We go back to our bookshelves for this week’s Fantasy Book Review here on Fantasy Ethos. I am happy to announce that today’s review is the second edition of the Your Comprehensive Guide to Playing Fantasy Football by Sam Hendricks.

There is something intriguing about getting fantasy football advice from a guy who flew and trained other pilots on flying the F-15. In the Fantasy Football Guidebook, Sam Hendricks opens his vast knowledge of playing fantasy football to the masses. Hendrick’s tome on fantasy football is a massive 375 pages that takes players from high-level topics to nitty-gritty details.

Knowing Hendricks’ background as a pilot helps put the massiveness of this book into perspective–Hendricks prepares the fantasy player for every conceivable and inconceivable case a fantasy player may encounter. Treating the reader as if he is responsbile for guaranteeing the well being of a $30 million fighter jet, Hendricks gets fantasy football players accustomed to the numerous scenarios that may play out in a league and advises him on how to navigate through them to their league titles.

In the Fantasy Football Guidebook, Hendricks spends countless pages discussing various draft strategies, auction strategies, position-by-position strategies, and league set-ups. However, the real gold in this book is the cerebral aspect of the book. Hendricks gets into the mind of fantasy players and discusses on how you can use one drafter’s tendencies to your advantage and how to handle the psychological game that fantasy football is. The Fantasy Football Guidebook is a great book to learn to take a much more strategic and disciplined approached to fantasy football.

The Fantasy Football Guidebook is a must read for any fantasy player looking to compete in the World Championship of Fantasy Football (WCOFF) as Hendricks has dedicated ten pages on preparing for this one particular high stakes league. He goes into special strategies for this draft on what to expect and how to vary your play accordingly.

Overall, if you read this book and do not consider yourself a better fantasy football player after reading it, read it again, you clearly were not paying attention.

You may purchase Fantasy Football Guidebook: Your Comprehensive Guide to Playing Fantasy Football (2nd Edition) at Amazon. , via our affiliate link (which helps fund this site).

What are your thoughts about the Fantasy Football Guidebook?

We go back to our bookshelves for this week’s Fantasy Book Review here on Fantasy Ethos. I am happy to announce that today’s review is Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis.

Prior to the release of Moneyball, Sabermetrics was something of which only serious stat geeks cared about.
Moneyball gives you incredible insight as to how Billy Beane managed to put together teams that won no fewer than 87 games from 1999 to 2006 despite having one of the tiniest payrolls in baseball. Michael Lewis was given unlimited behind-the-scenes access to Oakland Athletics’ front office. He details how Billy Beane became a disciple of sabermetrics and began shunning the overly-hyped prospect for guys who knew how to draw a walk.

Now, to call this a fantasy baseball book, might be a stretch. However, for myself personally, it changed how I approached fantasy baseball. I know focused on young pitchers who managed to maintain high strikeout to walk ratios through the minors and avoided the ones who had a lot of hype but never were that did not have the statistics to back it up the hype. When evaluating young hitters, the fact that a player knew how to work a count meant that he was much more likely to adjust to new situation and succeed in the majors.

As a result of the book and Beane’s success, it is common for major league baseball front offices to employ a full-time statistician to evaluate options for general managers, and some even become general managers wonderkids such as Boston’s Theo Epstein.

Moneyball is easily one of the best books written about professional baseball in the last decade and very well may be one of the books that has the longest lasting impact on how major league baseball front offices are run.

You may purchase Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game at amazon. , via our affiliate link (which helps fund this site).

What are your thoughts about Moneyball?

After a stomach bug kept me from reading anything last week, I am happy to get up back on track with the next installment of our Fantasy Book Review series here on Fantasy Ethos. I am happy announce that today’s review centers around the release of Baseball Prospectus 2010 by the Baseball Prospectus Team of Experts.

The last time I held a book this large, I am pretty sure I was looking a number in the phone book. That so happens to be the book’s exact point. The Baseball Prospectus 2010 is meant to be an exhaustive directory and analysis of every player that will matter for the 2010 baseball season. The team at Baseball Prospectus exhaustively goes team-by-team and breaks down each player’s recent history, provides an analysis, and projects what 2010 will look like for each player. What’s useful about their projections is that they are not just an average of previous seasons. There is real insight behind the projections that will make bold statements about a player’s demise or rise.

And that insight is well-known to many of Baseball Prospectus’ regular readers. The front cover boldly highlights that the book contains “Nate Silver’s Deadly Accurate PECOTA Projections for More Than 1,600 Players.” PECOTA is respected as the most accurate baseball projections tool. Silver cut his teeth developing PECOTA before he created the models that allowed him to correctly predict the 2008 Presidential Election on FiveThirtyEight.

