2014 site updates/enhancements

[Kevin]

Thanks in part to feedback I've received from all of you over the years, I have a long list of ideas I would like to implement to improve this web site. Some of those ideas are further along than others, but expect a bunch of new features coming soon. I decided to start this thread to keep a running log of site changes and enhancements. Feel free to subscribe to this thread if you are interested in being notified when these changes are announced. Also, if you have your own ideas for new features, you can reply in this thread as well, or start a new one.

With that, I have one new enhancement to announce tonight. I made changes to the team and free agent pages to add red cross icons to identify players who are suffering from injuries. I found a pretty good source for injury data. A new overnight process will retrieve this data and update an injury table. This isn't guaranteed to be completely accurate data, so I would still encourage you to do your own research as well. But hopefully seeing this icon might help keep you up to speed on the health of your players. The presence of the icon does not mean the player is on the disabled list. It's possible he is only suffering from something minor. Fortunately, I'm also able to grab a brief description of the injury with an estimated return date. To see this information, simply hover over the icon and a text pop-up will appear. I'm not sure how well this will work on smart phones, but at least you will be able to see the icon.

Eventually, I would like to be able to explicitly identify players who are on the disabled list (which I used to be able to do way back in the day), but we're not quite there yet. I think this new enhancement should be helpful though.

[Kevin]

New update: The league standings page now lets you select a specific date to see what the standings and team stats looked like on the selected date. For ten years, I've been storing all of the team stats and standings at the end of the daily update process. But prior to now, I have done absolutely nothing with this data. So now the standings page will let you select any date going back to 2004. Please note that data is only available for dates when a stat update actually ran. So if you start picking random dates in the middle of the winter, you aren't going to see anything. Similarly, there may be scattered dates over the years where no data is available, such as past All-Star breaks. But to the best of my knowledge, the data is available for almost every regular season date since 2004.

An interesting extension to this update would be to not only view the standings and team stats for specific dates, but player stats as well. Unfortunately, that is not possible at this time because I have never saved historic/daily player stats. Maybe sometime down the road...

One thing I would like to do is take this a step further and provide some graphical representation of the historic data. For instance, I could produce line graphs of teams' point or stat category totals over a given time period. This exact feature is available in FanGraphs' ottoneu leagues, so I'm going to see if it's something I can bring here too. It is very handy for tracking how teams are trending.

[Marc]

Kevin, something is wrong with the site. It says my team sucks. Please fix

[Kevin]

The baseball gods are angry at you for giving up on Derek Jeter so quickly. The kid has a future!