Customer Reviews

Baseball Register, 2003 Edition : Every Player, Every Stat!

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I agree with the first reviewer wholeheartedly. This is the Sporting News 2003 Baseball Register, not the Sporting News/STATS 2003 Baseball Register. There is an almost undetectable difference between last year's TSN Register and this one -- and this is a huge loss for Major League Baseball Handbook fans.

Every year, I looked forward to the early November arrival of the STATS Major League Handbook. I figured that with the new partnership with the Sporting News and the six week delay in publishing, it was going to be a bigger and better book than ever. How wrong that turned out to be. This is a basic back-of-the-baseball card stats regurgitation with almost no extra "stuff" except for a couple of pages of STATS-like managerial tendencies. Not even the basics such as leaderboards, much less projections for 2003 or in-depth fielding statistics.

A major disappointment, and a major loss for serious baseball fans who like their stats. I'm guessing STATS was losing their shirts on these books -- and that's why they first pulled their books from third-party distribution, and then pulled them altogether. Like the old Zander Hollander annual baseball guides (Handbook of Baseball), the old STATS books will be sorely missed.

This book contains virtually none of the great material that was previously in the STATS handbook. Anyone familiar with the STATS handbook will be misled by the false advertising and implications that STATS combined their efforts with TSN to create a better handbook. I won't be fooled again next year!

Like many other reviewers I regret the passing of the Stats Baseball Handbooks, since I had stopped buying the Register after I discovered the Handbook. I therefore rather reluctantly bought the Register this year thinking the promised addition of On-base and slugging percentages would at least make the new Register better than the old ones. I was very disappointed, though, to find out that room had been created for OBP and Slug by dumping putouts and assists from the fielding stats. One of the few advantages the older Registers had was that they did not ignore a player's yearly fielding stats. (The Stats Handbook only provided them for the past season.)

As with the first two reviewers, I am devastated by the loss of my yearly favorite. I am a long-time baseball book collector, and have a collection of Baseball Registers dating back to the early '50s, but stopped buying them altogether when the STATS Baseball Handbook started coming out.

The Baseball register is far the inferior product -- it is overpacked with inessentials, like complete minor league records, which make it more, not less, difficult to get a complete picture of a player's career and to compare him with other players. Minor league stats are only interesting for prediction of the future of prospects (and those stats were provided only for prospects in the grievously lamented Handbook); once a player has established himself, they are interesting for archival purposes only.

What I'm really missing: HBPs, TBs, League Leaders in a wondrous multitude of categories, career leaders, Bill James pitchers games scores, and most of all, the favorite toy -- projections of career likelihoods of reaching Hall-of-Fame type numbers, like 3000 hits and 500 homers.

You must face facts. This book killed the revolutionary STATS Major and Minor League Handbook series.

The Sporting News is over 125 years old, and it shows in this book. It is unfortunate that the publishers would choose this book in favor of the STATS series, and rather apparent that it was done in an "everyone knows the Sporting News brand name!" sort of way.

It is awful to see the infinitely superior STATS series slain by the mighty dollar.

Every year thousands, if not millions of baseball fans yearn for a book that will provide them with the past records of the hundreds of major league baseball players that appear in the games they watch live or on television (or listen to on the radio). Who are these guys, where have they played in the past, and how did they do last year? The BEST available currently published version of these data is *The Baseball Register*. The book is reasonably compact so it can be carried to the ball game (even with the current ridiculous security restrictions on carry-in items). It includes the information most essential to knowing "at a glance" how good a player has been. It also includes information that some of us, at least, find interesting, including school affiliation, minor league records, and transaction histories. All in all, this remains THE book for baseball fans to buy and then keep handy during the baseball season.

No, the Register is not perfect. There always are additional pieces of information that people will want and yet are not made available here, including which outfield position a fielder played (the book simply lists "OF") and fielding putouts and assists (eliminated this year to make room for additional batting statistics). People who enjoyed and relied upon the STATS baseball handbooks clearly are disappointed that much of the information previously contained there is not provided in The Register. But I find this stance and the associated angry disapproval unreasonable. Fans who want a reasonably compact register of players are NOT going to lament the lack of stats on batters' hit by pitches, pitchers' WHIPs, and "career projections" as a major catastrophe.

Yes, it's too bad that the STATS handbook apparently has gone the way of the dodo and something should come along and take its place (actually, there are computer disc compilations of stats that are VERY comprehensive and affordable). In the meantime, however, the typical baseball fan will definitely find the *Baseball Register* to be useful, enjoyable, and well worth its low price.