One of the most useful items in the book is not any of the statistics, analysis, or projections. It’s the ten-page Statistical Introduction that makes the book significantly less intimidating for those who may not be as number savvy as the authors. Further, the significance of each statistical topic is framed within “Fantasy Focus” sections, which helps the average fantasy baseball understand why he should care about each of those statistical difference and how to adjust his strategy accordingly.

Baseball Prospectus 2010 very delicately balances between being a heaven for statistical geeks and a practical guide for fantasy baseball players. At the very least, after reading this, you will sound like the smartest guy at your draft.

You may purchase Baseball Prospectus 2010 at amazon. , via our affiliate link (which helps fund this site).

Have you checked it out, what are your thoughts on the Baseball Prospectus 2010 (or previous editions)?

In our next installment of our Fantasy Book Review series here on Fantasy Ethos, I am happy announce that today’s review centers around the new 2010 Baseball Forecaster by Ron Shandler.

When it comes to fantasy baseball, Ron Shandler is one of the most well-known and renown experts. Every year, he shares his thoughts and predictions for the upcoming season by publishing his Baseball Forecaster, which is now in its 24th edition. The 2010 Baseball Forecaster has its usual suite of player projections based on sabermetric tools that Shandler and the BaseballHQ team have refined over the last three decades. If you are a fantasy player who likes doing it by the numbers, the 2010 Baseball Forecaster probably deserves a spot on your bookshelf.

What separates this book from another just another set of predictions is that it puts a lot of emphasis into making use of the data in additional analysis and the formation of actual strategies for playing fantasy baseball. There are all sorts of extras like reliability grades, consistency rankings, and five-year trends that are useful to the fantasy player.

One of the new items in this edition of the Baseball Forecaster is that Shandler is unleasing the Mayberry Method on the fantasy baseball world. This book does not just tell you who is likely to have a big season, but it is innovating and taking new approaches to help you win your next fantasy baseball championship.

As an added bonus for the book owner, since the book is published during the off-season, updated projections are available online on March 1 on BasebalHQ.

You may purchase 2010 Baseball Forecaster at Amazon , via our affiliate link (which helps fund this site).

Have you checked it out, what are your thoughts on the 2010 Baseball Forecaster?

I am happy to announce the launch of our Fantasy Book Review series here on Fantasy Ethos. The series with cover new and classic fantasy sports books. Some we will love, some we will not. To kick off the series, I am going to start with the classic Fantasyland by Sam Walker.

Sam Walker did everything that a fantasy player could only dream about doing to win. He hired not one, but two scouts to help him draft his team. He got the chance to go toe-to-toe with the biggest names in fantasy sports. He spoke to actual players about their fantasy value. He traveled around the country trying to make deals happen. All the while, he got paid to do it. Fantasyland: A Sportswriter’s Obsessive Bid to Win the World’s Most Ruthless Fantasy Baseball chronicles Sam Walker’s journey during the 2004 fantasy baseball as he attempted to win the 2004 American League Tout Wars title. While doing so, he penned the quintessential book on being a fantasy player.

As a reader, you realize how ridiculous Walker’s season is going to be when he hires two scouts, Nando Di Fino and Sig Mejdal to help him. Nando helps him scout players the traditional way, by gut and feel, while Sig, a NASA engineer, helps him crunch the numbers to find out on whom, from a purely statistical perspective, Walker should focus. These were not glorified co-owners. These were guys that Walker actually paid to do fantasy baseball research for him.

Walker splices in experiences of other fantasy players throughout the book, but it is his profound insight about (and resulting frustrations with) fantasy baseball that really resonate with the reader. A pre-judge punching Sidney Ponson was Walker’s biggest mistake on Draft Day and continued to be a royal pain. No matter how good your fantasy season is going, there is always that one player that makes you say, what was I thinking?

The most interesting part of the book is when Walker captures what has become a lost art–pressuring someone into a trade. With fantasy leagues interacting almost completely online and making it easy to say no to a deal, that art has been lost. Walker traveled around the country during the season to get some face time with his fellow fantasy owners making deals that his co-owners would have surely rejected had the offer appeared via email only.

Fantasyland is, without a doubt, the best fantasy sports book on the market, and definitely deserves a place of prominence on your bookshelf. It is a great read and you can cannot call yourself a true fantasy player until you read it.

Since and as a likely result of the publication of Fantasyland, Nando Di Fino went on to be a fantasy writer at ESPN and now the Wall Street Journal. Sig Mejdal is now a Senior Quantitative Analyst for the St. Louis Cardinals where he brings statistical analysis to the Cardinals’ scouting department.

You may purchase Fantasyland at Amazon , via our affiliate link (which helps fund this site).