Rating: 
Summary: Better in some parts than others.
Review: I always get BP. It covers more players than any other book, and the writing is always outstanding. This year there are some chapters and comments that are not as good as in books from earlier years. The chapter on the Braves is actually very bad. Some of the player essays are not as clear as they used to be.There are still great essays for teams and players. The chapters on the AL West teams are best. This book is better than any of Benson's books, and is fun to read whether or not you play roto. If I could make one change it would be to spend less space on financial and business discussion. It is very entertaining. They should spend more time evening out the writing. But it is still awesome. These guys should buy a team.
Rating:
Summary: The book is also pretty funny sometimes ...
Review: I forgot to mention in my lengthy review below that one of the best properties of Baseball Prospectus 2002 is the humor ... it adds to the readability a lot knowing that some funny and off-the-wall statements crop up in the player comments. I inadvertantly found myself up way past my bedtime recently reading about minor-leagues for the Tigers when I hit this note on Brandon Inge: he "does less damage at the plate than Lara Flynn Boyle". Good stuff. Keep it up, boys.
Rating:
Summary: TOP NOTCH BASEBALL WRITING
Review: I hope you have alot of time on your hands because you will not be able to put this great book down. Provides totally honest and intelligent team reviews, explaining why transactions were made and what were the good/bad ramifications. Excellent and witty player insight, brutally honest at points. Found myself laughing out load many times. You won't believe what you've been missing.
Rating:
Summary: Insightful Commentary
Review: I stumbled upon the Baseball Prospectus website about a year and a half ago and after reading the articles they frequently publish there, my view of baseball has totally changed. Basically, the BP team laughs in the face of traditional yet very lacking statistics such as batting average, RBIs, saves, wins and losses. They include several mathematicians who have created very comprehensive systems to evaluate batters (equivalent average), starters (Support-Neutral Wins Above Average), and relievers (Adjusted Runs Prevented). While they value the sabermetric approach to baseball, they also provide commentaries on less quantifyable aspects of the game. While BP is occasionally prone to making sweeping exaggerations regarding a subject, they provide generally objective analysis of baseball in a very entertaining manner. BP 2002 is well-written and contains paragraphs on about 50 players per organization, organization reviews and assorted other articles along with each players translated (meaning adjusted for AAA, AA, etc or parks) statistics. I highly recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: Insightful Commentary
Review: I stumbled upon the Baseball Prospectus website about a year and a half ago and after reading the articles they frequently publish there, my view of baseball has totally changed. Basically, the BP team laughs in the face of traditional yet very lacking statistics such as batting average, RBIs, saves, wins and losses. They include several mathematicians who have created very comprehensive systems to evaluate batters (equivalent average), starters (Support-Neutral Wins Above Average), and relievers (Adjusted Runs Prevented). While they value the sabermetric approach to baseball, they also provide commentaries on less quantifyable aspects of the game. While BP is occasionally prone to making sweeping exaggerations regarding a subject, they provide generally objective analysis of baseball in a very entertaining manner. BP 2002 is well-written and contains paragraphs on about 50 players per organization, organization reviews and assorted other articles along with each players translated (meaning adjusted for AAA, AA, etc or parks) statistics. I highly recommend it.
Rating: 
Summary: Both pedantic and funny
Review: If you are a trained statistician, you will probably love this book. For each major leaguer, it takes his actual numbers and washes out park effects. Then it compares the value (in runs) of the player's production to the league average. There are fielding and pitching "stuff" statistics invented by Baseball Prospectus that attempt to account for all the variables that contribute to performance. For minor leaguers, it calculated "major league equivalencies"--i.e., what numbers the player would have put up if he had played in the majors. The problem is that the bewildering array of new terms and statistical explanations will mean little to the casual fan. Even an experienced roto player who has a healthy respect for such methods, such as myself, will have an extremely difficult time putting it all together. Fortunately, the player write-ups are as compelling a reason to buy the book as the statistical analysis. They are hilarious--inventive, creative, and full of oddball references. Baseball Prospectus can be a little too opinionated at times, and a little subjective for a group of people that professes to believe only in the data, but that's part of what makes them so funny. It's unbelievable how many different ways Joe Sheehan & Co. can find to say that a player is worthless.
Rating:
Summary: It's all about the team
Review: The revolution in baseball analysis in the 1980s, led by the works of Bill James and Pete Palmer, spawned a boom in baseball writing. Unfortunately, most analytical baseball books begin and end with the measuring of player value, which is great for fantasy baseball players or who-should-be-in-the-Hall-of-Fame discussions, but ultimately leaves me feeling hungry. The folks at Baseball Prospectus put the focus on the "team", stressing that focus even within the player comments. Arguing about whether someone is the sixth best second baseman in the National League, or merely the eighth best, is refreshingly missing here. Instead, the discussion rests on whether the player is advancing the cause of contending for a championship, what he has to do to contribute more, how likely he is to improve, how long he is likely going to continue contributing, what the team needs to do to be prepared for his decline, etc. The team comments focus on where the team is in the development cycle, what it has to do to advance to the next stage, and whether the people in charge are likely to do it. The essays in the back of the book challenge us to understand how this game works. This annual has made me a better fan and has made my own conversations around the hot stove much more interesting. As a baseball researcher, what I wouldn't give for a complete set of BPs, beginning about 1871.
