An Exciting Update to Our Leaderboards | Baseball Prospectus

Happy new feature week, everyone. In just 24 hours, BP’s player pages will have gotten a facelift, with some cool new features and visualizations. There aren’t as many colorful graphics in the guts of the machine, but for those interested in wading into the depths of our sortable leaderboards, there’s a wealth of cool changes and new metrics, some of which you won’t be able to find anywhere else. You’ll find them all under the Statistics tab of the top header bar. 

Let’s take a quick tour of what’s already there, accessible to everyone, and what’s new. Additionally, if you haven’t arrived here via the front page, be sure to check out Rob Mains with a sample of the research these new leaderboards can provide.

Filters

One of the most consequential updates to the leaderboards is the expansion of our filters. In the past you could slice the data a few ways, restricting minimum plate appearances, selecting specific teams and positions and leagues. We’ve expanded that in a few ways, providing far greater control on how you divide plate appearances, allowing you to select your own minimum and maximum bands. The same goes for date ranges: You can now pick specific months or specific dates, meaning that our old team-level monthly splits are now just baked into the main leaderboard rather than dwelling in their own little domain. 

BP’s leaderboards always had minor-league data included, so you could sort the best hitters and pitchers in Triple-A down to the rookie and winter leagues. But another fun new feature is that you can group leaderboards by organization and level, meaning it’s very easy to collect the statistics of all of a team’s minor leaguers in one list, using the Parent Org filter. Combining that with the date ranges can give you an instant look at how your team’s farm has fared in the past week, or month. And our leaderboards have always included seasonal age, a handy feature, but now come equipped with an age filter, so you can check out how the teenagers are doing, or the 40+ club. (Not great, on that last one.)

Hitting Tabs

Right up front, you’ll notice (or you may not notice, but appreciate) that we’ve cleaned up and reorganized the organization of our statistics. This is evident on the summary tab, where we’ve divided the basic statistical information for each player in a readable way. My favorite part of the summary tab for hitters is the last four columns: DRC+, BRR, DRP, and WARP, which adds up all the contributions of a player into their final sum. 

Tucked in the standard tab, which has all the usual counting stats you’d expect, is an old chestnut: Guillen Number. This one is for the team-level filter, and tells you how many of a team’s runs arrived through homers. Leading the pack last year, naturally, were the Oakland Athletics, who scored 49% of their runs on the backs of dingers.

One big change is that the old Deserved tab has been split into two: Deserved Totals and Deserved Rates. If you ever wonder why a hitter’s DRC+ doesn’t match his OPS+, this is the place to go. Take, for example, José Caballero, who’s hitting the stuffing out of the ball (150 OPS+), except that, well, he isn’t: Instead of a .300/.404/.500 line heading into Thursday’s contest, DRC+ rates his performance as earning a .203/.300/.306 slash line. 

This data is reflected on the player pages as well, but now you can see a direct comparison between a player’s “observed” output (what they’ve done) and what DRC+ believes should have been their “deserved” output, based on the aspects of their performance under their control. Let’s just say that Caballero’s hit totals include a pop-fly bunt that landed in no-man’s land, three extra base hits narrowly in fair territory, and a bunch of shallow fly balls that the outfielders gave up on two steps short, and probably shouldn’t have. The Deserved Totals tab gives you the counting stats, while the Deserved Rates tab provides not only the triple slash but the rates of all the major outcomes. 

The Plate Discipline tab hasn’t changed much—it was already one of our newest data sources, including not only the usual batting eye rates but also CSAA (the rate of called strikes a batter sees above average) and the useful whiff rate against pitch groups, so you can see who swings through the most fastballs or sliders. But the big addition, and one that should make a lot of folks happy, is the incorporation of SEAGER, our metric for quantifying swing decisions not just on bad pitches, but also on the good ones. 

Finally, the Batted Ball tab gets a bunch of new columns. A personal favorite of mine, SLGCON (slugging percentage on contact) joins BABIP. But probably the most attention will go to the inclusion of exit velocity and launch angle, including the always useful 90th percentile EV, which gives you a clearer indication of how hard a batter hits it when he hits it well, by ignoring the fluke max result as well as the plethora of mis-hits that would be outs whether they were going 70 or 85 mph. 

