For those of you who have been hanging around FanGraphs since at least last season, you’ll know that we carry various projections in the off-season, which are for the most part generated by computer programs.

This off-season, in addition to carrying the various computer generated projections, we’ve teamed up with Tangotiger of insidethebook.com to give you, the fans, a chance to generate your own projection line for each major league player. Hopefully our collective brains will be able to pinpoint things that computer systems don’t.

With that said, let me give you all a quick tour of a projection ballot:

Before you can project any players, you’ll have to select the team you follow most closely towards the top of the screen. If you really don’t follow a team, just pick one. You’ll only have to do this once.

After you’ve selected a team, there are 8 categories for pitchers and 10 categories for position players. Pick the values in the drop-down boxes closest to what you think the player will do in 2010, hit the submit button and you’re done! If you made a mistake, you can always go back and change your selection at any time.

That’s really all there is to it. You can filter players by team, or if you go to the player pages, you can project players individually. If you want to see all the players you’ve projected, you can click on the “My Rankings” button which will show you only what you specifically projected a player to do.

As with all new features, we hope everything is bug free and we test things as much as possible, but if you do notice any issues, please let us know.

Throwing out the opening pitch of the FanGraphs 2010 projection season are the Bill James Handbook projections. Huge thanks goes out to Baseball Info Solutions for allowing us to publish their projections again this year.

They are now available in all the player pages, but as usual if you want them in a sortable format with some extra goodies, you’ll have to purchase them yourself.

And for those of you who own the FanGraphs iPhone app, they’re already waiting for you in those player pages too. No update necessary!

As a few of you had pointed out, defensive games in the 2009 UZR data appeared to be a little on the high side. The problem has now been fixed. The fix affected only the 2009 UZR/150 and DG stats. Raw UZR values and in turn WAR should remain unchanged.

UZR and like minded fielding statistics were almost mentioned by name on tonight’s Curb Your Enthusiasm when Larry David got into a fight with a stonemason about whether or not Derek Jeter sucks. Here’s a transcript of the phone conversation:

Stonemason: “That guy [Derek Jeter] sucks.”

Larry David: “Who sucks?”

Stonemason: “Derek Jeter, he’s the most overrated player in baseball.”

Larry David: “What did you say?”

Stonemason: “I can’t stand Derek Jeter, you know he’s the worst defensive shortstop in baseball statistically?”

Larry David: “Oh Bullshit! He’s a great clutch hitter, he’s a great clutch player!”

Stonemason: “There’s no way he deserves that kind of money he’s making.”

And then Larry David changes the subject.

Later in the episode, Larry David starts talking about the stonemason’s Jeter hating and says, “…starts telling me how Jeter’s overrated. What an ignorant moron. My God, please, give me a break. There’s not one person who has ever said that except this asshole, honestly.”

While the part about Jeter being one of the worst shortstops defensively is true, he has come pretty close to being worth what he’s paid, at least in a cumulative sense over the past 8 years.

In any case, it was fun to see fielding stats mentioned on Curb Your Enthusiasm, even if it wasn’t Larry David defending them.

The Huffington Post today released their list of top 10 “Game Changers” in the world of sports “who are harnessing the power of new media to reshape their fields and change the world.”

I was honored to be part of the list and it’s really a testament to our incredible writing staff and of course all our visitors who have helped spread the word and have taken the time to help educate people about the usefulness of stats based analysis.

In the meantime, if you have a free minute head over to the Huffington Post and give your vote!

When we launched the iPhone App about a month ago, one of the most requested features was adding blog content to the application.

While we are definitely exploring the possibility of adding blog content to the application, in the meantime, both the FanGraphs Blog and the RotoGraphs Fantasy Baseball Blog can now be easily viewed by anyone in their mobile web browser without doing unnecessary finger gymnastics.

Just go to either of these links on your mobile browser to make reading and commenting on the go a lot easier.

www.fangraphs.com/blogs
www.fangraphs.com/fantasy

Apparently for the past few days we’ve had problems sending out e-mails which would have affected anyone who tried to register, reset their password, or send us a contact form.

I apologize for the problem and it is now fixed. If you were trying to contact us in the past few days through our contact form, we unfortunately didn’t receive the message and would be happy to answer any questions you might have if you resend your inquiry.

I am constantly hearing how UZR is an unreliable way to measure fielders because there are “wild fluctuations” from year to year. I decided to put that to the test doing an apples to apples comparison of UZR from 2008 to the nearly completed 2009 season. I only compared players that played the same position and had the qualified number of UZR Chances. Here are the results:

more than 50 chances in both years = r^2 of .15
more than 100 chances in both years = r^2 of .19
more than 150 chances in both years = r^2 of .24
more than 200 chances in both years = r^2 of .28

Quite simply, the more of a fielding sample we have for a particular player, the great the correlation from year to year.

For comparisons sake, if we look at wOBA from 2008 to 2009 you get this:

more than 300 PA in both years = r^2 of .24
more than 500 PA in both years = r^2 of .30

So the lesson is, when there’s not a lot of UZR data on a player, there will be a lot of noise, but as the sample size increases, the data (at least from 2008 to 2009) actually becomes almost as highly correlated year to year as the stats that are considered to be the most reliable.

I’ve implemented a number of changes that were required to do a single sign-on for the entirety of FanGraphs.com Unfortunately, as a result, some of your passwords will no longer work. To reset your password, all you need to do is fill out the lost password form to have a new password e-mailed to you. You can then change your password back to whatever it was before.

I realize this is somewhat annoying and I apologize for the inconvenience, but as the site grows and we implement more features that require login, it just didn’t make sense to continue with the old system.

Fortunately, everyone’s custom teams and forum posts have been completely preserved.

The immediate benefit of the change is that you can now use your FanGraphs username to comment on either of the blogs.

If anyone is having any problems retrieving their password, please fill out a contact form and I’ll try and get things squared away as quickly as possible.

I’m pleased to announce that FanGraphs has arrived on the iPhone & iPod Touch!

This initial version of the FanGraphs Baseball iPhone App includes:

– Live win probability and win probability graphs.
– Live box score and play-by-play data.
– Basic/Advanced/Value stats for any baseball player.
– Minor league stats.
– Historical game data going back to 1974.

Here are the screenshots:

The app is currently priced at $2.99 and is available now. You can either click here to take you directly to the app store page, or search for FanGraphs in iTunes.

Be sure to leave us feedback so we can start adding additional features to the next version!