Welcome To PL8 – Here’s What New On Our Website

Welcome to PL8.

The focus for this year’s update to Pitcher List centered around creating an improved experience on the website, including a fresh set of fantasy tools paired with the integration of our new metric PLV.

Let’s get to it.

 

2023 Fantasy Baseball Draft Kit

As always, we launch with all our fantasy baseball rankings for the year ahead inside our draft kit. Check them out here and dive into all our player rankings.

 

Website Improvements

We took the time to polish many elements of the Pitcher List website, from mobile enhancements to player page and homepage features. These may seem subtle at first, but they completely change how you interact with the site.

 

Mobile Design

We spent the time to give player pages a dedicated mobile (and tablet) experience, making it easier than ever to look up your favorite players.

 

 

Custom Article Feed

PL+ Members have been able to enjoy their own personal article feed on the pitcher list homepage and we’ve added a far easier method to create your filters.

You can filter by article type, team, player, and category in a heartbeat.

 

Player Page Additions

We had a good amount of feedback on our player pages and I’m excited to share some welcome additions to our player pages this year.

 

MLB Percentiles For Every Stat

We added league averages last year and now we’re adding percentiles. There’s no better way to learn about a stat now on our player pages as you have:

• Definitions via tooltips upon hover
• MLB League averages
• MLB Percentile ranks

We’ve elected to activate Percentiles and League Average rows for all tables during the pre-season to teach users they exist – make sure to toggle them when you’d like in-season when we turn them back off.

 

Improved Game Logs

We added some missing stats to our Game Logs (O-Swing, Hard Contact, Strike Rate), but most importantly, we improved our Pitch Detail Section (click on the row to open it):

https://gfycat.com/craftyvalidgallowaycow

 

We’ve added:

• Usage and MPH arrow indicators (these are based on all games in-season prior to that game, not the average for the full year. The first game refers to the previous year’s average)
• Introduced three tabs – Overview, PLV, Advanced
• Hard Contact and Strike% to Overview
• O-Swing% to Advanced
• PLV stats to…PLV
• The SP Roundup Blurb is still there for every start made by a pitcher. Don’t forget it’s there!

 

We also plan on adding popular ERA Estimators to pitching pages in the near future, as well as implementing rolling charts for all the data on the site. We’ll let you know when those go live.

 

PLV Added

I’m sure many of you have no idea what PLV is. In short, PLV (Pitch Level Value) is a pitch quantifier similar to Eno Sarris’ Pitching+ and Cameron Grove’s PitchingBot where we use a machine learning projection model to analyze the pitch itself regardless of the context. We grade all pitches on a 0-10 scale with 5 being average. It’s way simpler to grasp than other scales we tested.

What makes me so excited about PLV is how we’re using it. Instead of giving the pitch a number and calling it a day, we’re using PLV to analyze what happens after the pitch is thrown better than ever. Was that a homerun off a meatball or a tough four-seamer? Is this batter making the right swing decisions? Did the pitcher get their deserved results based on the pitches they threw?

There are so many applications we can make simply by answering the question “was this a good pitch or a bad pitch?” and we couldn’t be more excited to explore the possibilities through the season.

Some examples of PLV metrics are:

PLA – Grading each pitcher’s pitch in their arsenal on the ERA scale to get a quick idea of its effectiveness.

QP%, AP% BP%, Q-BP% – We bucketed PLV into Quality Pitches, Average Pitches, and Bad Pitches where QP > 5.5 PLV and BP < 4.5 PLV. This becomes the most simple form of “was that a good pitch or bad pitch?”

HP – Hitter Performance. With the pitch quantified, we can calculate how well the hitter did to get the final result. In short, we calculate the expected run difference a pitch should have, then compare it to the actual result and assign that to the hitter. Example: This pitch is normally a strike and would lower the expected runs, but instead the hitter got a single.

Hit Luck – We look at the hits allowed and the hits PLV predicted and show you the difference. It’s a simpler form of BABIP that utilizes the pitches themselves and normalizes the field.

 

Be on the lookout for a lengthier primer on PLV out later today, but for now, you can mess around with the following Google Sheet of data as well as these two apps to quickly find the player you want.

Please note: These PLV apps will only be free to non-PL Pro members for a few months as we want you to have fun with our new stat.

PLV Stats For Pitchers

PLV Stats For Hitters

Pitcher PLV App

Hitter PLV App

 

We also have many more applications of PLV already in the workshop, including an ERA estimator and I can’t wait to explore everything we can do with PLV later in 2023 and beyond.

 

PL Pro – Launches February 21st

You may have noticed we’ve added a new subscription to Pitcher List this year: PL Pro. For a full outline of all the features, check out this article, but here’s the quick run-down of the new fantasy tools we’re giving to subscribers:

 

2023 Season Projections

We’ve been working with Jesse Wolfersberger to bring a new type of projection system to the market, powered by PLV. Instead of mean regressions, we’ve created a pitch simulator, allowing us to derive value from the raw skills of both pitcher and hitter. It’s a more aggressive projection system than others, which allows us to add interesting outliers to the projection market instead of the general conservative approaches.

 

Auction Draft Calculator

Create dollar values for players based on your league settings, powered by our proprietary PLV projection system and view all our projections in one place.

 

Live Draft War Room Big Board

I was personally intimidated by the Google Sheet draft assistants out there and we made our own that’s incredibly intuitive and easy to use. You can choose between using our PLV Projections or the award-winning ATC projections for your drafts.

 

Fantasy Projections In-Season – Daily and Weekly

Let PL Bot decide the best move to make each day for you, while also getting a quick view of what’s ahead. Incredibly helpful for weekly leagues. This will launch the week of Opening Day

 

DFS Projections

Using our PLV Projection system that runs via simulation instead of mean regressions, we’re able to be a differentiator when you need it most. This will launch the week of Opening Day

 

What’s Next

We’re always moving forward here at Pitcher List and there’s plenty more we want to tackle on the site. Here are some features we hope to rollout in the near future:

 

Live Daily Leaderboards with Pitch Details

Rolling Charts 

Dedicated PLV pages and featured on leaderboards

More Career Data

Improved Filtering Speed

…and a few surprises I’m going to hold off sharing for now.

 

That’s all for now. Please give us your feedback and I can’t wait for baseball to return. As always, thanks so much for supporting what we do and we’ll continue to strive forward to be the best baseball website we can be.

-Nick

 

Featured image by Justin Paradis (@JustParaDesigns)