As you may recall, last month we rolled out the FanGraphs Baseball Simulator as part of FanGraphs Lab. A couple of days later, we added a home field advantage feature.
Well, we’re back with even more features!
Historical Players, Marcel Projections, and Season Stats
You can now select any player from all of baseball history for your simulations. Want Babe Ruth’s 1923 season outcomes in your sim? Not a problem! Want a 1999 version of Pedro Martínez on the mound? You can do that too!
For sims involving historical players, you can choose either Season Stats or Marcel projections. Season stats use outcome ratios (BB/PA, K/PA, etc) based on the players stats for that particular season. If you select the Marcel projections option, the Simulator will use projections that include data for the season selected (we’ve compiled Marcel projections for every season). For instance, if you choose Ruth’s 1923 season with Marcel projections, it will use his projection for the 1924 season.
Simulate a Game Already in Progress
You Aren’t a FanGraphs Member
It looks like you aren’t yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren’t logged in). We aren’t mad, just disappointed.
We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we’d like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.
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4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.
5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.
6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn’t sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)
7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.
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We hope you’ll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we’ve also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn’t want to overdo it.
Now you can start a game from any game state you like. You can also pre-fill a simulation from any point in a completed game using the play logs. The Simulator will fill in the lineups and pitchers at that point in the game, as well as any future pitchers who appeared in the game:
Park Factors
The Simulator now has park factor sliders, which are automatically set for the home team you choose and can be further adjusted to your liking.
Weather Factors
You can now add in weather factors, which are preset for each game based on the weather conditions at a particular park and how much the current forecast deviates from those average weather conditions. You can also choose your own weather settings, and the Simulator will calculate the multipliers based on a 70°F, 100 m, 1000 hPa, 60% humidity reference point.
League Averages
You can set the league environment to a particular year, which will impact the odds ratio calculation for the batter/pitcher matchups.
My Sims
If you’re a FanGraphs Member, you can see a list of all the simulations you’ve recently run and go back to the saved results from those sims.
As always, let us know if you run into any issues, or if you have any suggestions.