Tuesday, February 25, 2025

Review: Baseball Prospectus 2025

Edited by Patrick Dubuque, Bryan Grosnick and Ginny Searle. 

Baseball Prospectus 2025 starts out in an interesting way as it launches a 30th edition. The original founders of the book got together to tell the book's origin story. It explains that after the strike of 1994-95, there seemed to be a hole in the niche of books on baseball statistical analysis. Bill James had moved on to other things from his annual Baseball Abstract, and the Elias annuals had just ended in 1994. So a few guys got together and essentially started to put some ideas down on the paper. 

The result was the Baseball Prospectus 1996, with all of 250 copies printed. I suppose one pops up on eBay every so often, but you probably couldn't afford to buy one now. Yes, it was amateurish in some ways - someone forgot to include the chapter on the St. Louis Cardinals. But there is a quote in that first book that set the tone for the 29 volumes that came next: "Since we like to laugh as much as you do, we've tried to be entertaining as well as informative, but if you think we're just one or the other, we'll take it." James' secret weapon in his Abstracts was that he was such a good writer - and didn't take any prisoners because he didn't need day-to-day access to baseball people because he wasn't a journalist covering the sport. That approach has been a hallmark of Baseball Prospectus over the years - it was often quite funny. 

The book is now the biggest part of something of a baseball empire, including a website and some other publications. But this is clearly the flagship of the enterprise. It plops on the doorstep around the start of spring training, promising plenty of insights within lots and lots of pages.

Where are we in year 30? It's striking just how much more information is out there these days, and a lot of it pops along the way. Someone seems to be counting everything that happens in a baseball game, from what pitch is thrown to how fast it is to where it arrives around home plate to how hard it is hit to where it lands. And there are a lot of games, so that's a lot of data that is kept somewhere. Baseball Prospectus has a lot of smart guys looking at the data as they search for connections and conclusions.

The publication adds some new tools this year in the form of metrics like StuffPro and PitchPro. I'm not going to tell you I read much of it, or that I even understood it. But it's nice to know the brainy types are still poking around in all sorts of different areas. 

In going through this book, it seems as if the player descriptions often lean heavily on the site of data analysis and new statistics to come to conclusions. I found myself a little lost with some of the numbers, and that's speaking as someone who called himself a one-man analytics staff with his slow-pitch softball team in the 1980s and 1990s. (I'm confident we were the only team in the Malone's bar league to keep track of Runs Created.) 

In other words, the book is still informative, but perhaps not quite as entertaining as it used to be. That varies from team to team and writer to writer, but to be fair it's difficult to be funny in print. Maybe I skim the player summaries a little more than I used to do in the old days. On the other hand, the team essays usually offer some original thoughts and different perspectives, and they remain smart and fun. Some other articles on baseball are worthwhile as well.

This book usually finds its biggest audience with fantasy players, which is fine. I'm probably not as enthusiastic about the book as those in that particular group, but I still buy it every year and look forward to its arrival. "Baseball Prospectus 2025" will be in a convenient place for the rest of the baseball season, coming out of there's a trade of interest or if I just want background information when a game pops up on television. There's something comforting about that.

Four stars

Learn more about this book from Amazon.com. (As an Amazon affiliate, I earn money from qualified purchases.) 

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