Understanding Fantasy Baseball No Longer Just For Nerds

Historically, people that have had the most interest in fantasy baseball have been statistic junkies and lovers of baseball in general. People who immerse themselves into spreadsheets and stare at computer screens to develop strategies have made a name for themselves in the industry. With technological advancement in recent years however, this is no longer the case. Information is very accessible and easily compiled so that almost anyone can put together a team and compete in fantasy baseball with a reasonable amount of time, research, and luck. It is not nearly as difficult to find player statistics, trends, reports or any other type of information that you need to succeed in your league. When I began working on this book, many people asked me why I was writing it. What could this book offer that other published works didn’t already talk about? There is some truth to those questions. There are plenty of available works published that provide a tremendous amount of knowledge about fantasy baseball. Reading other fantasy baseball articles and books myself, I’ve found that many of them, while thorough, tend to neglect the fundamentals. They assume that any reader already has a good grasp of the basics. While that often may be the case, I believe it’s critically important not only to know the basics but to completely understand how to use them to your advantage. Having this book as a foundation, you can then better understand some of the more complex topics: sabermetrics, drafting, trading, etc. In this book I will provide insights into not only the basics of fantasy baseball, but will also delve into complex strategies and statistical analysis to help you succeed. In each section, I will first present the topic and then discuss how understanding it in detail will help you as a fantasy baseball team owner. I’m certain that even savvy fantasy baseball players will be able to take away at least a few insights to improve their overall fantasy baseball experience. In one section in particular, Relative Draft Value, I provide original, self-developed formulas and strategies that you simply can’t get anywhere else. I will be focusing primarily on season long leagues; however I have also dedicated a section to daily games which have become extremely popular and deserve discussion. In short, this book will go into almost everything you need to know to start yourself down a path to fantasy baseball success.

What can a spell-checker tell you about economic trends? Why is the world’s supply of ideas about to double? What did America get right in the nineteenth century that it’s getting wrong in the twenty-first? If Karl Marx were alive today, would he be hosting a show on Fox News? These are just a few of the provocative questions asked by Sonic Boom, a (mainly) optimistic look at the near future. Sonic Boom tells why the world’s economy is likely to be just fine, with prosperity increasing; why globalization will soon drive us even crazier than it does today; why “a chaotic, raucous, unpredictable, stress-inducing, free, prosperous, well-informed, and smart future is coming.” The book is rich with specific examples and advice on how to navigate your own way through the craziness that’s ahead. Forbes calls Gregg Easterbrook “the best writer on complex topics in the United States,” and Sonic Boom will show you why.

What differentiates this new series of books from the books and magazines people have used in the past is that each of the six books focuses on a different league - 5x5 mixed, AL-only, NL-only, 4x4 mixed, AL-only, and NL-only. The projections and dollar values for players can vary up to 50% from league to league. Drafting with the help of a magazine not tailored to your league specifications is a recipe for disaster - yet millions of people do so every year. With your Fantasy Scouting Report in hand, you can rest assured that your projections are accurate. Each book also has special Quick Lists designed to help you find what you need in the limited time you have between picks. Players are ranked by actual scoring category points so you can compare players intelligently and quickly. Categories like ERA, WHIP, and BA are weighted for IP and AB, vitally important but often overlooked. Also included is a unique quantitative analysis of the best prospects for 2005.

The study of baseball history and culture shows the national pastime to be a forum of debate where issues of sport, labor, race, character and the ethics of work and play are decided. An understanding of baseball calls for consideration of different perspectives. This very readable textbook offers insights into baseball history as a subject worthy of scholarly attention. Each chapter introduces a specific disciplinary approach—history, economics, media, law and fiction—and poses representative questions scholars from these fields would consider. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

A best-selling author and passionate baseball fan takes a tough-minded look at America's most traditional game in our twenty-first-century culture of digital distraction Baseball, first dubbed the "national pastime" in print in 1856, is the country's most tradition-bound sport. Despite remaining popular and profitable into the twenty-first century, the game is losing young fans, among African Americans and women as well as white men. Furthermore, baseball's greatest charm--a clockless suspension of time--is also its greatest liability in a culture of digital distraction. These paradoxes are explored by the historian and passionate baseball fan Susan Jacoby in a book that is both a love letter to the game and a tough-minded analysis of the current challenges to its special position--in reality and myth--in American culture. The concise but wide-ranging analysis moves from the Civil War--when many soldiers played ball in northern and southern prisoner-of-war camps--to interviews with top baseball officials and young men who prefer playing online "fantasy baseball" to attending real games. Revisiting her youthful days of watching televised baseball in her grandfather's bar, the author links her love of the game with the informal education she received in everything from baseball's history of racial segregation to pitch location. Jacoby argues forcefully that the major challenge to baseball today is a shortened attention span at odds with a long game in which great hitters fail two out of three times. Without sanitizing this basic problem, Why Baseball Matters remind us that the game has retained its grip on our hearts precisely because it has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to reinvent itself in times of immense social change.

A lively illustrated introduction to the Negro League equivalent of the All-Star Game discusses the history of the games, as well as the colorful cast of promoters, gamblers, and hucksters who made it happen. Original.

The Wizard of Oz meets America's favorite pastime! Alex Metcalf must be dreaming. What else would explain why he's playing baseball for the Oz Cyclones, with Dorothy as his captain, in the Ever After Baseball Tournament? But Alex isn't dreaming; he's just from the real world. And winning the tournament might be his only chance to get back there, because the champions get a wish granted by the Wizard. Too bad Ever After's most notorious criminal, the Big Bad Wolf, is also after the wishes. And anyone who gets in his way gets eaten! From beloved baseball author Alan Gratz comes a novel in which classic literary characters are baseball crazy, and one real-world boy must face his fears and discover the surprising truth about himself.

What happens when three financial industry whiz kids and certified baseball nuts take over an ailing major league franchise and implement the same strategies that fueled their success on Wall Street? In the case of the 2008 Tampa Bay Rays, an American League championship happens—the culmination of one of the greatest turnarounds in baseball history. In The Extra 2%, financial journalist and sportswriter Jonah Keri chronicles the remarkable story of one team’s Cinderella journey from divisional doormat to World Series contender. When former Goldman Sachs colleagues Stuart Sternberg and Matthew Silverman assumed control of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in 2005, it looked as if they were buying the baseball equivalent of a penny stock. But the incoming regime came armed with a master plan: to leverage their skill at trading, valuation, and management to build a model twenty-first-century franchise that could compete with their bigger, stronger, richer rivals—and prevail. Together with “boy genius” general manager Andrew Friedman, the new Rays owners jettisoned the old ways of doing things, substituting their own innovative ideas about employee development, marketing and public relations, and personnel management. They exorcized the “devil” from the team’s nickname, developed metrics that let them take advantage of undervalued aspects of the game, like defense, and hired a forward-thinking field manager as dedicated to unconventional strategy as they were. By quantifying the game’s intangibles—that extra 2% that separates a winning organization from a losing one—they were able to deliver to Tampa Bay something that Billy Beane’s “Moneyball” had never brought to Oakland: an American League pennant. A book about what happens when you apply your business skills to your life’s passion, The Extra 2% is an informative and entertaining case study for any organization that wants to go from worst to first.