Baseball Prospectus 2008: The Essential Guide to the 2008 Baseball Season

by Baseball Prospectus, Steve Goldman (Editor)

The New York Times bestselling guide to major league baseball returns for the 2008 season

For over a decade, Baseball Prospectus has been the ultimate guide to the game for fantasy players, professionals, and casual fans alike. Baseball Prospectus 2008 continues that tradition, bringing together the top young baseball writers and analysts in the business to provide a definitive look at the season to come. Featuring groundbreaking essays on the performance of each of the thirty teams and an in-depth look at every major league player and all the top prospects, Baseball Prospectus 2008 offers the cutting-edge analysis that has inspired nearly every major league team to seek the advice of current or former Prospectus writers. Also included are projections of player stats for next year, as determined by the groundbreaking PECOTA system, which Sports Illustrated has called “perhaps the game’s most accurate projection model.” The most authoritative and entertaining book of its kind, Baseball Prospectus 2008 is as essential to the baseball-watching experience as hot dogs and cold beer.

Genres: Baseball, Sports, Nonfiction

624 pages, Paperback

First published February 25, 2008

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

[Conrad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another year, another prospectus. No one reads this whole thing, but you really could. All you non-baseball geeks out there will never understand the simple joy of a joke at the expense of the Texas Rangers' owners or Nomar Garciaparra, or really any of the thousand great wisecracks in here. It's really a shame, because this book contains a blurb for every current player in the game, including guys who're just going to tool around the minors for a couple seasons before fading away. And BP has something witty to say about every single one. It's obvious that this is a labor of love for everyone who writes it.

I must commend the authors for including the PECOTA ratings projections at the end of the book for easier cheat sheet construction this year. Well done.

[Marshall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although Baseball Prospectus contains many stats most fans are not used to seeing, or using to evaluate players' talent, if you know baseball you can understand this book. The people that put this book together each year can definitely be classified as "nerds." But they are baseball nerds, and if you're going to be a nerd this has got to be the best kind. This book does a great job of forecasting how well players and teams will do during the upcoming season, and best of all takes into account those bad bounces that no doubt occur during the course of a 162-game schedule.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

So this is the time of year that I spend all my free time reading up on the upcoming baseball season. There is a game at 6am tomorrow morning in Japan, in fact. I'll be up watching, having a breakfast of miso soup and rice. Anyway, the BP is always good for some insight and some laughs and for frightening people away in coffee shops.

[Justin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'll be playing with this book all season long. This is one of the funnest books I own.

[Toby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not much for narrative, but a blast if you enjoy new breakthroughs in quantitative baseball statistical analysis.

[Mayor McCheese · Rating 4 out of 5]

Top-notch statistics and narrative. I try to read this every year. Very good to prepare for real and fantasy MLB seasons.