BtB Sabermetric Writing Award Results: Best Online Resource

Thanks to everyone who voted for the Best Online Resource. The category is to encompasses:

Best sabermetric resource website, with emphasis on new sites, or improvements to existing sites made over the past year. Often these are websites that make statistics more readily available to lay users, though other definitions of resources may also be used.

To those of us that spend way to much time pressing Control - C and Control - V on our keyboards or wishing for the master name ID mapping file, these sources are indispensable. They allow researchers and writers to find the numbers they need in nice concise fashion. This past year saw some great advancements and improvements in data manipulation and we are sure to see more in the future.

First, not everyone can place, so I would like to extend a congratulations to the other websites that were nominated (sites are listed in alphabetical order):

Brooks Baseball

Darrell Zimmerman's pitch f/x SQL dump

TexasLeaguers.com Pitch F/X database

WPA Inquirer

I will get to the winners in a second, but I would like thank everyone again for not letting my brother in the top 3. I would have never heard the end.  I don't have a ton of sanity and you may have saved what little is left.

3. Joe Lefkowitz's Pitch F/X Tool

Manipulating and dispensing Pitch F/X data was common among the nominations with it it being the main point of 4 of the 7 nominations. Joe's Pitch F/X tool is easy to use and allows the user to exactly the data they need with many options available. Do you need to find out where Tim McClelland calls balls when a right handed pitcher is facing a right handed batter? This is the tool for you. Nice work.

2. Rally's rWAR

When this dataset came out last summer, I must have spent hours looking through it comparing players. The rWAR dataset was first of its kind by using WAR as the data and going so far back in time. It has spawned much debate since its release on topics like best players to helping determine who should or should not be in the Hall of Fame.   I limited myself to only voting for one choice in each category and Rally got my vote. Good job.

1. FanGraphs' implementation of UZr, wOBA, wRC, wRC+, and WAR

Fangraphs is becoming the one stop shop for all data. My love for them started when I saw one of there game graphs linked one day:

via www.fangraphs.com

Who can't like the game graphic. But David Appelman never rests and continues to added more and more useful information and this last year was no exception.

How did us fans survive all those years without a place to get wOBA?  How was a budding researcher supposed to get his data for UZR projections? Congratulations Fangraphs, you have earned your SABRE and I can't wait to see the next big improvement.