Welcome to FanGraphs Feature Focus, a new midweek series highlighting some of the site’s most overlooked tools at your disposal as a FanGraphs user. With so many great tools, leaderboards and statistics here at FanGraphs, it can be easy to lose track; my aim is to enlighten them. Since I spend about half of my time working on RosterResource and the rest helping to develop new features and improve old ones, I’m very familiar with everything the site has to offer. Plus, because I’m online a lot, I’m very familiar with how others use FanGraphs, which means I have a good feeling that features aren’t getting as much traction as their usage suggests they should.
This post will take different forms depending on the FanGraphs Feature it is focused on. Sometimes they’ll be quick “Hey, here it is, cheer up!” pieces; sometimes they will be in-depth studies that explain how our most complex tools work. If there’s an unfamiliar feature of our site menus that you’d like to know more about, drop it in the comments below. It may be the Focus of a future Feature!
Today’s featured feature is the Featured Leaders page, which can be found under the Leaders site menu:
This page allows you to choose from three measurement methods, with the result of viewing the levels arranged in the same way as an Excel pivot table. We will start with position mode. There’s a lot to find here, but the basic question this mod is meant to answer is: What’s the leaderboard like? [insert stat of your choosing here] changed over the years? Ranking mode only shows the top five players in a given statistic, but the default of 10 years can be changed to any age range you’d like, starting with 1871:
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The top menu bar gives you a variety of filtering options. In addition to the season range, you can set a different minimum playing time or age range, look for AL- or NL-only, and swap WAR (default) for any hitting or pitching stat from our extensive list of options, including new added stats that include ABS challenges:
In addition to the default Ranking mode, where a single value is selected and a view shows how the leaderboard for that figure appeared, the top right selector includes two other options: Compare Players and Compare Stats. As mentioned, Ranking mode shows how a given figure’s leaderboard has changed over the years, while Player Comparison shows how a specific set of players has seen their place on a given leaderboard for changing stats over the years:
Compare Players mode automatically matches the top five players by WAR regardless of whether you choose another limited statistic, but you can use the Set Players button to select a different universe of players. There is no limit to how many players you can select, although you will have to scroll to the right to see additional player levels if you include more than five. You can also assign each player a color, which will highlight their cell in the table:
Finally, there’s the Compare Stats mode, which (as its name pretty much implies) lets you choose as many stats as you see fit and compare your set of player ratings to those stats over time. Here, I limited my selection to 2026 and took the offensive stats of the top five leaders in WAR:
While this feature is available to all FanGraphs users, some features that I will highlight in future Feature Focus articles are only available to our members. If you are not yet a FanGraphs Member, you can sign up here. It’s the best way to experience the site and support our work. And thanks to our existing Members!