Pitching Tabs

The pitching tabs have seen an equal amount of cleanup, with one small but valuable addition on the summary tab in the form of HR% next to K% and BB%. It’s an important stat and surprisingly difficult to track down, particularly on a leaderboard: Don’t accept HR/9 as a substitute. ERA, RA9, and DRA are all lined up together for easy reference, since DRA scales against RA9 and not ERA, something people tend to forget. DRA- and WARP have been moved to the far right side, where summary stats belong. As with the hitters, hurlers’ deserved stats have been broken out into two tabs and expanded; it’s particularly nice to see observed and deserved strikeout and walk rates side by side.

The pitch detail tab is definitely easier to read now, with the four pitch groups (fastball, slider, changeup, curveball) clearly demarcated. We’ve also added the whiff rates for each group next to each pitcher, so you can sort by usage rate, velocity, or bat-missing ability. The plate discipline tab is largely unaffected, but does include a stat that’s hard to find on most leaderboards in PutAway%, the rate at which a pitcher records strike three after reaching strike two. Exit velocity and average launch angle figures are also available for pitchers to sort. And finally, we’ve added good old SLGCON to the batted ball tab for pitchers as well, because more people should be using SLGCON. It’s a good stat.

Fielding Tabs

Let’s face it: the fielding leaderboards don’t get the same amount of love that pitching and hitting do. Fielding stats are often unintuitive, and argue with other fielding stats. We’ve tried to both add new numbers while simultaneously simplifying the process, by using sections to break defensive value down into its components. 

Starting from the right, you have the total value stat, DRP. Moving left you’ll find the three major branches of defensive value that flow into that final score: range (RDA), arm (THR), and catcher defense (CDA). The latter is complicated and gets its own tab, the same way catchers get their own little stat boxes in the player comments in the Annual. But then moving farther left you get even more of a breakdown on the first two. For my purposes, RDA, THR and CDA are what I use, but you have the option to sort by whichever you prefer. 

The catching tab hasn’t changed much, beyond a little visual cleanup, but it’s a good place to see which catchers are good at framing, blocking, and both deterring and throwing out base stealers. 

Baserunning

For years, baserunning metrics came in two flavors: stolen bases, and caught stealing. That was it, because that was all we could count. Our new baserunning leaderboard reflects that there’s a lot more that goes into running than stealing, by doing the same thing with DRB that we do with DRP. Our overarching running metric is split into two categories: DRBa, which reflects the value of a runner after contact, and DRBn, their value when there’s no contact, namely, stealing and advancing on passed balls. Since each player has their own number of opportunities, you can sort by total DRB or per chance: Shohei Ohtani ruled the former, naturally, with his 59 stolen bases and 93.7% success rate, but on an opportunity basis, it was actually David Hamilton who was the most efficient basestealer.  

For the traditionalists, there’s good news as well: it turns out there are a few more ground-level numbers to play with. Something I’ve wanted for a long time is a pickoff column, but for the DRBa crowd we also have a fun new metric in the form of XBT%, or rate of extra bases taken. This calculates how often a runner was able to advance at least an additional 90+ feet on a batted ball (first-to-third or second-to-home on singles, first-to-home on doubles) given the number of times the lanes were open to them. The sniff test has already been passed: For 2024, the leaders in that category are Pete Crow-Armstrong, Jon Berti, and our old pal José Caballero.

PECOTA

Lastly, there’s the PECOTA tab, which hasn’t changed much, but can be easy to forget, because it’s pretty useful even after the season is underway. When looking at PECOTA you can check on our rest-of-season forecasts for each player, but there’s also a couple of extra filters to play with. One turns on or off the DC Flag, which selects whether players were assigned projected playing time by our depth charts team. You can also filter by team, age, and position. There’s also one more filter that should provide some entertainment: You can choose which percentile projection to use. The default is, naturally, 50th percentile, but you can choose any tenth, as well as 5th/95th and the extreme 1st and 99th percentile projections, for when you just want to see some numbers stretch out on an event horizon.

And that’s it! Nearly 1,700 words of explanation about a tool that should offer a wealth of exploration. But you’ll have to get them in quickly: We’ll release the second half of our site update shortly, this time focusing on our player cards. Make sure to check back then.