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!

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.

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’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!

Good news everyone. tRA has made its way to FanGraphs thanks to Graham MacAree of Lookout Landing and statcorner.com. tRA is currently located in the player pages under the batted ball section of stats.

Directly from the StatCorner glossary:

tRA involves assigning run and out values to all events under a pitcher’s control and coming up with an expected number of runs allowed and outs generated in a defense and park neutral environment. tRA is on a R/9 scale and does not involve any regression of the rates.

There are a couple things which are different between the StatCorner version of tRA and the version implemented on FanGraphs. The main difference is we’re using Baseball Info Solutions batted ball stats instead of Gameday batted ball stats. The other difference, though probably not as major is we’re using different park factors.

tRA will not be available in the leaderboards or team pages until this winter most likely because it’s going to take a minor overhaul to the code in order to handle the park adjustments.

Graham will be stopping by later to give a better overview of the stat.