Baseball Prospectus Book News

Your First Look at BP2011

We're a little over a week away from our official Amazon ship date, but I'm holding a bona fide copy of Baseball Prospectus 2011 which was overnighted from our publisher (Wiley). The express purpose of this express shipment is that I'm going to be making a television appearance this weekend. I’ll be a guest on the Fox Sports Extra show — that’s channel 5 and 705 (WNYW) here in New York City, at least on Time Warner Cable — on Sunday night at 10:30 PM Eastern, talking about the Yankees and Mets with host Duke Castiglione. This will be the third time I’ve been the guest on Duke's show, and while my appearances have been brief, it’s an honor to get any kind of air time in a major market, not to mention a whole lot of fun. It's also great exposure for our annual book, which will be making its way to you shortly.

First off, I can confirm that the 16th edition of our annual contains a chapter on the St. Louis Cardinals, something that was true of only 14 of our previous 15 editions. It's also got chapters devoted to the other 29 teams, as well as most of the stuff Steven Goldmanpromised you back in December, including a foreword by the fabulous Joe Posnanski. Alas, the one thing I'm aware of that's missing is the promised JAWS-related content, something which owed to the enormity of Colin Wyers' task as the book's statistical guardian. For more info, including where to order this online, please see our BP2011 page.

Two things you'll notice once you get this book into your hot little hands. First, it consists of fewer pages than our previous books, 584 where last year's was 652, and second, the player comment pages have undergone a facelift. Those two developments go hand in hand. Because we decided to pare down the array of statistics we provide in the book — there's no VORP in here, for one thing — I suggested to Steve that we seize this opportunity to tighten up the presentation. You can get a rough idea from these iPhone photos:

The biographical data which was loosely strewn around each player's stats has now been corralled into the gray boxes to the left of those stats, and the type size on all of the text has been decreased a bit. The result is that we're able to provide more commentary on each player than ever before, yet do so on the same number of players (more than 1,600, as the book cover promises) in less space. For example, on the two spreads above, both of Yankee hitters who fall in the first half of the alphabet (Robinson Cano, Francisco Cervelli, et al.) we've got 59 lines of commentary this year, where we had 45 lines last year, with more words per line as well.

Yes, I'm afraid it's true. Moreso than CC Sabathia, Pablo Sandoval, or this humble wordsmith, the Baseball Prospectus annual is in the best shape of its life. If you're in the New York area, tune in on Sunday to see for yourself.

Jay Jaffe is an author of Baseball Prospectus. Click here to see Jay's other articles.
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I'll let Colin elaborate when he gets a chance, but quoting from his stats intro in the book:

"Note that here we diverge from past volumes of the BP annual and have left out VORP, or Value Over Replacement Player, altogether. This doesn't mean that we have discarded the underpinnings of VORP; we simply determined that it wasn't necessary to have two ways of measuring the same player's contributions relative to replacement."

VORP is still HERE, and will continue to be. But we had a decision to make in terms of presenting an ever-larger book, or cutting our player commentary down, or excising a couple of stats columns that are freely available on the net in a way that wasn't true when the book started back in 1996. It was an easy decision.

Will VORP for 2011 projections be available somewhere? As a fantasy player, I like the range of difference in VORP projections...in 2010 the top VORP was Albert's 81.8, while #30 was David Ortiz with 43.7. That's a clear separation. WARP-1 was Albert Pujols again at 8.2. #30 was Chase Utley at 4.9. Warp has 13 or so players that are less than 1 whole point different from each other.

I do - it's just the glance at or quick add to a spreadsheet that I had apparently been misguided in getting used to with the VORP view. When agonizing over a draft pick I guess I like to make myself feel better by using the 16.1 gap in VORP from Ryan Braun to Andres Torres instead of the 1.4 in WARP. It's a scale thing and we'll adjust to the view I'm sure...

We have a BP 2011 app coming from the publisher, where you can purchase aspects of the book, but not everything. I will have a post up about that tomorrow. The Kindle/iBook issue remains one of all the numbers translating correctly to that form, and what I have repeatedly been told is that it's not technically feasible right now. This is not our call, but a limitation of the technology.

Dead trees? Sure they are but you should know something about producing a book before gettin' all self righteous. The paper used was sourced from closely monitored, privately owned forests in America and Canada. It's not like this stuff is coming from some rainforest in Singapore, where little to no concerns for the environment are considered. Oh wait, that is how is your IPhone and Kindles and such are made.

A number of studies have shown that the environmental impact of an e-reader over the course of its lifetime is significantly less than a proportional number of books (assuming an average rate of reading and incorporating transportation costs).

First book, BP96. I simply forgot to print out the chapter in compiling the final copy for the printer (this was when you actually provided hard copy rather than e-files). Shipped 200 books, and didn't even notice until Gary Huckabay called me upon receiving his. ("It looks great, too bad about the Cardinals." "What?")

We made the chapter available as a PDF, I think.

While embarrassing, the mileage I've gotten out of telling the story has been worth it. (Similar to my jaywalking ticket as a USC freshman.) It helped that the error didn't bring down the franchise. Yet, anyway.

First time PECOTA user. Looking at the PECOTA Weighted Means spreadsheet. Why are the projections so low this year - no pitcher over 15 wins, no hitter with more than 110 rbi, top BA of .317, etc? Is that normal, are you still projecting, or am I missing something?

read up on Pecota. It is a very conservative forecasting system. The player comments in the annual address this with text like "this projection is low," or "barring injury and/or poor management, xxxx will get 500 abs and will blow this projection away."

This is a common question. If you asked the question of "how many pitchers will get more than 15 wins this season on average?", the answer is that probably 5-10 will. However, there is no individual pitcher with better than a 50/50 shot of topping 15 wins. The pitchers that win 20 games are basically always among the top pitchers in the games who were ALSO lucky with run support and health in a given season.

For example, batting average generally has a standard deviation of about 20 points for a given season, which means that if you get 10 guys who are supposed to be around .310, one of them is probably going to hit .335 or so because of luck alone even without improving their talent level.

Thanks...both fgreenagel2 and Matt Swartz. That helps. I'll do some more studying and get more familiar with it.

Wikipedia says this about PECOTA - "What separates Pecota from the gaggle of projection systems that outsiders have developed over many decades is how it recognizes, even flaunts, the uncertainty of predicting a player's skills. Rather than generate one line of expected statistics, Pecota presents seven â€“ some optimistic, some pessimistic â€“ each with its own confidence level. The system greatly resembles the forecasting of hurricane paths: players can go in many directions, so preparing for just one is foolish."

Can you provide any more info about the seven levels of expected statistics? Where can that be seen?

Will this year's edition have an index?! That item vanished a believe two years ago, much to my personal consternation - only to happily re-appear in the subsequent edition. The prospectus is on my must buy list each spring and I keep the last three on the coffee table for in-season reference. By the way & for what it is worth, I would take VORP over WARP-1 any time. Might showing my lack of deeper appreciation of the stats.