information.

Next we’ll move to where the bulk of the update has taken place. Thanks to the tireless efforts of Tom Gieryn and Robert Au, we have overhauled both the tabs and what metrics appear in tabs on both leaderboards and player cards. More importantly, though, we’ve added a significant amount of functionality in terms of what you can do with that data. Rob Mains highlighted some of this functionality in his article today, but I’ll discuss a little more as well. Below is Mookie Betts’ card:

The first thing you’ll notice in this section is the massive number of new include and filter options. These are tremendously powerful in what they allow you to query. As you would expect, on player cards this will apply only to the player in question, but broadly the same set of options will be available on leaderboards as well.

Next you will note the sequence of the player card stats on the Summary tab has changed, with the most notable difference being that WARP occupies the right-most column, with its important component parts directly preceding it.

One adjustment I’m truly excited about is the addition of the Deserved Totals and Deserved Rates tabs:

The impetus for these tabs is that we know that deserved metrics are not always the most intuitive. Some of the adjustments our flagship metrics make under the surface aren’t always simple to ferret out, even when you know what to look for. To that end, we have tabs that note the “observed” totals and rates (what actually happened) and put them side by side with the deserved totals and rates. This should provide clarity, not only that an adjustment is being made, but what the knock-on effects are, of say, a lower deserved home run rate than observed home run rate. Those balls that would be homers could be reallocated to doubles or outs or walks or…any number of things. But now you can see where they’re going.

While the above is Betts’ card, the same setup will be present on pitcher cards as well.

Another thing folks have been asking about for some time is to have SEAGER available on cards and leaderboards. Ask no more, you’ll find it under the Plate Discipline tab:

And the last change to organization of the tabs I want to highlight is the addition of average exit velocity, 90th Percentile EV, Max EV, and launch angle to player cards.

Before we leave you to play around (and please, do play around!) with all of these new features, I want to highlight another one of the things I am most excited about within this update. Remember when I mentioned all the includes and filters being available on player cards (and leaderboards) now? One of those filters is something folks have been asking for for a long time: arbitrary endpoint splits.

So for example, let’s say you know Pete Crow-Armstrong had a strong second half at the plate, but wanted to see his process stats that led to those good numbers. You can head over to the Batted Ball tab, select the date filter and select 8/1/2024-9/30/2024:

And find…that despite the nice results (nice .621 SLGCON!), his average EV was only 85.4 during this period of play. (You’ll note that 90th EV isn’t available under this split, and that will be the case for various metrics that aren’t split-able (or useful when split in certain ways) throughout the cards and leaderboards.)

You can then head over to the Summary tab to see what this meant for his DRC+ in this time—the filter will hold as you bounce between tabs:

A 105 DRC+ is solid, but well below the .803 OPS he recorded in this time. You can even see what his deserved OPS would be (.734) thanks to a lower home rate per DRC+, in the Deserved Rates tab:

These same splits and tabs will be available for pitchers, as well, along with the repertoire-specific information you’ve come to expect on pitcher cards.

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I hope you’ve enjoyed this jaunt through our overhauled player cards (and leaderboards) as much as I’ve enjoyed walking you through it. I’m beyond excited about these updates, and hope (and expect) you’ll find them exceptionally useful. They would not be remotely possible without the unbelievably hard work put in by Tom, Robert, Patrick Dubuque, Rob Mains, and more. We hope you love them!

And yes…we already have additional updates planned.