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The New Stats Explained
by Ryan T. Campbell
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Johanna quoted in the Chicago Tribune about Fan Safety.
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This Month
Michael Street reviews
2009 Baseball Player Guides: 2009 Baseball Prospectus, 2009 Baseball Forecaster, and 2009 Baseball America Prospect Handbook
Tuesday, May 19, 2009 10:30am
(Author's Note: I write for BaseballDailyDigest.com, a subsidiary of Baseball Prospectus, which publishes the Baseball Prospectus 2009, and I was one of the contributing writers for John Burnson's The Graphical Player 2009, a player-rating guide that competes with some of the guides in this review.)
I've played fantasy baseball for more than ten years, and back in the early days, my draft prep consisted of going down to a local magazine store and grabbing a handful of fantasy baseball magazines. I'd compare the different predictions, converting them to sabermetric s(tats for the saber leagues I played in, trying to get a consensus of the widely divergent predictions. The perfunctory player writeups told me stuff I already knew, and the articles were mostly useless explanations of auction draft strategies, which my leagues didn't use.
Then, amazed that I'd never heard about it before, two different friends told me about Baseball Prospectus, an annual guide that not only offered sabermetric stats, but also thoughtful, funny writing about every organization and every significant player. One of those friends read it every year, and he didn't even play fantasy baseball. This I had to check out.
I bought that first BP, the 2001 edition with Richard Hidalgo on the cover, and it was like stepping into a different world. Reading BP changed me from a writer who loved playing fantasy baseball to a writer who realized that people made a living writing about the sport and the game I loved so much. It put me where I am today, on Lovemyteam and the three other sites I write for, analyzing and writing about baseball.
BP had a writeup for each player (not just the top 10 or the top 50), from promising prospect to middling middle reliever, and the prose was chatty but intelligent, occasionally clever, and unfailingly honest. The writers also discussed organizations, candidly criticizing the approach of managers and front offices alike.
The stats were unbelievable, not just sabermetric stats, but peripheral ones, too-BB/9 or K/9 for pitchers, or proprietary statistics like the PECOTA system, which predicts how a given player will perform in the following year based on the histories of similar players. (PECOTA was developed by Nate Silver, whose predictions on fivethirtyeight.com got 49 of the 50 states right in the 2008 election.)
But BP's stats were part of the problem, too, at least for fantasy purposes; they'd been "translated," adjusted as if the player had faced the same competition as every other hitter, in the same ballpark. This might have been helpful to understand how much Todd Helton would be worth if he didn't play at Coors Field, but fantasy stats are based on such inequities.
So, I still ended up buying fantasy magazines, just to see someone generate the untranslated stats. Fortunately for BP, they figured out this problem and started printing both predicted and translated stats in their 2003 edition. This has been one of the good things about BP: it changes through the years, adapting to add new tools and new writers.
But those changes haven't always been good.
For several years, the writing in BP got funnier and funnier, giving great lines like "Looks like he ate Jared from Subway" (Jonathan Broxton) or "Pinch-hitting an roller derby are his most likely career paths going forward, and where else but Tampa can you combine the two?" (Robert Fick, the year after he tried to stiff-arm Eric Karros during the NLDS).
Lately, however, the writing's become steadily more dull and workmanlike. Whether that's because the good writers have moved on or institutional imperative, it's just not as fun to read. I'd get a good laugh out of at least one writeup per team, but those days have gone, at least for now.
This year's edition was as flat a read as ever, but the most glaring omission in 2009 was the index. Given the fact that BP lists players by the team they played on at the end of the previous season, the index is essential in today's free-agent era.
But this year's BP simply-omitted it. Or so they say. Editor Christina Kahrl explains on the website, "Words fail to express the depth of my disappointment that, because of the shortness of time and our mounting page count, we could not make space for an index in Baseball Prospectus 2009."
Forgetting it is one thing, but playing it off like it was intentional is condescension on the level of arriving at work not wearing socks and saying, "I didn't forget-I just didn't have room for them." Blaming something essential like the index on "mounting page count" is even lamer. Last year's BP was 605 pages, while this year was 628-and the index only took up six whopping pages last year. If the book's running too long, cut back on the flat commentary; that's what an editor does.
In the grand scheme of things, of course, leaving out an index and offering a limp apology for it doesn't mean the book itself is a failure. It's still essential reading, but I fear that the "mounting page count" of less engaging prose, coupled with the omission of the index, might indicate that this proud publication is on the decline.
