I’m pleased to announce FanGraphs’ newest partner: SBNation! We’ll be highlighting their awesome content right here on the FanGraphs player pages, in the form of player specific related content, and on the home page and blogs.

And from SBNation.com you’ll be just a click away from FanGraphs stats and articles on their player pages and blogs.

We think this cross-integration of our content will help both FanGraphs readers and SBNation readers be even more informed as baseball fans!

The first thing I did on my iPad was check out how the FanGraphs app looked on it. It works, but truth be told you’re better off using the website on an iPad, which will work in its entirety. I much prefer the FanGraphs app on the iPhone to the website, but it just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to use it on a bigger screen. Now if you could use the FanGraphs app as an iPad widget and leave it in the corner all the time or something, that would be cool.

The second thing I did was download the MLB At Bat 2010 for iPad.

MLB.tv through MLB At Bat 2010 works great on the iPad. While I was doing the live chat yesterday, I had the iPad propped up with whichever game I wanted to watch that was not blacked out. It’s like having a handheld television, specifically designed to watch baseball games.

And of course you have all sorts of statistical overlays available to you while you watch the game. Want to know which players are in the field, or want to see a boxscore while watching the game? No problem, those are all available right at your fingertips.

There’s also a high resolution MLB Gameday view, where you can see each at-bat, pitch by pitch along with lineup, boxscore, and video highlights. You can pull up so many extra “stat boxes” that it will more or less fill up the entire screen. It all looks really great and because you can’t access the web based MLB Gameday on your iPad, this is really the only official MLB live scoring option available to you.

The downside is that it costs $15 dollars, again. And I say again because I already have MLB At Bat 2010 for my iPhone, which cost $15 dollars too. I also noticed a few opening day bugs, which weren’t show stoppers or anything, but caused the application to crash on me a couple of times. I’m sure these will get ironed out pretty quickly.

While it’s one of the more expensive apps you’ll purchase, it does provide the most robust and prettiest live scoring experience on your iPad, mainly because of the lack of Flash software that will prevent many popular web based solutions (including MLB’s very own) from working. And if you have an MLB.tv subscription and an iPad, getting MLB At Bat 2010 for the iPad is really a no brainer.

It’s always a mystery to me how long it’s going to take to get the site in a state where it can load the next year’s stats. Fortunately, everything appears to be working (after a hiccup that caused all the player pages to error out) and all one game of 2010 stats have been loaded successfully! Remember that pitch type stats usually run one day behind and UZR is updated every Sunday.

Stats are typically updated nightly around 4am Eastern Time.

Tomorrow night I’ll switch over all the default views to 2010 stats.

After each and every game this season, you’ll have the opportunity to vote for the players of the game:

You’ll be able to award 3, 2, and 1 stars (3 stars being the best) to whichever players you think are most deserving and then we’ll tally the votes in real time. The ballot will open as soon as the game is “Final” and it will remain open for the following day as well, but then it will be closed permanently.

After each week we’ll tally up the votes and award a FanGraphs fan chosen player of the week, month, and season.

This is a collaborative project with Tangotiger and insidethebook.com.

Check out our live win probability pages as soon as the game ends to vote!

I stumbled across Thomas Boswell’s most recent Washington Post chat in which he wrote [all errors sic]:

The Fangraphs valuations just don’t come close. Something’s wrong with their method and I think its probably UZR. Folr example, they value the whole 84-win Rays team in ’09 at a salry of $229M, but they think the 80-win Brewers, just four less wins, are “worth” only $116M using their stat methods. Huh???? Even worse, they say the A’s and Blue Jays, both with 75 wins, are worth $162M and $176M, but the Astros and Pads, who won 74 and 75 games, are only worth $98M and $96M. Obviously, to me, there’s a big problem here. …

… Go on, explain those salary valuation. It can’t be done. Any method or theory that proposes to assign “win value” to every player has to be consistent with past win totals. Duh.

First, it’s worth getting the numbers correct. In 2009 we don’t have the Brewers at $116M. It’s actually $128M, but in any event, there are always going to be some outliers.

It’s true that the Blue Jays and Athletics were two of the major outliers last year, but the problem is not with UZR, at least in the Blue Jays case. UZR considered the Blue Jays as one of the six worst defensive teams in baseball. The A’s aren’t being overvalued by UZR either at just about average.

If you look at the Pythag Records for 2009, the Blue Jays and Athletics are at -8 and -6, suggesting they should have won 8 and 6 games more respectively based on their runs scored and runs against. Team WAR is also going to reflect that.

Since 2002, our WAR data has a .86 correlation with actual wins. So while we’ve said it before: WAR is consistent with past win totals. Just because you’ve cherry picked a few outliers doesn’t change the fact that the numbers do add up.

We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention Bill Simmons‘ most recent column in which he “finally joins the revolution” and highlights stats such as UZR, WAR, FIP and BABIP!

The more I played around with fangraphs.com, the more I realized, “Hey, there’s really something here.” The numbers for Boston players jibed with what I had been watching all last season. For instance, Jacoby Ellsbury had lousy instincts in center, his jumps were routinely late, he took bad angles on balls, he drove me crazy week after week … and yet, he is fast and committed only two errors all season. How bad could he have been? Well, UZR wasn’t fooled.

In conjunction with Tangotiger and insidethebook.com, we’ll be hosting the results of the Projection Challenge this year, but the great news is that you’ll be able to (optionally) see how your individual fan projections rank against the rest of the field!

If you want to participate, you have one week left to fill out your fan projections with as many players as you want. The cutoff time to enter projections will be Sunday the 4th at 6pm Eastern Time.

We hope to award prizes to the top 10 FAN Projectionists and we’ll have more details on that later.

In the player pages there’s now a new section called “Dashboard”, which will be the first one you see. It includes a number of the most widely used stats on the site and they are arranged to allow you to get a statistical sense of a player with a quick glance.

We’ve also done some behind the scenes work which should make stats pages load just a bit quicker, I hope.

We’ll probably be messing around with this section a little, so if you have any feedback, be sure to let us know!

Tangotiger is once again running his pre-season playing time survey. Be sure to fill out a ballot for your favorite team here!

On ESPN2 at 3:30 EST, they’ll be talking about WAR and WPA and I get to chime in with a few observations.