Even though there is plenty of great online coverage to get you ready for the baseball season – both real and fantasy – you may be like me in enjoying a physical book or two to dive into at this time of year.

Baseball Prospectus 2017

My traditional purchase is the pleasingly big, thick brick of a book that is the Baseball Prospectus guide.

It reviews the previous season and previews the coming one with essays on every MLB team, followed by statistics and commentaries on their Major Leaguers and main Minor League players and a Top 101 Prospects list.

I always come back to BP based on how much use I get out of it each year after the initial good flick-through. It’s a handy resource to have on your coffee table when watching games or doing some research and, with the print version in particular, a search for one player usually results in a 10 minute browse.

There’s the odd player comment that, to my taste, veers too far into the jokey rather than enlightening end of things (as I noted in my review of the 2016 edition), but generally you’ll find that the stats and comment will teach you something new about a player.

The 2017 edition follows the standard formula and the established level of quality regular readers have come to expect, so previous buyers won’t need much encouragement to pick up this year’s book and if you’re not among that number, it’s definitely worth looking into if you’re after something more than a pre-season guide.

Ron Shandler’s 2017 Baseball Forecaster

BP normally meets my Spring Training book needs, yet this year I decided to double-up and buy another well-known annual guide.

Ron Shandler’s Baseball Forecaster has long been high on the list of required purchases for fantasy baseball fans. As a keen, rather than a full-on obsessed fantasy player, it’s not something I have shelled out for previously, but having re-read the excellent Fantasyland book during the dull baseball-free winter, I thought I’d give it a go this year.

Whilst the book touts itself as being for “baseball analysts and fantasy leaguers” with its “encyclopedia of fanalytics”, it is definitely a fantasy baseball tool rather than a more general preview guide.

There are plenty of unique stats to the Forecast (XPX, BPV, DOM and DIS to chuck in just a few) that take some learning; in fact, I ended up copying them out onto a bit of paper and clipping that to the book so I could always have it handy, rather than flicking backwards and forwards to the glossary.

The player entries are listed alphabetically – first the batters, then the pitchers – rather than grouped into teams which has an immediately obvious benefit in finding a player’s entry when under the draft clock. The comments are written in short-hand and include plenty of abbreviations that, as with the stats themselves, take a little while to decipher at first but soon become helpful in stripping away the fat and giving you the core nuggets of info you need to consider about the player.

One other thing that can catch you out initially is that they bundle Double-A, Triple-A and MLB stats together in a single line if a player competed at different levels that year (the minor league numbers are converted into Major League Equivalents, MLE). This is denoted by an asterisk next to the team name, for example, A’s 2016 rookie Ryon Healy has OAK* next to his 2016 stat line, so you are aware that the numbers listed aren’t what the normal record books say.

As with the other features, you soon get used to it and there is a fantasy-based reason behind the approach: MLEs at Double-A and above “provide as accurate a record of a player’s performances as major league statistics”. The stat lines aren’t there as a reference book, they are there to help you make decisions on a player’s fantasy value.

On top of all the player entries, the first 70 pages of the book are dedicated to fantasy baseball research and advice. There is plenty here to learn from and even the less-complex sections, such as analysing how the top 15 average draft position (ADP) players worked out in terms of actual fantasy value, are really useful.

I particularly like the 5 year injury record section. It’s a simple idea, listing every player and the type of injury and number of days they missed each season, but it’s great to be able to flick straight to that info really quickly.

And even though the Forecaster isn’t quite the behemoth that the BP brick is, it’s certainly no flimsy magazine. It’s essentially A4 sized in height, a bit larger than that in width, and approximately 1.5cm thick. So there’s lots in it, but you can put it in your bag to read on the train to work without knackering your shoulder.

Which one might be for you?

Well, you can’t go wrong with either. As stated, the Forecaster is a great choice if your primary focus is on fantasy baseball, whilst Baseball Prospectus offers a more rounded baseball guide with some fantasy help included in the PECOTA projection stats (BP offers a dedicated Fantasy subscription service on their website too).

