I’m pleased to announce that the 2011 Second Opinion is now available for purchase!

The product is now available both as a PDF with additional online integration!

Here’s the rundown:

Player Profiles – Almost 600 (598) in-depth player profiles written by the FanGraphs and RotoGraphs contributors you’re already familiar with.

Articles – Closer situations, players coming back from injuries, sophomore players to watch, 2011 fantasy prospects, impact trades, the big questions for 2011, and Carson’s non-prospect rookie picks!.

Quick Opinions – New for this year’s Second Opinion is a short one to two sentence profile that give you the bottom line about a player. These are also integrated into our various projection pages so you can quickly get more information about a player.

Player Page Integration – Each player’s profiles is integrated into his player page so you can easily read about the player as you’re browsing his stats.

Bonus Material – FanGraphs has partnerned with ESPN Insider this season and if you purchase the Second Opinion, you’ll have access to anything we write for ESPN Insider right here on FanGraphs.com up until March 1st, 2012.

2010 Second Opinion – In addition to all that, regardless if you bought the 2010 Second Opinion, you still get access to the now obsolete 2010 Second Opinion’s content in the player pages and in the bonus blog.

Right around this time last year we looked at how the FAN projections projected the 2010 standings, so now seems to be as good a time as any to take a look at what the 2011 fans have projected the standings to look like based on their individual player projections thus far.

Red Sox       98
Yankees       94
Rays          87
Baltimore     81
Blue Jays     79

Twins         87
Tigers        83
White Sox     79
Cleveland     73
Royals        68

Rangers       85
Angels        79
Athletics     78
Mariners      76

Phillies      90
Marlins       85
Mets          84
Braves        82
Nationals     74

Brewers       84
Cardinals     83
Cubs          82
Reds          80
Pirates       71
Astros        60

Rockies       90
Giants        84
Padres        80
Dodgers       79
Diamondbacks  75

Once again, the fan ballots were a bit optimistic and needed to be scaled back a bit to make the win totals look realistic.

The Braves look obviously low to me (maybe there’s something weird going on there) and the fans really have their hopes up for the Rockies, but I’m pretty pleased with how these came out.

The 2011 Second Opinion is now available in a PDF format. It’s 391 pages worth of content.

Originally we did not plan to release any PDF this year and the reasoning was that purchasers of the Second Opinion would be able to get all the content online with some additional integration. The stats under each profile were also reduced because I figured if you wanted to see stats, the player profiles would be just a click away.

While good intentioned, I think the decision to do away with the PDF this year was premature and we’ll hopefully be able to deliver a more meticulously formatted one next season.

Anyone who already purchased the Second Opinion 2011 can downoad the PDF at anytime. And anyone who purchases the Second Opinion will be able to download it at their time of purchase.

Tangotiger posts the official results of his 2007-2010 projection tests. Specifically he tests CHONE, PECOTA, Oliver, ZiPS and the Marcel projection systems using wOBA.

It’s very in depth and there’s a lot of really great information here about how different projection systems fared for different “classes” of players.

The 100 initial free signups for ottoneu fantasy baseball are now filled! Those who have already signed up should be reimbursed soon.

Teams are now available at the discounted rate of $9.99 up until March 1st.

I’m very pleased to announce that FanGraphs has partnered with ottoneu, Inc. to bring you an auction-based, dynasty league, fantasy game.

Our fantasy game is not your standard customizable commissioner service, but is a very specific game, where you manage a roster of 40 Major and Minor League players with a budget of $400 against 11 other teams. There are currently three different scoring options: 4×4, 5×5, and points-based. You can read more about the specific rules here.

One of the exciting things about bringing a fantasy game to FanGraphs is integration. Have you ever wanted to find free agents in your league using the FanGraphs leaderboards? Now you can.

Information about your fantasy leagues will be available in the FanGraphs player cards and elsewhere on the site, making your fantasy baseball research easier and more in depth than ever.

This season, up until March 1st, each team is discounted to $9.99 from the regular price of $19.99. The first 100 people to sign up will get one free team for the 2011 season, with their money refunded to them in 48 hours.

Signups are available now. Just click here and create/join a league.

We’re very excited about this fantasy game and think that once you start playing, you’ll understand why. Niv Shah, the creator of the game, will be sharing his experiences with the game format later today.

Over this off-season we rolled out a slew of new features to the leaderboards including splits, multiple seasons, and additional fielding stats.

Now, for batters and pitchers if you are looking over multiple seasons you can break out each individual season. For instance, maybe would you like to know which position player had the highest single season WAR total since 2002.

Or maybe which American League batter had the highest single season wRC+ since 1990.

Or which National League qualified-starting-pitcher in the past 5 years had the lowest single season BB/9.

Anyway, there’s lots to play around with here. Remember that this only works for batters and pitchers and does not currently work for any of the splits.

I’ve added the RotoChamp.com’s fantasy baseball projections to the projections pages and they’re also available in the usual sortable format.

For those interested, you can read the full FAQ on the projection system here.

RotoChamp’s projections are a new entrant (queued) in Tangotiger’s Forecasters Challenge this year.

Full Disclosure: RotoChamp.com is a paying advertiser in the form of banner ads on FanGraphs.com

Tangotiger just released the 2011 Marcel Projections. They’re also up and running on the FanGraphs player pages and in our sortable projection section too!

Baseball Info Solutions has two job openings.

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