This is the sixth of ten features we are adding for our 10th anniversary.

We have presented Sean Smith's Total Zone on our site for about two years now, but we have always just updated at the end of the year. Working with Sean, we are now updating major league Total Zone on a daily basis.

That would be big news on its own, but we have also added Sean's Minor League Total Zone for all available players from 2005-2009. You can now see that Jason Heyward was a beast in right field (11 runs above avg per year) and Buster Posey was worth 11 runs behind the plate last year. We currently do not have plans to update that during the year, but that could change at a later date.

And there's more. I have long admired the defensive work that Baseball Info Solutions has presented each year in the Fielding Bible and considered it to be the best available. I'm very pleased to announce that we have reached an agreement to present their advanced fielding statistics on the site, and not just for this year, but for 2003 to the present, updated daily.

This includes:
Total Defensive Runs Saved
Plus/Minus Runs Saved (typical fielding plays)
Bunt Runs Saved
Stolen Base Runs Saved (for catcher and pitcher)
Catcher Earned Runs Saved
DP Runs Saved
Outfield Arms Runs Saved
Outfield Home Run Saving Catches

This has necessitated moving some things around and adding a new fielding table to the players' fielding "More Stats" area. The basic fielding table on the main player, team, and league pages now contains just Rtot and Rtot/yr for the total zone numbers and DRS and DRS/yr for the Fielding Bible overall runs saved data, when available.

The complete breakdown for each of the two metrics is now in a Sabermetric Fielding table located on the More Fielding Stats page for players. Here is Derek Jeter's More fielding page. You can always get to these pages using the nav bar above the player name or the "More Stats" link next to the fielding header.

For teams and leagues, the standard fielding pages likewise show Rtot and Rtot/yr for the total zone numbers and DRS and DRS/yr for the Fielding Bible overall runs saved data. Then the positional breakdowns for the teams have the breakouts for the runs saved data. Here is the 2010 National League Shortstops (team and by player) and the 2005 San Diego Padres (scroll down for positional reports).

Remember that all of the tables are sortable by clicking on the column header, holding your mouse over the header brings up a description, and that clicking share just above the stats, allows you to remix the stats for you to share them via a link, e-mail bulletin board, etc.

I also decided that fielding stats had been a second-class citizen for long enough, so I have added leaderboards for the fielding stats. These leaderboards also now appear in the leaderboard summary for teams that appears at the bottom of the pages.

We now have career leaderboards for each position and overall and year-by-year leaderboards for each of these stats as well. For an individual league page, click on Fielding under the "Leaders&Awards" tab, just above the first table of stats. Using these pages, you can now find out that Mike Piazza led the league in Stolen Bases Allowed a record 9 times.

I haven't added fielding to the Play Index, sorry, but I hope to get that added over the summer, time permitting.

We hope you enjoy these additions to the site. Comments, questions and suggestions are always welcome.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 10th, 2010 at 11:11 am and is filed under 10 for 10, Announcements, Power Users, Site Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.