THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I am looking at four of the reports currently available for subscribers.  Here are my impressions, as I open each file:

1. They have the MLB Schedule.  It’s a pretty cool layout actually.  Instead of it being “one box per day”, it’s “one box per opponent”, and the size of the box shows you whether it’s a two-game, three-game, or four-game set.  Never saw one like this before.  The only thing you lose is the game time.  They even color-coded the teams to differentiate between AL/NL and home/away.  The only thing they can do to make it perfect is make the in-division games stand out more (though I don’t see how… maybe use a third color).  On the huge plus side, you get three-months of games, for all thirty teams, on one page.  This is a nice bonus for the subscribers.

2. They’ve got a file that has one page per team, where you get the spring training stats, plus the depth charts, including the likelihood of who becomes the relief ace if the original goes down.  They also have a couple of lines of blurbs for the biggest transaction of the week.  Again, what’s nice is that you get all the data crammed on one page for each team, but it doesn’t look crammed.  I think this one is mostly for Fantasyers.

3/4. Studes gives the batted ball report for pitchers and batters, similar to what you get in the Annual.  Those reports are one of the best things to come out of sabermetric presentations.  He also provides some commentary of particular players he finds interesting.  I think these ones are mostly for Saberists.  He’s got one of them available for download for free here:
http://www.hardballtimes.com/gifs/BBR_01_09_Whats_a_batted_ball_report.pdf

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It’s an interesting business model, in that the regulars won’t know about anything else going on and so aren’t losing anything… they’re just missing out.  It would be similar to Bill James’ publishing dozens of articles for his subscribers, then picking out a few to put in his annual book.