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As Adam Aizer will happily point out on the Fantasy Baseball Today podcast, I'm a bit of a nerd. I never read many comic books and I didn't get my first video game system until I was 14, but I did sleep with a copy of Bill James' Historical Baseball Abstract on my night stand in high school; I'm a sports nerd.

As a result, I am confident in the value of numbers in expanding our understanding of sports, none more than baseball. There are so many outcomes to take into account, so many of which are tracked, that baseball really is the perfect sport to get nerdy with.

There are a ton of resources available these days, and I like to make use of as many as possible to buttress my opinions. I still try to watch as much as possible -- I have Wednesday's Dallas Keuchel-Andrew Cashner matchup playing as we speak -- but with each game running two-plus hours, there just isn't enough time to see everyone everyday. Catch the Twins on the right day and they can look like the'27 Yankees, so sometimes your eyes aren't enough.

With so many resources out there, it can be a bit overwhelming, even if you are interested in finding out more. A few years back, the Eye On Baseball podcast covered the basics of advanced stats, and it is still worth a listen. After Thursday's podcast, listener Michael Petterson asked the following question:

So, here are my go-to sites, and what they each bring to the table.

Baseball-Reference.com

This is the most obvious one, but it is maybe my most-visited site on the web. They have the most exhaustive collection of stats in any one place, and the best thing is how much you ddan do with it. Go to Jose Altuve's page and you'll have their season-long stats for each season, right in front of you. If you subscribe to the Play Index, you can search for individual game results and streaks. If you click on "vs. Pitcher," a list of Altuve's results against every pitcher he has ever faced will come up. We can argue about the utility of batter-vs.-pitcher results given the small sample sizes, but this could be especially useful in DFS.

If you click on "More Stats," you'll find Advanced Stats (BABIP, stats relative to league, etc.), batting ratios (K%, BB%, XBH%, HR/FB), baserunning stats (How often he takes an extra base, success rate stealing 2nd vs. 3rd, etc.), and situational batting (sacrifice hit percentage, double-play percentage, percentage of base runners who scored.) If you notice that a hitter doesn't have as many RBI as his overall hitting profile would suggest, and you suspect his teammates haven't been getting on base as much as expected, this is where you would find that out, among many other things. 

However, this isn't just for major-league data. B-R also has minor-league stats, and they are pretty extensive as well. Dodgers outfielder Joc Pederson has been off to an incredible start this season, but the team has sat him twice against left-handed pitchers; given his age, this makes some sense, as young left-handed bats tend to struggle against LHP. However, he's been so good, I just wanted to make sure this was the right move, and that they weren't potentially costing him productive at-bats, so I went to his minors page and clicked the link for 2014 Game Logs & Batting Splits. 

As it turns out, Pederson did just fine against lefties a year ago, hitting .290/.415/.580 with 14 home runs in 169 at-bats. He struck out a bit less (26.2 K-rate) against them than RHP (27.5),  while still showcasing the patience and strike-zone judgment that has helped his game translate so well already. The Dodgers have an abundance of good options in the outfield, including lefty-mashers Scott Van Slyke and Alex Guerrero, but they might be limiting Pederson's Fantasy value by shielding him against LHP.

FanGraphs.com 

FanGraphs' greatest strength is that they know their customer. You aren't going to any site besides Reference for basic stats, so they cater their player pages to the next-level fans. When you go to a player page on FanGraphs, you are getting the how of their season, not the what that the back of a baseball card provides.

Dallas Keuchel's 0.73 ERA is amazing, but it doesn't tell us much after just 37 innings of work. However, his 2.88 FIP and massive 65.3 groundball percentage indicate that, though he isn't pitching quite as well as the ERA indicates, there's a lot to like here. FanGraphs also gets bonus points for how they integrate PITCHf/x and batted-ball data into the player pages, making it a kind of one-stop-shop for analysis. Other sites might do certain specific things better -- we'll see two of them next -- but none give you as much data in one place. 

BrooksBaseball.net

If FanGraphs gives you a taste of PITCHf/x data, Brooks lets you drown in it. On the home page, you can jump to any start during the course of the season for any pitcher, with all of the relevant information. For instance, I can find out that Jesse Hahn threw 17 fastballs, 40 sinkers, five changeups, eight sliders and 18 curveballs in his start Thursday, with velocity and movement data for each pitch type. Want a visualization of his velocity as the start went on, or his release point for each pitch, or see if the umpire was squeezing him? It's all there on that page. 

However, you can also take a wider view with the Tabular Data on his player page. In 2015, for instance, Hahn has thrown 51 more fastballs than sinkers, with an average vertical movement of around 2.5 inches less. He tosses his curveball out there 22.6 percent of the time, picking up a swinging strike on 10.7 percent of them, with 14.7 percent put in play for a groundball as well. Of course, knowing what a pitcher is doing is only helpful if you can understand the context in which he is doing it. Brooks can help here too.

Slide over to the "Velo and Movement" tab and compare Hahn's results to his previous year. He is average 93.9 MPH on his fastball this April, higher than all but one of his months in 2014; the trend is the same for all of his pitches. You can do the same thing with the "Usage and Outcomes" tab.

BaseballSavant.com 

Savant is a relative newcomer for me, but it has been one of my favorite sites since discovering it this season. They also have PITCHf/x data, and their's is searchable with all kinds of factors you are able to account for. Want to know who has thrown the most 100 MPH fastballs in baseball this season? Just limit the search for those parameters and hit search. (It's Aroldis Chapman, with 24, a staggering 14..8 percent of his total pitches.)

That's all well and good, but it isn't necessarily anything we can't find out elsehwere. What really makes BaseballSavant stand out is the introduction of batted-ball data from MLB's Statcast tracker. This information is available on most MLB.com Gameday games, but so far, this is the only site I know of that is compiling the data in searchable form.

This is where I've found the data for my recent posts on the pitchers and hitters accumulating the most hard-hit balls. In the same search form, you can limit the query to search for batted balls that have come off the bat at 100 MPH or more -- Phil Hughes has given up 25 such balls, the highest total in baseball. The best part  is the ability to download the data into an Excel document, which you can manipulate any way you choose. You can search for the same data for hitters, and find that Hanley Ramirez leads the majors with 29 batted-balls of at least 100 MPH -- 8.7 percent of the total pitches he has seen.

They also have a batted-ball leaderboard, which has everything from max batted-ball velocity (Nelson Cruz -- 119 MPH), average batted-ball velocity (leader: Ramirez - 98.7; lowest: Jordan Schafer - 79.1 MPH), and average batted-ball distance (leader: Pederson 223.2; lowest: Starlin Castro - 56.8). This is more than just trivia, of course. We can finally start to quantify just how well players are hitting the ball, data that can tell us when a low or high BABIP is bad luck, and when it's bad hitting. 

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