Baseball Prospectus 2008 ed. by Stephen Goldman and Christina Kahrl (Plume, 2008), 605 pages.
As each new season approaches, a hoard of preview magazines and books are published, all competing to attract your cash. Among all the contenders, the Baseball Prospectus guide stands out as the leader in the field. Now in its thirteenth year, it has become essential reading for Fantasy owners and general stat-minded baseball fans alike.
At 1.8 inches thick and weighing in at 2.6 pounds, it is a hefty tome and the amount of information on offer in the 605 pages is simply staggering. Naturally, you won’t find this book in your local Borders (or equivalent) in the U.K., so Amazon or a similar online book seller will be your source. Bear in mind that your postman won’t be able to put this through your letter box though!
BP 2008 follows a standard format. After a thorough introduction to the statistics on show, each of the thirty Major League teams is taken in turn. Each chapter starts with an always insightful essay about the team, utilizing some of BP’s research techniques, followed by a breakdown of hitters and pitchers. The players covered are the team’s forty-man roster as well as the main prospects within the organization at the end of the previous season. This is an important distinction as it means that the players who found new homes over the off-season are listed under the team they finished the season with last year (e.g. Torii Hunter can be found in the Twins’ section rather than the chapter on the Angels). It’s the most pragmatic way to approach the inevitable problem caused by trades taking place during the period of the text being finalized and the book being released. If you want to find a specific player and aren’t sure where he will be listed, you can just look him up in the Index.
For each player you receive statistics for the last three seasons, alongside a paragraph providing some essential context while also making the book much more than page after page of dry statistics. The real selling point of BP’s annual is their proprietary statistics and research techniques that allow them to provide a projection for the performance of each player in the upcoming season. The system they use is called PECOTA and a full explanation can be found on BP’s website. Essentially, they are able to neutralize each player’s statistics (stripping away external factors that influence them, such as the level of competition they were playing at) and can then compare each player to “thousands of historical player seasonsâ€. From there, they are able to determine how similar players performed and therefore arrive at a projection. Since the 2006 edition of the annual, some of the main ‘comparables’ have been listed for each player and they often make for interesting reading. It’s human nature to describe a sportsman by comparing him to past players, so this should instantly appeal to any baseball fan.
This process is understandably manna from heaven for fantasy players (accepting that no projection is an exact science and is about probability – it is probable from all the research that Albert Pujols will hit .327/.427/.577 with 32 homers in 2008, but he may out/under perform this projection for any number of reasons), yet it is also fascinating for non-fantasy fans as well.
If the thirty chapters and statistics/projections for more than 1,600 players were not enough, the book also contains several additional essays, predominantly relating to the statistical research that Baseball Prospectus excels in. The slight exception is Kevin Goldstein’s Top 100 Prospects List, which as the name suggests lists the top 100 prospects in the game today accompanied by a paragraph on each. In the context of the strict ‘scouts versus stats’ debate, Goldstein is more on the scouts’ side of the fence. Yet beyond the extreme characterizations that some like to portray of the two sides being in competition with each other, most people accept that the key to the best possible analysis of baseball is a combination of the two. The addition of Goldstein to the BP staff in March 2006 has provided a different flavour to the website and annual, one that makes the overall product even stronger.
Writing a book of this size and with a tight deadline makes it difficult to avoid a few errors along the way. The BP annual has improved in this regard each year and while a few will briefly catch your attention (for example, on page one the text states that the Diamondbacks’ runs-allowed total was fifth-best in the National League, while the ‘Prospectus’ box on the same page states that it was fourth-best) they do not detract from the overall quality of the book. Anything in print runs the risk of becoming out of date and the chapters on the Mets and Mariners are undoubtedly affected by the deals for Santana and Bedard being agreed after they were written. There’s nothing BP can do about that, except for directing you to their website for the latest comments.
Tradition is an important part of baseball, as it is generally in life. Receiving the BP Annual each March and flicking through its pages for the first time has become an anticipated event in my baseball year. Are there any negatives? Well, it’s too big and heavy to read on the bus and your social life is likely to take a hit due to the many hours you will spend pouring over the pages, but that’s about it. Quite simply, if you are interested in baseball statistics and want a preview for the upcoming season, it doesn’t get better than this.
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