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.

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.