This season, I have been contributing to the Hardball Times and HEATER Magazine, both of which are coming out with annuals that review the 2009 season and look forward to 2010. You can purchase the THT Annual through this link.
Whether for yourself or as a gift for the holidays, I endorse each site’s annual. Today, I’ll talk about the 2010 Hardball Times Annual. The 2010 Graphical Player Annual will come in a couple days.
The Annual is available to $21.95 at ACTA Sports. I know you can get it for less elsewhere, and I can’t blame you for doing so. But know that it costs money to run THT and advertising on the Internet, like everything else, has dried up. Sales of the THT Annual are now our major source of revenue and we don’t really make much money on sales from Amazon and other discount publishers. We make the most money when you purchase the THT Annual through this link.
Please support THT and its writers, and future publications of the THT Annual and other THT publications, by buying directly through this link. If you do, you’ll receive the book several weeks earlier than anyone else, because it will be sent directly to you instead of passing through various distribution centers and that sort of thing.
I’ve been working through the Annual so far, and I have to say… I like it. It’s actually my first baseball annual ever and I’m enjoying the additional knowledge I’m gleaning so far. As a baseball fan, this book is allowing me to expand my horizons past the type of articles I usually read. The review of the divisions has allowed me a great way to summarize how each team performed. I haven’t gotten past the division reviews and Craig Calcaterra’s humorous review of the season as a whole, but the next part of the book looks promising to me. I’ll get to learn about the business of baseball, Latin American free agent markets and many other things that have swayed me into believing a baseball annual is an invaluable way for a baseball fan — and for myself, as a baseball writer — to gain a better understanding of baseball.
Dave Studenmund of the Hardball Times has the rundown of the book below:
- Each division race in 2009 will be analyzed by one of THT’s writers. [That’s me! You’ll find me as the very first article, recapping the AL East.]
- Dave Studenmund chimes in with his usual “Ten Things I Learned This Year” submission
- Craig Calcaterra will review the year’s events in his inimitable way
- Richard Barbieri will revisit the year’s events in the context of baseball history
- Max Marchi, our Italian correspondent, will talk the World Baseball Classic
- Baseball America’s Ben Badler will review the state of the Latin American baseball player “market”
- Brian Borawski covers the business angle of baseball
- Corey Dawkins has a nice analytic piece talking about baseball injuries
- Bill James has developed a new system for predicting which batters will do better or worse next year
- Jack Marshall reviews all those things that make up a player’s character, building off his earlier THT article.
- Geoff Young unveils his system for staying interested in the season even when your team is out of it.
Those articles comprise the first two sections. There are two more: History and Analysis.
- Craig Wright looks back at the amazing achievements of Grover Cleveland Alexander and his duel with Honus Wagner.
- Chris Jaffe nominates his choice for the best World Series ever
- Craig Brown remembers the year the players were set free
- Steve Treder looks back on the productivity of farm systems over the years and wonders when and how the American League overtook the National
- Warren Corbett puts famed manager Paul Richards in a box
- Sky Andrecheck uses his Championship Leverage Index to highlight the year’s games and weight player contributions
- Greg Rybarczyk is back with Hit Tracker’s take on all the home runs last year
- David Gassko has a new system for predicting MVP and Cy Young award winners
- Mike Fast and Dave Allen have written two fantastic overviews of PITCHf/x and what it means for baseball fans
- Tom Tango analyzes how much starting pitchers have pitched in the past and present
- Sean Smith reviews the evolution, and the logic, of relief pitching
- Jeff Sackmann introduces a new approach to developing major league projections from minor league stats
- John Walsh plumbs the depths of WAR to find those players who were better than we thought
- Studenmund uses the occasion of Lucky Lohrke’s death to ask the question: Who truly were the luckiest players in baseball history?