Kilg.us – Fantasy Stat Tracker …Tracker

Now that Kilg.us is migrated and–seemingly–stable, I can actually make some improvements!

First up are some stats additions. The easiest request was to include total bases. Because this is calculated based on data we already have, I was able to implement it pretty quickly. To enable Total Bases for any of your teams, visit the “Select Stats” page for that team. You will see a checkbox for “TB.” Checking that box and saving your changes should add a TB column right after strikeouts.

The most commonly requested stats that Kilg.us does not currently have are games played. While this data isn’t conveniently available in the MLB XML data Kilg.us uses, I think I have determined a way to deduce whether a player has played in the day’s game(s) or not. That will take significantly more effort, though, so it will have to wait. Perhaps this weekend I’ll find some time.

Yesterday I started receiving notes that players’ season at-bats in Kilg.us were topping out at 127, even when MLB was reporting a higher value. The reason was a simple oversight in database design. All the numeric values were defined as “tinyint” within the database. This is what is used throughout the daily stats, so it was copied over when the season stats tables were created.

Tinyint is a data-type that only allows for values from -127 to 127. This is great for daily stats (the only daily stat I could imagine passing 127 would be a pitch-count), but doesn’t work so well for season stats. I have changed the data-type to “smallint” for all fields that could exceed 127 in a full-season. Smallint will allow values up to 32767.

Season-to-date stats are collected on a scheduled basis, every 15 minutes. In the next few minutes we should see season-to-date at-bat values correcting themselves. I’ll be monitoring this to ensure it happens so I can diagnose further problems if it doesn’t work.

Thanks to all of you that chimed in with this issue and for providing details so I could correct it quickly!

Since the release of season-to-date stats, a lot of people have been asking for games played and games started to be included. I’m doing some research to find a reliable place to find such a statistic. If I can find it–and figure out how it plays into a paradigm with daily stats, too–I will incorporate it. The level of effort to include it is pretty minimal, assuming it can be found. More details to come.

A comment yesterday brought to my attention that Kilg.us was not showing WHIP values for individual players on their Season-to-Date stats. This was an oversight in an assumption I made about the data Kilg.us was collecting and storing.

Each time Kilg.us renders stats, it checks to see if the latest stats are in the database or if they need to be collected. If the latest ones are in the database, it displays those. If not, it collects the new ones, saves them, and displays them. The XML data from MLB contains the season WHIP stat for each pitcher. So I assumed I was also storing that value in the database.

As it turns out, I wasn’t. The database stores the counting values (innings, hits, walks, etc). Kilg.us  then calculates the average stats (WHIP, ERA, k/9, etc.) based on the counting stats. In the Pitcher object, it was attempting to pull the WHIP value from the dataset returned, which works when collecting new stats from MLB. When the latest stats are in the database, though, that WHIP value doesn’t exist, so “-.–” is displayed instead.

I have updated the Pitcher object to calculate the WHIP value whenever it is needed. This means WHIP should be displaying in Season-to-Date stat views now. If you find otherwise, let me know!

Kilg.us now retains your last view state for each one of your teams. This serves as a low-complexity mechanism for allowing you to define a default view for your teams–whether it be Today’s stats or Season-to-Date stats.

Each time you switch between viewing daily and season stats for your teams, Kilg.us now makes a record. Which ever view you looked at last will be the view it presents when you return to your team the next time.

This seemed like a simpler interface than adding an additional control to toggle back-and-forth between settings. While a separate control would add slightly more flexibility, I think this mechanism will be just as effective and require less effort for both users and myself.

So if you always want to see Season-to-Date stats for your team, all you have to do is click over to that tab the first time, and for the rest of eternity you’ll see Season-to-Date stats (until you manually switch back to daily stats). If you only ever want to see daily stats, you actually don’t have to do anything (daily stats are the default until you select otherwise).

To accomplish this, the Teams table in the database was extended to include a “View” field. In addition, the Team object was extended to allow for setting and getting that View value. Each time you access a team page, the page checks for a view variable in the query-string (these are what the “Today” and “Season-to-Date” tabs use to set the view state). If that variable exists, it updates the default setting for the team. If it doesn’t exist if asks the Team object what the default state is and uses that instead.