Welcome to the inaugural post of Feature Focus! We've spent years building useful baseball products, and we've found that some readers and subscribers are unaware of some of the many great offerings available at Baseball Prospectus. In this series, we'll be highlighting some of those features as a reminder of what you may have been missing. We're kicking things off with a fairly new addition to the site: Prospect Tracker, which gives BP users a convenient method of monitoring the progress and performance of baseball's top prospects.

Prospect Tracker was announced early in 2012, and some new features were added this season to make it even more powerful.

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The first new thing everyone will notice about the Prospect Tracker is that the "Submit" button is gone. That's because, when you make a new selection on the pulldown menus, the tracker now jumps to the desired page automatically.

Prospect Tracker has also undergone some improvements in functionality. The most substantial of these is that subscribers with Team Tracker teams can now review them using the same stats output, making monitoring all those minor leaguers in super-deep leagues quick and easy!

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As regular Team Tracker users know, you can get email notifications when we at Baseball Prospectus write about your players. But often people just want to see what's going on with their teams recently, and that's where Daily Roundup comes in! Whenever your players are mentioned in the Daily Roundup post for the day, you'll get an email if you choose this new option. 

To use this functionality, simply pull up your Team Tracker team list by clicking on "Edit Teams," and then select "Daily Roundup Only" from the pulldown to the right of the team you want. For example:

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Solely in the interest of completeness, mind you, as no serious baseball fan would pay any attention to how many home runs George Springer has this Spring (he has two, but you didn't actually see me peeking), we offer spring training statistics, available in two locations on the site!

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Yesterday, Jason Parks and the Baseball Prospectus prospect crew released our Top 101 Prospects of 2013, also newly available in printed form in the now-shipping Baseball Prospectus 2013 annual. The festivities were wild and raucous for all, perhaps tempered slightly for fans of the Chicago White Sox. Here is the Top 101 list displayed by position, by organization, and by prospect age. Enjoy!

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Last year, Baseball Prospectus introduced the Scoresheet Draft Aid to help Scoresheet Baseball players with their drafts. And many got to see a free trial last March. Since its inception, the most common piece of feedback by Scoresheet players who have used it is that it's "too good" and that it levels the playing field, erasing the edge that can be gained by an opponent through hours, days, or even months of research. This year, BP has welcomed Tim Collins, a new member of the tech team who is helping make it even better than the inaugural edition! So, look for upcoming improvements, including incorporation of the new prospect rankings by Jason Parks.

First, a recap of the basic functionality: Scoresheet Draft Aid is a tool to help with Scoresheet Baseball drafts, powered by PECOTA. (And remember that any "/fantasy" URL on the site can be accessed using "/f" instead, which can be useful for avoiding filters). To find the Scoresheet Draft Aid in the future, simply click on "Fantasy" on the main menu, which takes you to a page with this sub-menu:

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Welcome to the initial launch of this year’s PECOTA forecasts. We hope you find them enlightening, useful, and predictive.

Let’s start with the business aspects of things. In order to access the PECOTA forecasts, you need to be a subscriber to Baseball Prospectus. Monthly subscribers will have access to certain PECOTA features but will not have access to downloads like the PECOTA spreadsheets.  The best value we offer is a yearly subscription, which not only gives you access to the full PECOTA product offering, but also unrestricted access to our extensive prospect coverage, R.J. Anderson’s Transaction Analysis, in-depth analysis from the likes of Ben Lindbergh, Sam Miller, and more, and the latest in baseball research from the likes of Russell Carleton and myself. If you feel you can pass on that, we offer our lower-priced Fantasy subscription, which give you full access to the PECOTA products and all fantasy-focused articles on the site.

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For some readers who use Internet Explorer, the existence of a "Post Reply" button on comments must have seemed rather confusing, as it didn't do anything when clicked, and replies had to be entered using the box below all the other comments.  From the best we can tell, this issue cropped up when IE8 was released, so it's been around for a very long time (as Internet time goes).  

Now it has been fixed.  

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We've added a link on the Depth Charts for Visual Year-to-Date stats, which goes to:

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/fantasy/dc/teams_by_positions_ytd.php

This has the same mouseover capability as the Depth Charts, so that if you mouse over WARP for Baltimore catchers, you see the breakout for Wieters, Paulino, and Exposito, for example.  Note that there are 4 stats available: WARP, TAv, FRAA, BRR. 

Despite booting Dayan Viciedo and his .381 week with two home runs, the Value Picks outfielders hit a composite .295/.390/.477 this past week with five home runs and five stolen bases. With the three leadoff hitters combining for two runs batted in (neither Jarrod Dyson nor Denard Span had any), the group still managed 18 RBI while scoring 28 runs. Obviously, results may vary from week to week, but this is the sort of “found money” that can be realized when Value Picks work out.

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There was a common perception that Jayson Werth is injury prone, but he went almost four years between stints on the disabled list (his previous being May 23, 2008). His loss hurts fantasy owners, though not nearly as much as it is likely to hurt the on-base-challenged Nationals. Meanwhile, mixed-league afterthought Rick Ankiel becomes a much better risk; the team really needs his power, even if he brings little else to the table offensively. In the fantasy realm, however, owners can do a lot better when searching for a replacement in most league formats, which is where Value Picks comes in...

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It's a good thing most leagues don't count slugging percentage as a category, since the three picks from last week slugged a combined .278 over the past seven days. Fortunately, our much-discussed hero (at least in the comments), Michael Saunders, hit three homers, so good work anyone who had him active. Also, Gerardo Parra continued his wanton running, swiping three bases, and they say steals are more important when slugging is down.

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