One of the coolest things about ottoneu Fantasy Baseball is that it is a game that runs all year.  Plenty of other fantasy baseball league sites will shut down once the MLB regular season is over, but at ottoneu that is where the fun begins.

Arbitration

As soon as the MLB regular season is over and a league winner is crowned, owners have to begin evaluating rosters for next season.  The first step is to send players to arbitration, a unique ottoneu experience that helps both long-term competitive balance and represents player interests.  Each owner can vote to determine who they believe is the lowest paid, highest production player on each team.  These players by definition are being paid too little, and deserve the opportunity to go back to auction to receive a more fair salary. 

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I’m very pleased to announce that FanGraphs has partnered with ottoneu, Inc. to bring you an auction-based, dynasty league, fantasy game.

Our fantasy game is not your standard customizable commissioner service, but is a very specific game, where you manage a roster of 40 Major and Minor League players with a budget of $400 against 11 other teams. There are currently three different scoring options: 4×4, 5×5, and points-based. You can read more about the specific rules here.

One of the exciting things about bringing a fantasy game to FanGraphs is integration. Have you ever wanted to find free agents in your league using the FanGraphs leaderboards? Now you can.

Information about your fantasy leagues will be available in the FanGraphs player cards and elsewhere on the site, making your fantasy baseball research easier and more in depth than ever.

This season, up until March 1st, each team is discounted to $9.99 from the regular price of $19.99. The first 100 people to sign up will get one free team for the 2011 season, with their money refunded to them in 48 hours.

Signups are available now. Just click here and create/join a league.

We’re very excited about this fantasy game and think that once you start playing, you’ll understand why. Niv Shah, the creator of the game, will be sharing his experiences with the game format later today.

Over this off-season we rolled out a slew of new features to the leaderboards including splits, multiple seasons, and additional fielding stats.

Now, for batters and pitchers if you are looking over multiple seasons you can break out each individual season. For instance, maybe would you like to know which position player had the highest single season WAR total since 2002.

Or maybe which American League batter had the highest single season wRC+ since 1990.

Or which National League qualified-starting-pitcher in the past 5 years had the lowest single season BB/9.

Anyway, there’s lots to play around with here. Remember that this only works for batters and pitchers and does not currently work for any of the splits.

I’ve added the RotoChamp.com’s fantasy baseball projections to the projections pages and they’re also available in the usual sortable format.

For those interested, you can read the full FAQ on the projection system here.

RotoChamp’s projections are a new entrant (queued) in Tangotiger’s Forecasters Challenge this year.

Full Disclosure: RotoChamp.com is a paying advertiser in the form of banner ads on FanGraphs.com

Tangotiger just released the 2011 Marcel Projections. They’re also up and running on the FanGraphs player pages and in our sortable projection section too!

At FanGraphs we’re big fans of the heat map. And now customizable heat maps are now available in the pitchf/x sections for all pitchers. Much thanks to Dave Allen for helping me out!

The thing about heat maps is that one size does not always fit all. Depending on the density of pitches and how many pitches are thrown, it’s not always a clear cut case how to display the data. Sometimes you want the points bigger, sometimes you want the “intensity” of each point to be more and sometimes you really want a different color scheme. For instance here’s the same chart, but with the settings changed.

And here is a third chart, with the settings changed one more time, where the points are made smaller but very intense in monochrome.

There’s a lot to play around with here and a lot of options to try and get the best picture possible.

Bill Baer of Crashburn Alley yesterday wrote an article titled, “FanGraphs Fan Projections Are Craaaaazy”. And there certainly was something crazy going on with some players on the Braves.

Long story short: I’ve made some updates and the Braves projections have returned to sanity and now look like this:

Player       Fans   CarAvg    Diff
Heyward, J   .393   .376      .017
McCannn, B   .360   .364     -.004
Uggla, D     .365   .359      .006
McLouth, N   .337   .343     -.006
Prado, M     .351   .352     -.001
Freeman, F   .332   .213      .119
Gonzalez, A  .294   .298     -.004

Player        Fans    CarAvg    Diff
Hanson, T     3.25     3.38    -0.13
Lowe, D       3.94     3.80     0.14
Minor, M      3.83     3.77     0.06
Jurrjens, J   4.02     3.85     0.17
Hudson, T     3.98     3.82     0.16

I’m pleased to announce that Joshua Maciel’s original WAR Grids are now automated for you to create your very own. Also a big thanks to Dave Allen for his help.

Here’s what one looks like for the top 25 WAR leaders since the year 2000.

click to make big

The selection of multiple seasons that was made available in the leaderboards section has now been rolled out to the team pages and My Team section sof the site.

Now it’s easy to find which Yankees player had the most WAR since 1996.

Or, which team had the worst offense since 2006.

On the leaderboards you can now filter by multiple seasons going all the way back to 1871.

There are a couple caveats, in that some sections of the leaderboard only go back so far. The Batted Ball, Pitch Type, Pitch Value and Plate Discipline sections can only go back to 2002, and the Win Probability section only goes back to 1974. Splits will also only go back to 2002 and monthly splits currently only for single seasons right now. I’ve included a label which shows exactly which seasons you’re looking at, even if you’ve selected something else.

For instance, if you’ve selected dates between 1980 and 2004 and you go the the Batted Ball section, you’ll only see the dates between 2002 and 2004.

If you’re filtering huge date ranges, please be a little more patient than usual because it may take a few seconds more to grab all the data.

This feature will be making its way to the other sortable stats sections fairly soon.