Baseball Prospectus

by Baseball Prospectus

The bestselling annual baseball preview from the smartest analysts in the businessThe essential guide to the 2012 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 2012" 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 teamsProjects 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 baseballNow in its seventeenth edition, this "New York Times" bestselling insider's guide remains hands down the most authoritative and entertaining book of its kind.

Genres: Baseball, Sports, Nonfiction

600 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 1, 2012

About the author

Baseball Prospectus is an organization that publishes a website, BaseballProspectus.com, devoted to the sabermetric analysis of baseball. BP has a staff of regular columnists and provides advanced statistics as well as player and team performance projections on the site.

Since 1996 the BP staff has also published a Baseball Prospectus annual as well as several other books devoted to baseball analysis and history.

Reviews

[Oliver Bateman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kudos to the new team of editors and contributors, as their witty capsule summaries and much-improved team previews made reading this volume an enjoyable experience. Although the new work was strong, it seems to me that BP is nearing a bit of a dead end: they've zeroed in on the key stats (BABIP, FIP, FRA, WARP, GB/FB, K/9, BB/9, fielding as the "great unknown") and flog them mercilessly, but the innovation found in past editions--when more statistically-minded writers were rather joyously inventing and deploying all sorts of new metrics--is largely gone. Moreover, it appears that BP is keeping most of its new research (such as the Mike Fast pitch-framing report) on the website rather than including it after the "Goldstein 100" (of which I wish to say the following: I'd like to see a recap at some point on how all of these Goldstein lists have turned out...and maybe a line after each player capsule in the body of the book noting how wrong or right BP got it with regard to their performance in the previous season). I'm going to continue reading the Prospectus each year, but it seems to me that the best work in sports analytics is being done over in pro basketball (Doolittle and Pelton's Basketball Prospectus is tremendous--superior to this, I'd say--and nba.com/stats is the best presentation of statistical material out there).

By way of aside, I've got the two Baseball Prosepctus "Best Of..." books in .pdf format, so if anyone wants to check those out, let me know. It'll be ages before I read through all of that stuff, although most if it is review.

[Chris Witt · Rating 2 out of 5]

Team profiles are decent, but player profiles are too brief and the heavy-duty statistical analysis you expect from Baseball Prospectus is hard to find. Also seems like the humor found in previous editions is now largely absent.

Website baseballprospectus.com is still (mostly) worth a subscription, although even that is becoming a question mark for me lately - their best writers seem to be moving on to other things of late.

Regardless, this is probably the last time I purchase this annual.

[Nicole · Rating 3 out of 5]

New snarky contributors this year!

[Marcus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exciting season ahead! Let's go Bucs!

[Nick W. · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Bible for stat nerds. Personally feel the projections for Holliday to be WAAAYYYY too low. Can't wait to watch the Cards exceed expectations.