The Sporting News Baseball Guide, 2003 Edition : The Ultimate 2003 Season Reference

Rating:
Summary: Stats, yes. But little keepsake value
Review: The 2003 edition marks another downgrade in the Sportings News long line of baseball guides. If you purchase this season's edition, be forewarned about the awful changes made this year. As a collector of every since 1975, I've loved these guides as a keepsake for a season. OK--so I'm a diehard fan and a bit sentimental....This new edition is terrible for memories, however. I don't use the guides solely as a stat reference;I am not a fantasy leaguer and could care less about who hits the most homers off lefties in Yankee stadium, etc, or whatever other mind-bending trivia you can think of. The merger with STATs books has caused SN to make the merged book nothing (virtually) BUT stats. Any text/words that described each team's experiences during the season have been removed. The great season summaries (two-three pages) written by solid baseball writers disappeared in the BB guides in the early 1990s; now we don't even get the half-page of "highlights" that had replaced those longer text summaries. It's now just numbers, numbers, numbers...
boring, boring, boring....This is the last SN BB Guide I'm buying. My streak of Guides ends in 2003....I only bought this edition because it was sight-unseen from Amazon.com. Now, you are warned like I was not.

Rating:
Summary: Stats, yes. But little keepsake value
Review: The 2003 edition marks another downgrade in the Sportings News long line of baseball guides. If you purchase this season's edition, be forewarned about the awful changes made this year. As a collector of every since 1975, I've loved these guides as a keepsake for a season. OK--so I'm a diehard fan and a bit sentimental....This new edition is terrible for memories, however. I don't use the guides solely as a stat reference;I am not a fantasy leaguer and could care less about who hits the most homers off lefties in Yankee stadium, etc, or whatever other mind-bending trivia you can think of. The merger with STATs books has caused SN to make the merged book nothing (virtually) BUT stats. Any text/words that described each team's experiences during the season have been removed. The great season summaries (two-three pages) written by solid baseball writers disappeared in the BB guides in the early 1990s; now we don't even get the half-page of "highlights" that had replaced those longer text summaries. It's now just numbers, numbers, numbers...
boring, boring, boring....This is the last SN BB Guide I'm buying. My streak of Guides ends in 2003....I only bought this edition because it was sight-unseen from Amazon.com. Now, you are warned like I was not.

Rating:
Summary: Same Old Guide
Review: The Sporting News Baseball Guide is the same old stuff every year. Basically, it is a review of the previous year with basic stats. On the cover, it advertises that it includes information from the sorely missed STATS Major League Handbook. Unfortunately, this volume is far more TSN and far too little of STATS. As far as I can tell, TSN only added some ballpark tendencies, L/R splits for pitchers and batters (2002 only), and some catching stats. As a result, this book and the Baseball Register still do not add up to the Major League Handbook that STATS used to put out. It is a shame that the inferior Sporting News books are still being published (and they are proud of them, by the way) while the STATS books are no more.

Rating:
Summary: Where's the Beef?
Review: We Want Our Little Red Book Back! This book seems like a poor replacement for Bill James' / Stats Inc.s Major League Handbook, for us stat geeks. However it does offer much of the same information, so it's not a complete waste of money. I've kept all of my little red books, as they offer great insight and you can easily track annual changes. I'll reluctantly use this as well.

If you are only intersted in current Baseball Fantasy information, I'd suggest that you spend the money for this book at TSN's Fantasy site. That has been my on line bible for the past three years, and I've got a number of wins to show for it.