Rating:
Summary: It's all about the team
Review: The revolution in baseball analysis in the 1980s, led by the works of Bill James and Pete Palmer, spawned a boom in baseball writing. Unfortunately, most analytical baseball books begin and end with the measuring of player value, which is great for fantasy baseball players or who-should-be-in-the-Hall-of-Fame discussions, but ultimately leaves me feeling hungry.
The folks at Baseball Prospectus put the focus on the "team", stressing that focus even within the player comments. Arguing about whether someone is the sixth best second baseman in the National League, or merely the eighth best, is refreshingly missing here. Instead, the discussion rests on whether the player is advancing the cause of contending for a championship, what he has to do to contribute more, how likely he is to improve, how long he is likely going to continue contributing, what the team needs to do to be prepared for his decline, etc. The team comments focus on where the team is in the development cycle, what it has to do to advance to the next stage, and whether the people in charge are likely to do it. The essays in the back of the book challenge us to understand how this game works. This annual has made me a better fan and has made my own conversations around the hot stove much more interesting. As a baseball researcher, what I wouldn't give for a complete set of BPs, beginning about 1871.
Rating:
Summary: Best Baseball Annual
Review: This is the best baseball annual currently out there. Unique statistical analyses and biting commentary. Witty too. A worthy successor to the old Bill James Baseball Abstract.
Rating:
Summary: Entertaining analysis for stat-headed baseball fans
Review: This is the second year that I've read Baseball Prospectus and it continues to be a great resource for analysis on both players and the strategies that each team is employing (or not employing, in the case of some teams). Every major-league player and all of the minor-league players that they consider notable are covered with a paragraph of commentary and "translated" stats for the previous three seasons (i.e. not the actual numbers, but stats normalized for league and park effects to make it easy to compare guys at different levels and altitudes). Each team gets a two-page commentary reviewing the direction the management has been taking the team. The book also contains articles on specific analytical subjects such as the continued efforts to measure pitcher abuse, defensive prowess and the projectability of minor leaguers, as well as the annual article on their top 40 prospects in baseball. There are a few differences I found between BP 2002 and 2001. The new book is only 500 pages compared to 550 for its predecessor. This looks like it's partly because they cut out the page for each team listing the support-neutral and adjusted stats for the pitching staffs, which is a shame, and also because they aren't covering quite as many players, which is fine -- they still talk about over 50 players per team. A new addition to this year's book is the "Stuff" stat for pitchers, based on their rates for strikeouts, walks, and homers (if I remember correctly, don't have the book in front of me), which should help measure a pitcher's effectiveness independent of the defense behind him. Because of the recent, (in)famous research implying that on balls in play (i.e. anything aside from Ks, BBs, HRs and HBPs) defense and luck contribute to the results more than the pitcher, it's natural to concoct a new stat which encapsulates the things a pitcher is guaranteed to have control over. I also felt this year's book wasn't *quite* as critical as last year's book. The BP writers can be, frankly, somewhat arrogant at times. I agree that many of the guys who run baseball teams are deserving of scorn, and the criticism from BP is usually backed up with reasonable arguments, but they still can come off as know-it-alls. It would be great for them to have a section in the book where they review the unequivocal statements from the previous edition; they say things like "Player X will flop in the bigs" or "Pitcher Y is definitely going to blow out his arm" and I would wager that their accuracy is good, but not 100%, on these claims. Anyway, I was pleased to get the impression that the criticism is tempered a little in the 2002 book. For instance, they managed to praise ex-Pirates GM Cam Bonifay, one of their favorite whipping boys, for the things he did do well even as they recognize that on the whole he built a pretty poor Pittsburgh team. In general the authors did a nice job of recognizing the strengths and weaknesses of different GMs, which lends more credibility to BP and is interesting in its own right. Face it, every fan thinks that they're capable of building a championship team (witness the insane popularity of fantasy leagues), so it's great to read about how actual GMs might be good at building a pitching staff or a minor league system, but stinky at trades and free agent singings. Being a general manager is a more complicated job than it appears. I will definitely use BP 2002 to help with projections for my fantasy league, but even if I wasn't a roto-nerd I'd still read the book (and check out their web site every day) for the new insights they bring to the game. The 2002 book is smaller than the 2001 version but contains virtually as much content and is meaty throughout -- I recommend it for any serious baseball fan. (I should note that their web site (baseballprospectus.com) warns of a pretty egregious error in BP 2002 -- in the stat lines for all of the pitchers, the ERA and PERA columns were transposed. Adjust accordingly.)
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