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Product Description
Product Description
The essential guide to the 2011 baseball season is on deck now, and whether you′re a fan or fantasy player—or both—you won′t be properly informed without it. Baseball Prospectus 2011 brings together an elite group of analysts to provide the definitive look at the upcoming season in critical essays and commentary on the thirty teams, their managers, and more than sixty players and prospects from each team.
- Contains critical essays on each of the thirty teams and player comments for some sixty players for each of those teams
- Projects each player′s stats for the coming season using the groundbreaking PECOTA projection system, which has been called "perhaps the game′s most accurate projection model" (Sports Illustrated)
- From Baseball Prospectus, America′s leading provider of statistical analysis for baseball
Now in its sixteenth edition, this New York Times bestselling insider′s guide remains hands down the most authoritative and entertaining book of its kind.
From the Back Cover
"THE BEST BOOK OF ITS KIND."—Rob Neyer, ESPN.com
Now in its sixteenth edition, the Baseball Prospectus annual shows once again how it became the industry leader: the 2011 Edition includes key stat categories, more controversial player predictions, and the kind of wise, witty baseball commentary that makes a phone–book–thick tome worth reading cover to cover.
Baseball Prospectus 2011 provides fantasy players and insiders alike with uncannily prescient PECOTA projections, which Sports Illustrated has called "perhaps the game′s most accurate projection model." Still, stats are just numbers if you don′t see the larger context, and Baseball Prospectus brings together an elite team of analysts to provide the definitive look at all thirty teams—their players, their prospects, and their managers—to explain away flukes, hot streaks, injury–tainted numbers, park effects, and overrated prospects who won′t be able to fool people in the Show like they have down on the farm.
Nearly every Major League team has sought the advice of current or former Prospectus writers, and readers of Baseball Prospectus 2011 will understand what all those fans have been raving about.
"If you′re a baseball fan and you don′t know what BP is, you′re working in a mine without one of those helmets with the lights on it."
—Keith Olbermann
"Witty . . . savvy . . . a rich snapshot of where the game and its reference books are today and where they′re going."
—Sports Illustrated
"Baseball Prospectus continues to raise the bar for innovative baseball analysis every year."
—Mark Shapiro, President, Cleveland Indians
"If a general manager hasn′t read Baseball Prospectus, he should be fired for incompetence."
—Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball
Baseball Prospectus 2010 correctly predicted:
The collapse of 2009 stars Derek Jeter, Derrek Lee, Adam Lind, Pablo Sandoval, Ben Zobrist, Todd Helton, and Miguel Tejada
Major comebacks for Kelly Johnson, Rickie Weeks, and Aubrey Huff
Breakout seasons from Carlos Santana, Jason Heyward, Mike Stanton, and Pedro Alvarez
That the Cubs′ aging, expensive stars would put the team not only out of contention, but into rebuilding mode
That the Mets′ injury problems, poor starting pitching, and absence of corner outfield power or a decent catcher would sink them for 2010 (and probably for 2011), leading to a round of firings
That Texas would put a great team on the field, a team well poised to compete for years to come
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Customer Reviews
* PECOTA projections, updated on the Baseball Prospectus site, differ so materially from the book on many important players so as to make the numbers in the book an unreliable indicator. Really, BP knows the deadline for the book and the data is set with the end of the prior season, so this simply reflects a failure to get the job done on schedule. Revisions should reflect tweaks to the system or subsequent events, such as player movement, not major adjustments affecting large numbers of player forecasts.
* The narrative is simply poorly edited. The number of run-on sentences or sentences missing clauses or incorrectly formated tables creates the impression the book was rushed to press without even a proof-reading.
* In the past, I loved BP's insightful player write-ups. This year, the writing just isn't as good. It's almost as if the style of past years is being imitated but without the rich knowledge of unrelated fields that added color amd brought unique insights to player description.
* Ballparks (major and minor) are listed in an appendix, but park factors have been eliminated. Unfortunately, this makes the table fairly useless.
Having said that, the book made some advances: simplified the range of statistics, removing what was becoming a proliferation of redundant measures. The BP work on meusuring fielding performance is truly cutting edge. And the Top 100 Prospects section is perhaps better than ever.
The single biggest thing BP could do better is simply get better organized to put out a complete, higher quality product on time.
Then I started spotting errors with the stats. For example, in the Diamondbacks section it says Mike Hampton threw 41 innings for them last year and allowed only three hits, one walk, and no earned runs. WHAT?
Then in the Braves section on pitchers I began to notice that the games and games started numbers are messed up. Tommy Hanson pitched in 34 games, but started 40? Tim Hudson pitched in 34 games and started 36? What is going on? Very strange for a publication that prides itself on accuracy. Am I missing something?
Do you want an example of the smug condescension that runs throughout these pages? How about this on page 37, "Unless a stint as a talking head on ESPN's Baseball Tonight taught Showalter the secret of baseball alchemy, enabling him to turn Baltimore's diluted and watery roster into wine - which would seem unlikely, considering the intellectual and analytical powers of his cohosts- we should proabably...." That is about as smug as it gets and it turns me off from wanting to read more. On another page a political shot at Pres. George W. Bush seems out of place, too. I don't want my baseball and politics mixed together. I won't be buying anything from BP again.
1) In many instances, the comments in the text of a player evaluation are directly contrary to the PECOTA projection for the player. For example, the text says that the player is declining and in danger of losing usefullness, while the PECOTA shows a significant bounceback from a down year.
2) In most instances, the PECOTA does not even attempt to project an accurate playing time for a player, often showing clear utility players with 400-500 plate appearances. Sure, I can extrapolate or divide, but why should I have to?
3) The PECOTAs are ridiculously conservative, even for someone with a full understanding of regression to the mean. And, in the case of pitchers, there are many cases where the projected ERA for a pitcher (not one who is 38 years old, either) is higher than any of his past three years. And--see # 1 above--in at least one instance, that's despite a textual evaluation that the player is basically an elite level performer who should be expected to stay that way (Ubaldo Jimenez).
4) The occasional witticisms seem forced, inapposite and, rather than adding to the enjoyment of the reading, clearly detract from what ought to be the mission of the book.
5) The team essays are of variable quality; many were just not that interesting in terms of the facet of the team performance that the writers chose to focus upon.
6) Although the stat capsules are cleaner, there is a definite absence of advanced-level metrics. If BP is actually looking at things like line-drive rate, etc., they are not providing that information for us to see as Shandler did last year. If the stat projections appeared to be better, I would probably be willing to just trust in the evaluative tools, but they haven't earned that benefit of the doubt this time.
7) I can't tell if the fielding measures are better or not. Unless I've mistaken, what they say they are doing is throwing out all zone ratings becuase there are potential flaws in the reporting and semi-subjective aspects of that methodology and just reducing it all to a measurement of the subject player against some average figure of plays that should be made. It's hard for me to see this as a step forward; it looks like they have just thrown in the towel here (which may not be a bad idea come to think about it).
There are probably more negatives, but that's all I can think of off of the top of my head. Frankly, the only thing I liked about the book was the solid writing/evaluation in the Top 101 prospects section. But I can find material of a similar quality on that subject in a lot of places.
The bottom line is I feel like I wasted my money and will probably now go get the Shandler book instead.
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