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Last night, I added FIP (short for Fielding Independent Pitching) to the site. This is a sabermetric stat for pitchers that approximates ERA without the effect of their team's fielding ability. FIP actually correlates to future ERA better than ERA itself making it a superior indicator of future performance.

The idea is that the pitcher most directly controls the number of walks, home runs and strikeouts that occur and that the batters and fielders have a bigger say on whether balls in play are turned into outs and that most pitchers' Batting Average on Balls in Play (BAbip) reverts to a league average from one year to the next.

FIP is (13*HR + 3*(BB+HBP) - 2*SO)/IP + Constant(year). The constant is set so the yearly avg FIP equals the yearly avg ERA.

FIP can be looked at exactly like ERA and is scaled to exactly the same league average as ERA, but it's range will be slightly smaller.

Often a player with a low FIP and high ERA will improve, while a low ERA and high FIP indicates a likely regression as more hits start falling. I've placed FIP next to ERA to make this comparison more obvious, but if it begins making the ERA lookup too hard, I may move it further right on the pitching tables.

I've also added FIP and K% to the Play Index Season Finder. Right now, I don't believe we will add xFIP given the inconsistency in batted ball data, but that could change.

Player with big gap in FIP and ERA: Ricky Nolasco.

Practice Shot Charts.

NBA.com has really upped the level of detail they've added, so we're trying to respond with the latest and greatest data we can get. We've recently come to an agreement with a number of franchises for access to their practice film and have begun breaking down scrimmage data.

Practice shot charts seem to us the next frontier in basketball analytics. This data will show you who's improving, who isn't, and who is working on new aspects of their game. It's especially useful for players without a lot of playing time.

Before we roll it out sidewide, we've prepared some sample charts.

Here is a google doc containing every team-season in our database since 1957, including the Head Coach and offensive & defensive coordinators. It also specifies those coaches' preferred offensive or defensive schemes (depending on which side of the ball they specialize in), and attempts to figure out the general offensive family (i.e. Air Coryell, Erhardt-Perkins, etc) each team-season fell into.

THIS IS BY NO MEANS COMPLETE. In fact, it's very much incomplete at this stage -- and that's where you come in. In the comments of this post, or in an email, we'd love to hear corrections and/or additions to the data, if you see an entry about which you know more than we do (and it's a good bet you do). Thanks in advance for your help, and hopefully we can assemble a more complete listing of teams' systems/schemes, which will let us do things like compute splits vs. a certain type of offense or defense, analyze whether 4-3 or 3-4 defenses were better in a given season, etc.

So let those corrections/additions pour in!

I am very close to having a complete set of proofed line scores (i.e., scoring by quarter) for the 1950-51 NBA season forward. By "proofed" I mean that I have verified that the line score total equals the team point total. There are almost 55,000 regular season and playoff games in that period, but I only have 21 12 issues that need to be resolved.

First, here are the cases where the line score total does not match the team's point total:

195111100BOS BOS pts  83 (game)  84 (line) Found!
195812270PHW PHW pts 114 (game) 115 (line) Found!
195812270PHW STL pts 108 (game) 105 (line) Found!
196003090DET MNL pts 116 (game) 117 (line) Found!
196011050STL STL pts 119 (game) 120 (line) Found!
196111180STL CIN pts 133 (game) 136 (line) Found!
196203040SYR SYR pts 115 (game) 105 (line) Found!
196301310SYR SYR pts 112 (game) 102 (line)
196403010DET SFW pts 100 (game)  94 (line)
196403170LAL PHI pts  97 (game)  94 (line)
196602160NYK SFW pts 108 (game) 106 (line)

Second, here are the games that are missing line scores:

195011040WSC MNL and WSC
195011110NYK SYR and NYK Found!
195011110WSC BOS and WSC Found!
195011150MNL SYR and MNL
195011220BLB NYK and BLB
195011250WSC SYR and WSC
195101060WSC FTW and WSC
195102220NYK TRI and NYK
195103290SYR NYK and SYR Found!
196203120LAL NYK and LAL

I have almost exhausted the resources that I have at my disposal, so I would be very grateful if any of you could lend a hand. You can post additions/corrections here or submit them using our feedback form. Please supply documentation to support your claim. Thanks in advance for any help that you can provide.