I’m pleased to announce that FanGraphs first publication, The 2010 Second Opinion is now available for sale at the price of $7.95! What you get is a PDF and all the information is also available online through your FanGraphs.com account. Here’s the rundown:

Player Profiles – Over 400 in-depth player profiles written by many of the FanGraphs and RotoGraphs contributors you’re already familiar with.

Articles – Closer situations, players coming back from injuries, sophomore players to watch, 2010 fantasy prospects, impact trades, the big questions for 2010, and something that Carson wrote, where he answers your questions before you even ask them!

Stats & Graphs – Each player profile is accompanied by a stat box with 10 very useful stats for both fantasy and real-life player evaluation including spark graphs showing career trends.

Team Previews – Each team is previewed for next season, giving you the rundown on what to expect from a fantasy and real-life standpoint.

Bonus Material – FanGraphs has partnerned with ESPN Insider this season and if you purchase the PDF, you’ll have access to anything we write for ESPN Insider right here on FanGraphs.com up until March 1st, 2011.

Online Integration – In addition to the PDF, you will have access to all the information in the book on FanGraphs.com when logged in to your FanGraphs account. This information will include the written player profiles which will be integrated into the stats pages and all the articles and team previews in the book.

If you run into any payment problems or other issues please fill out a contact form and we’ll try and solve the problem as soon as possible!

The FanGraphs App was featured today in the New York Times where they call it a “nifty iPhone app”.

FanGraphs ($3) is a nifty iPhone app that crunches almost every conceivable baseball-related statistic, including a team’s probability of winning a game as it proceeds.

In other FanGraphs iPhone app news, it was featured as one of the iTunes Baseball App Essentials.

The 2010 ZiPS projections courtesy of Dan Szymborski of Baseball Think Factory are now available in the player pages and sortable formats.

This wraps up the projections we’ll be carrying on FanGraphs this year and ZiPS, just like last year, will be updated daily all season long.

We’ll be conducting some live data tests over the next couple weeks, so if you own the iPhone app, you may see a few spring training games show up here and there. I think we’re only testing a few Grapefruit League games each day.

Same goes for our live scoreboard.

On the iPhone app this year, we also have the complete schedule for the year, instead of just the current days games.

RotoGraphs is now accepting applications for fantasy baseball writers. These are paid, part-time positions that require a commitment of five posts per week. We are specifically looking for writers with knowledge of multiple fantasy formats, who are comfortable with writing strategy-based articles.

Writers may be asked to tackle specific topics as assigned, but a big part of the job is to independently develop interesting topics and ideas on a regular basis. Strong writing skills and the ability to write clean copy are important along with a familiarity of the statistics found on FanGraphs.

To apply, please send us email with your background and why you’d like to write for us. Please include anything you think will be helpful in evaluating your application such as: writing samples, links to current blogs, fantasy experience, resume, etc….

Interested writers can contact us (David Appelman and Marc Hulet) at wanted+rotographs@fangraphs.com with the heading RotoGraphs Application 2010.

I was having some fun with the FAN projections and thought it might be neat to attempt to see where the visitors here at FanGraphs have collectively ranked the teams based on the individual player projections.

Just some quick notes:

– Everything had to be scaled back considerably and evened up for playing time. Pitchers as a whole are projected at about 4 wins too high per team and batters are projected at about 6 wins too high per team. Fielding stats were the most realistic and were only about 1 win too high.

– These standings are also simply based on wins above average (calculated FanGraphs WAR style) and for the most part use the entire projected player pool. Some players with well below 0 WAR were left out and players needed at least 5 ballots to be included.

– I should also note, that I’m posting these as a launching off point for discussion and not much more.

Team       Wins
Yankees      98
Red Sox      94
Rays         92
Orioles      78
Blue Jays    71

Twins        82
White Sox    79
Tigers       78
Indians      76
Royals       73

Rangers      84
Mariners     83
Athletics    81
Angels       80

Braves       89
Phillies     84
Marlins      80
Mets         78
Nationals    72

Cardinals    88
Cubs         78
Brewers      78
Reds         77
Astros       72
Pirates      68

Rockies      87
Diamondbacks 87
Dodgers      84
Giants       80
Padres       79

And there you have it.

If anyone wants to give these a go, you can always export the FAN Projections and try it out yourself.

Here’s a timeline of FanGraphs I put together for the Second Opinion intro, but just didn’t make it in there. I had totally forgotten that when the site first launched it didn’t even have BABIP (I think it might have been there under a different name: H%).

(click for full size image)

Tangotiger’s poll from insidethebook.com on which 3 year contracts were the best and worst from a team perspective:

FanGraphs Audio is now available on iTunes! You can either search for it and it will show up under podcasts, or you can just follow this link.

I just implemented a very slight change to how we calculate the positional adjustment for WAR. Previously we were calculating it based on full games played at a position. Now it is being calculated by innings played, which is a bit more precise.

This may shift a player’s positional adjustment up or down a run at the most, and will mainly impact multi-position players, but that’s about it.