Update: The 2010 Second Opinion is Now Available!

I’m pleased to announce that FanGraphs will be dipping its toes into the publishing world with its very first publication: The FanGraphs Second Opinion: 2010 Fantasy Baseball Companion, or for short, the 2010 Second Opinion.

First let’s get to what’s in it:

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

– Articles covering: 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.

The book will first be available for download in PDF format late February for the low price of $7.95.  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.

In addition, some of you may have noticed that FanGraphs has been contributing to ESPN Insider (ESPN’s all sports premium content) this past month with more to come.  If you purchase the book and are logged in, you’ll also have access to these articles and future articles we publish on ESPN Insider, on FanGraphs.com, through March 1st, 2011.

As we get closer to the book’s release, there will be more information and sample pages available.

As a few of you have noticed, tRA was on hiatus for a couple days. Now it’s back, but as tERA. Quite simply, tRA is on a runs allowed scale and not an earned runs allowed scale, which I believed caused some confusion, especially when I placed it right next to xFIP, which is on an ERA scale.

It seemed the natural thing to do was to compare tRA to ERA/FIP/xFIP and with tRA on a runs allowed scale that didn’t quite work, but now it should.

To convert back to tRA, just divide by .92.

For a couple years now I’ve wanted to get better splits up and running on FanGraphs, but other things have taken priority. We’ve had Lefty/Right and Home/Away splits in the graphs sections for almost four years, but never have there been any tabular splits.

In the player pages, there’s a new section called “Splits”. It’s right next to the season stats tab:

Give it a click and you’ll have access to Lefty/Righty, Home/Away, Monthly, Batted Ball, Location, and Leverage splits, with the full selection of stats from the “Standard”, “Advanced” and “Batted Ball” sections.

You can then browse the splits by individual season, comparing one split to another, or you can take a look at the career tab, where you’ll be able to see how a player has fared in a particular split over time. If you just want to see the career total lines, you can collapse the individual season by clicking on the “Show Season Splits” button.

Splits are currently available for all Major League players dating back to 2002. As always, if you have any feedback, or notice anything’s not working as expected, just let me know.

I’ve made a few updates as requested for the Fan Projections.

– The Fan Projections now only require 15 votes to be eligible. This added an additional 200 or so players into the mix and I imagine that most MLB regulars and some not so regulars should have Fan Projections now.

– There’s now an UZR column in the sortable projections.

– You can now export the Fan Projections to either Excel or CSV files in the projections page.

Yesterday, Tangotiger released the 2010 Marcel projections and now they’re available on all the player pages and in the sortable projection pages.

Couple things of note about the Marcel projections.

– About Marcel, Tango himself writes, “it is the most basic forecasting system you can have, that uses as little intelligence as possible. It uses 3 years of MLB data, with the most recent data weighted heavier. It regresses towards the mean. And it has an age factor.”

– The wOBA calculation I’m using for FanGraphs is going to be different than the ones included in the projections. To keep things consistent, I’m including SB and CS and using the 2009 weights, just like all the other projections.

Courtesy of baseballprojection.com and Sean Smith, we’ve got the CHONE projections available in all the player pages, the sortable leaderboards!

You’ll also note that there are WAR values generated off the CHONE projections for non-pitchers. Couple things to note about these. They use the CHONE defensive projections (which are based off Total Zone), but everything else is calculated in the same manner as the usual FanGraphs WAR. I am also not park adjusting the “Batting” component, which is the same deal as the “Fan” projections. I’ll probably do the WAR for pitchers sometime next week.

As you may have noticed, there’s now an extra column in the “Advanced” section for batting stats called “wRC+”. You can think of this stat as a wOBA based version of OPS+. It’s park and league adjusted and it’s on a very similar scale as OPS+. The difference is that it uses wRC, which is based on wOBA.

For those of you not familiar with the scale, 100 is average. Anything higher is above average and anything below 100 is below average.

Big thanks goes out to Tangotiger for pointing out how easy it was to implement this particular stat. It’s now available in all the player pages for major league and minor league players going all the way back to 1871. Please note that it is not park adjusted for minor league stats, but it is league adjusted.

It’s also in the career leaderboards and will soon be making its way into the individual season leaderboards too.

Update: I’ve removed pitchers from the league baselines, so the values will have changed slightly since this morning.

The Hardball Times and FanGraphs have a long history of working together. I used to write the original Daily Graphing series over at the Hardball Times when FanGraphs first launched, and if you look at the list contributors over at THT, you’ll see more than a few familiar FanGraphs regulars among them.

To further our relationship, we’ll be promoting the great writing over at THT throughout the site. You’ve probably already noticed the THT article box on our homepage, and relevant THT articles will also start showing up on the player pages. The Hardball Times will no longer be providing stats and will instead defer to the FanGraphs stats sections.

With the THT stats pages departing, there were also a few unique stats to THT that didn’t make the jump over to FanGraphs. We know xFIP is important to everyone, so it’s now available on all the player pages and leaderboards. The more detailed catcher fielding data will eventually be added to FanGraphs in some form or another, but there’s been no decisions made on anything else just yet.

While I do realize that no one’s going to be thrilled by the departure of the THT stats pages, both Dave Studeman and I think that this will be a winning situation for everyone. If there are stats or graphs you really wanted to see updated daily next season that won’t be on THT anymore, just let us know. We’d like to make the transition for you as smooth as possible.

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!