2012 Baseball Forecaster (Ron Shandler's Baseball Forecaster) [Paperback]

Ron Shandler (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 20, 2011 | Series: Ron Shandler's Baseball Forecaster

The industry's longest-running publication for baseball analysts and fantasy leaguers, the Baseball Forecaster, published annually since 1986, is the first book to approach prognostication by breaking performance down into its component parts. Rather than predicting batting average, for instance, this resource looks at the elements of skill that make up a given batter’s ability to distinguish between balls and strikes, his propensity to make contact with the ball, what happens when he makes contact and reverse engineer those skills back into batting average. The result is an unparalleled forecast of baseball skills and trends for the upcoming season and beyond.

Product Details

• Paperback: 280 pages
• Publisher: Triumph Books; 26 Annual edition (December 20, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1600785875
• ISBN-13: 978-1600785870
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 0.7 x 10.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #459,158 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Still THE Classic January 4, 2012

By S. Regis

Format:Paperback

The book has changed over the years and the 2012 edition is different than previous years. The player profiles are larger (there's 7 players/page rather than 9) and there are more statistics and skills ratios. The Encyclopedia of Fanalytics now takes up the first third of the book. It's been improved and is a fun read on its own.

The authors discussed the accuracy of predictions quite a bit over the last couple years and now they have fully embraced a weighted 3-year average unless skewed by obvious trends, scouting reports, injuries, and/or age. Their point, and it's valid, is that the inherent error in actual performance is so great that accurate predictions are impossible. Think about accuracy vs. precision and standard error, or noise, of the data.

Twenty-five years ago when this book was first published, there were very few predictions available. The internet didnt exist. When we drafted our Roto teams, we used the baseball annuals published by the Sporting News (I miss the Baseball Guide and Baseball Register), insight from Bill James, and the spring training magazines. By the late '80's pioneering player valuation authors like Shandler, Patton, and Mann-Manley slowly became available at bookstores. Now, anybody can get pretty good projections the night before the draft.

Shandler's point in this book, however, is that such precise projections are not really that accurate. The Forecaster gives you the tools to do your own evaluations. Use them to select the players you think will perform the best. In this sense, fantasy baseball has come full circle if you're doing your own work. The way to beat the parity created by a plethora of available information is to gather tools that provide the edge of accurate insight.

And finally, are the 60-word player write-ups less pithy than the old 30-word gems? The Matt Latos bio includes a description of his career trajectory, "He came quickly but proved to have staying power". No further comments...........

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Hard to beat Shandler for baseball forecasting January 22, 2012

By Toddster64

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I've been purchasing the Shandler annuals for years, and his team continually fine-tunes the formulae as well as content presentation to make this a must-have for upcoming baseball seasons. While fantasy leaguers will find an abundance of good data here (I personally only played one year), I strongly believe baseball fans will benefit from, and enjoy reading, the analysis within. My must-have annual every year, along with Baseball Prospectus.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Good book but like some have stated...falling apart February 23, 2012

By Benjamin Lee

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I too have a copy of the book where the middle pages of the book are detaching from the spine. I've had to resort to reading the book vertically so that I don't cause any further detaching of the pages from the spine.

I've placed an inquiry with the author as my book was purchased over 30 days ago and I'm not eligible for an exchange or return from Amazon. Called Amazon and they will let me return the book and issue me a replacement despite me being over 30 days since my order. Thumbs up to them!

Although I'm now very wary of early printing cycles as these books were probably an early printing.