Another book with staying power is Ron Shandler's Baseball Forecaster. Although it's been around longer than BP (this year's the 23rd edition of the BF, as opposed to the 14th for BP), and despite the fact that I've been reading the BaseballHQ.com site for several years, I'd never read this particular guidebook before this year. I didn't know what I was missing.
The Forecaster has a different slant from BP, as it is directed more at the fantasy baseball player. It bills itself as "The Bible of Fanalytics," the word Shandler uses to express the union of baseball fanaticism with statistical analysis. BF is far more statistic-minded than BP or any other guide, particularly in its explanations of predictive methodology, which occupy the first twenty or so pages.
I learned more from its "Forecaster's Toolbox" than I had in a decade of playing and reading about fantasy baseball. Whether it was the secondary statistics that can predict a player's performance or the fallacies that show us why we perceive the sport and its players the way we do, it opened my eyes. Then, I read its writers' latest baseball research abstracts, as well as a discussion of various fantasy draft strategies, both auction and snake-style.
Within the book, the players are listed alphabetically (no need for an index here) with pitchers separated from hitters; the stats are mostly secondary, along with a prediction for the primary stats we all use to score our leagues. The writeups are brief and pithy and stuffed with abbreviations, so there's no room for the expansive explanations and bygone witticisms of BP. This is a reference book, not a writing platform, and it makes no pretensions towards literary merit.
Sections at the end of the book offer further information, like a five-year injury log, major-league equivalent stats for significant minor leaguers and "cheat sheets" for various draft styles and strategies. The Forecaster is simply a much better all-around fantasy reference book than BP, but that means you're unlikely to read it if you don't play fantasy baseball.
The last vital book I use as a fantasy player and sportswriter aims at an even narrower market. Baseball America Prospect Handbook, the gold standard for those looking for information about the top minor-leaguers, makes no effort at statistical predictions. Instead, it gives writeups stuffed with dense scouting report commentary about the top 25 prospect in each organization. The #1 prospect gets the most ink, about a full page, but the others get about 250 words each, and it's jam-packed with stuff that will educate you or at least make you sound brilliant while talking baseball at the bar.
Minor-league stats are included, but the text and the rankings are the meat of the book; their ratings of each player within an organization are widely referenced in sportswriting, and their release (which precedes the book) receives a fair amount of attention. The book has scarcely changed since I started reading it in 2007, except for some design elements, but BA has a formula, and it works for them.
Fantasy baseball players who aren't in keeper leagues will have little use for BA, since it doesn't predict stats, and nearly all the players in the book won't arrive at the major-league level for a few years yet. The casual baseball fan is also unlikely to draw much from the book, unless you're a real organizational hound and want to know who's coming up in the system.
BA's real audience are baseball writers, who need to know about the guy who just got called up or was packaged in the latest deal. They also aim at keeper-league players, a growing trend in fantasy baseball; you simply can't compete in this kind of league unless you have the in-depth minor-league knowledge that BA can give you. You won't read Baseball America for the witty writing, or to know how your fantasy team might perform this year, but if you're in this target market and you don't have the latest copy of BA, you're simply not doing your job.
So which one will I buy next year?
All three, and it's possible that Ron Shandler's strategy writeups won't be as mind-blowing, or that BP will go back to writeups with a little zip to them. BA won't be a book I am dying to read, but it will be the one I refer to the most during the season, to read about this callup or that trade throw-in.
Which one should you buy? With the decline of BP's prose, you shouldn't buy any of these books without a genuine reason. But all serve their own purposes, with relative quality and merit.
Hardcore baseball fans will still appreciate Baseball Prospectus's industry-leading commentary on players and organizations, and fantasy players will reap the benefits of its accurate predictions. Fantasy baseball players who haven't read it should pick up Baseball Forecaster, and sportswriters could afford to look at many of his predictions, too, but it's unlikely that the casual baseball fan will read it. And Baseball America remains essential reading for sportswriters, keeper-league players and minor-league fans, as well as the hardest core of major league fans.
Note from Johanna Wagner: I wouldn't be caught dead at a minor league game above single-A without my BA Prospect Handbook, nor at a spring training game. It gives you a quick reference to the top players in those games, and really informs what you are seeing. And it makes the late innings in March much more interesting.
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