However, my main conclusion is that they are different enough to make for an excellent pairing without feeling like you are paying for two versions of the same thing.

We can all appreciate the benefit of taking one bottle into the shower rather than two, as the old Wash & Go advert used to tell us, but when it comes to these baseball books, two is even better than one.

This past week has treated us all to sights of baseball’s return thanks to photos of teams taking part in their first days of Spring Training camps in Arizona and Florida.

It also treated me with a traditional ‘baseball is on its way’ sight of my own:

Yes, a copy of the Baseball Prospectus annual taking pride of place on my coffee table, with obligatory pencil for notes right beside it.

This has been a lapsed tradition in recent years. Living circumstances and regular travel meant that the convenience of a version on my Kindle made too much sense to ignore, yet in truth it was a compromise I was never completely happy with. After the initial week or two of reading, I found myself rarely delving into it because delving into an e-book just isn’t the same as flicking through a paper brick.

The whole point of the BP book is that it sits there close to hand when I’m watching or writing about baseball. If a recently promoted prospect is taking the field, or the TV coverage heads to a break with a low-profile reliever heading to the mound, I’ll be reaching for BP to find out more and inevitably reading about other players while I’m there.

My lack of e-book engagement has a bearing on it, but I have felt that the annual has taken a bit of a downturn in recent years in not quite being the essential resource it once was. Comments from regular readers about the 2016 edition were reassuringly positive and my first impressions are that this is a return to form.

The print layout is unquestionably improved from previous editions, with a better quality of paper being used and a nicely designed page that crams plenty of detail in without looking cluttered. Last year’s edition raised complaints about a small typeface and they’ve really focused on improving the layout, by all accounts. You can sample this thanks to the Philadelphia Phillies chapter being made available for free as a pdf.

Humour has always been a part of Baseball Prospectus, which can be difficult to get right as what’s funny to one person can be off-putting to another. The light-hearted asides often strike the right tone for my taste in this edition, although there’s one major exception to this.

The Houston Astros’ shortstop Carlos Correa made a big impression in his rookie season in 2015 and is rightly regarded as one of the most exciting young players in the Majors.

Sadly, BP decided that everyone knows Correa is an amazing talent and didn’t bother to try to give any insight about him, instead providing what can only be described as a load of aimless bollocks. It starts with “Correa is a Saturday morning, a cup of coffee and the second chapter of your new favourite book. He’s the 20 dollars you forgot to put in your winter coat ..” and goes on and on in the same vein for 10 whole lines.

It would have been fine starting that way, then saying ‘you get the picture’ and going on to put his rookie season in historical context or suchlike, but you’d expect a bit more from BP than thinking ‘errr, he’s really good isn’t he, let’s just write something silly’.

This is a rare exception among well over 1,000 player comments though, so don’t let that put you off from picking up a copy.

That also goes for the errors that do always creep into the book every year. They’ve got plenty of experience in producing this tome so it’s a bit frustrating (especially for the team themselves, I’m sure) that errors like mixing up charts, such as with the Chicago Cubs and Chicago White Sox here, make their way into the published product. However, BP always hold their hands up to it and try to rectify things by maintaining an Errata list and make Premium subscriber details for affected players free to view. It’s not perfect, but not the end of the world either.

Even with the snags, I can already tell I’m going to enjoy reading through the team essays during Spring Training, consulting the comments and projections as part of my fantasy draft preparations, learning more about some of the best prospects in the Minors, and heaving it from the coffee table countless times during the season to look up a player or two.

You might need to make some logistical allowances for getting the print version, its size and weight don’t make it an ideal travel companion and you’ll need a bloody big letterbox if you don’t make other arrangements to receive it in the post, but I’d definitely recommend making the effort.

Flicking through the print version is so much more satisfying than searching the e-book (the presentation of the tables is a bit his-and-miss that way too), as is avoiding typing comments and instead using a pencil to scribble essential notes down.

Such as writing the word ‘BOLLOCKS!’ next to that maddening Carlos Correa capsule.