Customer Reviews

Baseball Forecaster 2003

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I began playing fantasy baseball two years ago, and my immediate success is due in large part to Ron Shandler's Baseball Forecaster. Don't bother wasting money on the multitude of worthless preseason fantasy baseball draft magazines on the newsstand, or speculative publications like Baseball Weekly.

One of the reasons Baseball Forecaster outdoes the competition is that it focuses on what it calls Base Performance Indicators, or what economists might call leading indicators. Instead of assuming that a player like Paul Byrd, who suddenly won 17 games last year, or Mark Bellhorn, who came out of nowhere to hit 27 home runs, will continue those trends, Baseball Forecaster looks at some underlying skill measures to understand how those levels of performance were reached. That way it can assess the likelihood of those players repeating the performances. Likewise, it can assess whether a star player who had an off year will bounce back.

Shandler and his team have refined these base performance indicators every year, and while they're very good they don't stop improving them. For example, last year Alfonso Soriano batted .300, much to the chagrin of many sabermetricians who were concerned about his free-swinging ways. John Burnson took that as a challenge and created a new formula to predict expected batting average, one which, tested on historical data, proved superior to their old formula. This book is especially good for 5x5 rotisserie leagues because it has base performance indicators to predict nearly all of the most common 5x5 statistical categories. However, I also use it for another league I'm in which is based on expected runs created and saved.

Last year the Baseball Forecaster helped me grab players like Vincent Padilla, Eric Gagne, and Jarrod Washburn for very little...

Have subscribed to Shandler's Forecaster since 1997. Believe me, I've been through all the other mags and publications, both by noted fantasy gurus such as Bill James, John Benson, etc in addition to Spoting News, Fantasy Sports and so on. I still read and buy the others, as I consider them interesting and enjoyable reads. Yet, when I want the crucial info that will lead me to league titles, I refer to Baseball HQ. The Forecaster has guided my preseason and in season ship for 6 yrs now. The best, no questions asked. Projections based on empirical data, trends and base skill indicators. I could go on and on..... Play Ball!!!!!!!

I won my first baseball title last year and $1000+ thanks to this book. Although I didn't follow the dollar values of each player, I thoroughly studied the trends in different ratios to determine my own values. I scored at the draft and dominated the entire league. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone except my league mates. I can't wait for the 2004 edition. Also look for Rotoman's projections.

For the past 7 years, I have sworn my allegiance with John Benson. But, last year's book was a letdown. Poor editing, and rehashed articles.
For last year's auction, I employed Shandler's LIMA plan, and won my league! I didn't even know Ron had books out. All I read was an article of his in another rag. Just that one page article on rating pitchers helped me come in second out of 15 teams in pitching points while spending the least! Read this book, you should be impressed by his formulas and correlations which help predict future performance. It makes things less of a guessing game and takes away alot of subjectivity that most books employ. Buy this book!