The 2017 baseball season is (finally) right around the corner, and now that Baseball Prospectus 2017 has made its way into the hands of thousands of readers nationwide, we wanted to post this year's edition of our run-down of changes and errata.
Handy Link
An index of all the players in the book, including the team chapter and page number: https://legacy.baseballprospectus.com/sortable/extras/bp2017_index.php
Book Updates
Last year, we made many changes to the format, layout, and features of the annual. We stuck with just about all of them for Baseball Prospectus 2017–you'll find two years of PECOTA projections, the graphs and ballpark schematics in each team chapter, the pitch speed and catcher statistics, the thicker paper, and pretty much everything else that was introduced last year. The part of the book where you'll see the most difference is the cover, where we are pleased to have photos again after a multi-year absence. Our cover model is fantastic Boston Red Sox outfielder Mookie Betts, and we've got Kris Bryant and Corey Kluber on the back.
New for 2017:
- we have revised treatment of managers–they've been moved to their own section, and we've added Rian Watt and Rob Arthur's wRM+ for each of them. The section is fronted by Matt Trueblood's essay on the modern manager.
- Other fungoes this year are Rob Mains on the crazy 1967 pennant race and Jeffrey Quinton on the modern front office.
- We've juggled the composition of the player stat blocks slightly to give fantasy players and old-school Baseball Prospectus VORP fans alike a little more love. We've also added draft round or other information about how the player entered professional baseball.
Errata [updated 3/26/2017]
The biggest change that was made behind the scenes this year is a multi-phase, distributed editing system developed by new editors Aaron Gleeman, Bret Sayre, and Stephen Reichert to squash some of the bugs that have made their way into previous editions of the book. It has always been frustrating to track those issues, and we're seeing a lot less of them than at this point last year, so our fingers are crossed in the hopes that this list is a lot shorter. If you see anything we don't have, please leave it in the comments, and we will update this list as things are reported.
- We have found one book-wide data issue: projected GB% is essentially random for pitchers. We have corrected the data and it is freely available by clicking here.
- p. iii: in the Table of Contents, "2017 Mangers" should be "2017 Managers"
- p. 192: Ken Giles' player comment mentions "Augsut", should be "August"
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