Customer Reviews

Graphical Player 2009

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

 

 

The Graphical Player 2009 is a stunning compendium of statistical information about nine hundred major and minor league baseball players - in the form of black-and-white graphs! Each page is crammed full of black-and-white visual statistics about four players, punctuated with a very brief text summary of the player's performance. Compiled by John Burnson and his crew from the weekly baseball magazine "Heater", Graphical Player displays three years of daily trends, highlighted with Graphical Organizations that give an overview of where each team stands and where it's going. A treasury for the hardest of hardcore baseball plans, especially anyone who enjoys fantasy baseball leagues as a hobby.

This is my third year buying this book. And this is the best yet. A must buy for a different look at players. A lot of insight. And a lot of different graphs to pour over. Enjoy.

Rob

This is my second year with Graphical Player and while I really liked last year's the 2009 edition is a full evolutionary step forward. I've been competing in fantasy baseball for 14 years now and will be entering my third season in the NFBC - National Fantasy Baseball Championship. I can honestly say that this may be the most essential fantasy baseball publication on the market.

What separates Graphical Player from other fantasy baseball publications is the graphical representation of data. There are trends that are impossible to see just looking at data sets. This give you a clear advantage to help win your league.

I also recommend John Burnson's other publication which is weekly PDF fantasy baseball magazine - Heater. Graphical Player is key to prepping for fantasy baseball drafts and Heater magazine will keep you on track for the championship!

This is my 5th year buying this book and it has changed. Burnson has shifted focus from a sabermetric look at analyzing on-field performance to a Fantasy Annual. This book has shifted way to the geek side in the balance of on-field versus fantasy.

Freed from the shackles of baseball HQ, John Burnson won a Total Points League last year and it has hurt this book.

Gone are the old ratios that Burnson developed such as GOG3 and GOG4, along with pitch counts. In their place? - K/BB ratios, histograms of Total Points, and other less complicated, and less meaningfull data. Each players' career is better depicted, but with less insightful statistics.

The MINER projections are given much more prominence now. However, in the lack of any other meaningful interior statistics, and given the tiny scale of the plots, the projections all seem to simply regress to the mean.

I used to love this book - I used it almost exclusively for selecting pitchers in my fantasy leagues. Although still valuable, "Graphical Player" now should be considered a fantasy annual and it is below others in terms of value. It is still worthwhile as a supplement.

If you are in a total points league, its value has increased greatly. But for me, who's not in such a format, this book has been dumbed-down too much.

I've gotten the Graphical Player for years (all the way back to when it was only the Graphical Pitcher) and this year's version isn't as good. The GOGs are gone as are the career star graphs outlining the career hit and strand rates for each pitcher (my personal favorite). The SIM ERAs are good and are still there, however. They tried putting in everything and it caused it to be too crammed. Even though I am in a head-to-head league (vs 4 or 5 Roto-style), the Weekly Points is just useless to me. Also, as a baseball fan, I understand the importance of OPS, but the Yearly OPS Trends graph is just wasted space in a fantasy guide, imo. In addition to being unhappy with the change in the "meat" of the book, I was also mildly disappointed in the two-line excerpts, which I'm afraid were not that clever now that they have too many "contributors". While that is certainly a minor point, it made reading the summaries rather entertaining in years past. Not so this year. I look forward to getting the Graphical Player every year, but I was so disappointed that I'm not sure I'll be getting it next year.

As much as I don't like the off-season, at least I know that there are a handful of books that will help me pass the time by giving me some idea how players will perform in the upcoming season.

Such is the case with Graphical Player 2009, written by John Burnson and featuring some of the writers from Heater Magazine.

What makes this book unique is Burnson's approach to profiling and projecting players, and in turn provides the reader - generally a participant in fantasy baseball leagues - a different strategy to take with them.

Burnson's departure from the standard off-season projection tools stems from his belief that the best way to present his data is the simplest - by doing it visually. He creates a 12-element "dashboard" for over 900 players - both major and minor leaguers - that utilizes MINER, his projection system that plots a player's performance through 2011.

Why might that be important, you ask? Well, if you play in keeper fantasy leagues, you want to have a good idea how a player might perform beyond this season.

Compared to other similar books, the Graphical Player 2009 doesn't have as much written analysis, which is a bit of a disappointment from my perspective. Since I don't play fantasy baseball, I really look to these types of books to inform me about their methodology. While there is some analysis, there's not enough to make me run out any buy the book.

Then again - I'm not the target audience, so if you are someone who plays fantasy baseball, I think this is something that you would benefit from - if nothing less, to get a different perspective on projections.

It does take a bit to get used to the dashboard style that Burnson uses - or at least it did for me. I found myself keeping a finger on the page that explained how to use it and flipping back to make sure I understood what I was reading. It seems best to equate it to stock market or financial projections - it looks pretty, but you sure better be able to make sense of it all.

Graphical Player 2009 is a good read for those looking to succeed in their fantasy leagues, while something that could be a nice addition to the library of analytical fans.

the book is confusing, hard to follow and the graphs are so small the 10-20 point shifts can't be recognized in the charts. Would not recomend you waste your money on this piece of junk.