I’m pleased to announce that The Hardball Times will be joining the FanGraphs family.

The Hardball Times has a long-standing tradition of excellent baseball writing and research, and we’re extremely happy to have them as part of our team. Dave Studeman and I plan on continuing the excellent tradition of bringing talented researchers to a broader audience.

THT will continue to operate as a separate site, keeping intact the strong THT brand. Over time we’ll make some changes and more tightly integrate the two sites as we see fit.

We’re really excited about the great work that will come out of our combined organizations.

Dave Studeman’s THT announcement can be found here.

FanGraphs has had some sort of user forums since it started and generally it’s a place where people go to ask questions about either the site, fantasy baseball, or sabermetrics in general.

Today we’re launching FanGraphs Q&A, which will hopefully allow for better discussion and allow for good answers to questions to be found much more easily than in the past.

To kick things off, we’re moving our RotoGraphs fantasy mailbag to FanGraphs Q&A where our RotoGraphs team will continue to answer questions and the rest of the FanGraphs community will also be able to chime in and help too.

Our game logs have been updated to include all the stats sections available on FanGraphs!

Here’s the full rundown of the new features:

– Includes the majority of our stats sections including the Dashboard, Standard, Advanced, Batted Ball, More Batted Ball, Win Probability, Pitch Type, Pitch Value, Plate Discipline and all PITCHf/x sections.

– Date filtering allows you to select the exact time range of a player’s career (dating back to 1974) that you want to see, even spanning multiple seasons.

– Minor League game logs are available for all players dating back to 2006.

In the FanGraphs Guts! page, you’ll now find a bunch of component park factors, included park factors by handedness.

All park factors are calculated using this 5 year regressed version.

In the player pages there is a new section called “Live”, which has live stats from the game(s) a player played in today, and then an updated year-to-date stats line for them.

Basically, you no longer need to wait until 4:30-ish AM to see how the day’s games changed a player’s most popular full season stats.

WAR is now available for in-season ZiPS! This goes for both the “rest-of-season” projection (ZiPS R) and the updated full-season projection (ZiPS U).

These are of course made possible by Dan Szymborski and the projections he provided in the 2012 ZiPS Projections, Final Edition.

These are now available in both the projections pages and the player pages.

Please note the following:

– There is no base-running component factored into the in-season ZiPS WAR projections.

– Original ZiPS fielding projections have been regressed by 22%.

– These are park adjusted.

– These are currently only available for position players, we may add pitchers later.

wOBA is now available for pitchers in both the splits leaderboards and the splits player pages.

One of the frequently asked questions we get is what are the wOBA constants for a particular season, or what is the FIP constant?

Now there is a single exportable page with all the answers: FanGraphs Guts!

– Any field with a “w” in front of it is a wOBA constant

– R/PA is runs per plate appearance

– R/W is the runs to wins conversion number

– cFIP is the FIP constant

If you run a blog or a website and you’re interested in having live win probability graphs, you can now easily embed a FanGraphs win probability graph that will update in realtime.

Here’s how to do it:

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In honor of opening day, the FanGraphs iPhone App has been discounted to $0.99 for today only!

FanGraphs App iTunes Link