"Prospectus? You Hardly Know Us!!!"

Baseball Prospectus is the coolest, most comprehensive book of its kind. Those guys are always working hard to bring us new stuff, better stuff, and they've done it again this year:

* Will Carroll of the wonderfully useful Under the Knife is now on their staff of writers, and will also be hosting a syndicated radio show. You can't really hear this through the book, I don't think.

* They've gone against their intuitions and added projections for pitchers for next year. I don't know how, and I don't know if they'll ever do it again, given the difficulties in such projections, but they did it this year, so I guess we'll see.

* You can even pre-order the book through them at 20% off the cover price, but then you make up the difference in shipping costs anyway. I reccommend going to bestbookbuys.com and getting ith through buy.com, where the book was only $13.82! You can even get free shipping, except that you take the chance of the book being delivered sometime in mid-August buy an old man using a rick-shaw. I went for the UPS standard at $3.85, which still brings the total to less than $18.

One of my only criticisms about the book, at least last year's edition, was their use of a particular quote:

"Their rankings by position are an invaluable tool. If more general managers understood it, they wouldn't do the trades they do." --Peter Gammons, ESPN

Sounds great, right? Except that last year's edition didn't include rankings by position. Which, besides eliminating what I thought was a very useful tool, made this quote kinda pointless. I wrote to them about it last year, but never got a response. That was before Clay and I were on a first-name basis. I guess it's just nice that Peter Gammons said something about you once, so you've gotta take advantage of it. I imagine that if Peter had said,

"With the season winding down, baseball fans from RedSox Nation and beyond 

are realizing that this book is a piece of crap I use to wipe my wrinkly old ass, 

and that it sucks so much that my living room gets cleaner every time I open it, 

especially while watching Darrin Erstad grind out a gritty, epic, classic, line-drive 

homer into the right-field bleachers at the beautifully classy, new, Edison Field 

off Giants reliever Tim Worrell, with Dale Evans watching over him from above, the 

love of millions of formerly unrequited Angels fans washing over him like a whirlpool, 

thinking about the eckstrordinnarrilly underratedness of David Eckstein and Susan 

Tedeschi, which flies in stark contrast to the overbearing, warmonger, micro-

managing owner of the hated, New York Yankees... "

they'd still have it right there on the cover, albeit in much smaller type.

Anyway, here's a quote from Boy of Summer:

"Go buy Baseball Prospectus. Now."