I don't think I'm a natural writer. I think I probably write better than I do anything else, so it's fortunate that I have been able to make a career of it rather than resorting to editing or carpentry or male modeling, but it's not something that's just a matter of course, like it's just always been there. I went to college intending to be a stockbroker, and kind of fell into journalism when I realized I enjoyed writing more than I enjoyed math. I still do, which is why it's always been a little uncomfortable when people who don't know all the names and the history position me as a sabermetrician. I'm not; I work with them and I admire them, but I can't do what Clay Davenport or Keith Woolner did, or what Colin Wyers and Eric Seidman continue to do. I don't have the database chops, for one, and I don't have the math skills, for two.

All of this is a long way of saying that I admire and envy the writers I know who are prolific. I'm convinced that Joe Posnanski is actually triplets, and he's just done a great job of hiding that fact. How else could he write as much, on as many topics, as he does? I used to think that Kevin Goldstein wrote a lot, generally five days a week on prospects and the minor leagues after joining BP. Then he ramped it up with "Minor League Update," and I'm in awe. Even beat reporters, who I've tended to criticize as a class, almost all have the ability to generate huge amounts of copy in an age when filing a couple of stories to the paper each day just isn't nearly enough. There's a particular skill, the skill of volume, that I just don't have. I can be prolific at times, such as each October, but it rarely feels like I'm tapping into some kind of natural talent. It's just that I like baseball and have a lot of strong opinions about how it should be played, managed and administrated.

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I don't remember exactly when, but at some point in the middle of the '00s, the Boston Globe's Bob Ryan penned an article in which he expressed wonderment at what it would be like to attend a ballgame with a stathead. Jonah Keri, with Baseball Prospectus at the time, subsequently invited him to attend one with him, although I don't think the date ever happened.

I wish Ryan could have been at MCU Park in Coney Island last night, where a collection of statheads and fellow travelers gathered on a cloudy night to watch some pretty unimpressive baseball. I think he would have been surprised, and while I don't know whether he would have enjoyed himself, I do hope it would have changed his perceptions about how this particular type of fan enjoys the game.

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In 2007, Barry Bonds hit .276/.480/.565 in 126 games, leading the NL in OBP for the sixth time in seven seasons. He hit a homer every 12.1 at-bats, was intentionally walked about once every 11 plate appearances -- in 29% of his plate appearances with runners in scoring position -- and played a below-average left field that was far from among the worst in the game.

In 2007, Carlos Delgado hit .258/.333/.448. It was his worst season since establishing himself in 1996. Delgado played in 139 games, two weeks' worth more than Bonds had played, was intentionally walked eight times and led the league in nothing.

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I guess we should reset this…

This blog exists to promote a still-untitled book coming out this fall, my first solo project. The book is a collection of my own Prospectus articles and columns dating to 1996, as well as original material, most notably a chapter devoted to the Mets/Cardinals 20-inning game from April of this year, a game that represented both the joys of being a baseball fan and the agonies of being a baseball analyst in the early 21st century.

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It's taken a while, but I think I finally have the structure of the book laid out. I played around with writing it chronologically, which would have enhanced the biographical aspects, but instead, it will be organized by topic. The following list isn't final, but you can expect sections to include:

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I spent a lot of time trying to come up with a rationale for the Phillies' decision to commit $125 million to Ryan Howard's ages 32 through 36 seasons 20 months before a decision point on doing so. The ones I see fall into two categories: soft factors, such as keeping a perceived key player happy, fending off two years of stories about Howard's impending free agency and showing the fan base that the team will keep its most popular players in Philadelphia; and poor player-evaluation skills: using runs batted in as a primary measure of player value, not taking into account the career path of players with Howard's skill set and badly misreading the replaceability of players like him.

No combination of these factors can justify the contract. Howard is a good, not great, player, a mix of obvious skills — his ability to hit for power and against right-handed pitching — and obvious flaws — a contact rate that limits his ability to reach base, middling defensive skills, terrible problems against left-handed pitching. The package makes him an asset as he moves through his prime, and he has been a key contributor to the Phillies' success since 2006. He has never been the best player on his team, and now, he is no better than the third-best Phillie, and could be rated lower depending on what kind of years Jimmy Rollins and Jayson Werth have. The Phillies have missed badly on Howard, committing maybe 20% of their payroll down the line to a player who will be contributing, at best, 70% of the time at the plate and not at all in the field.

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The epic Mets/Cardinals game Saturday provided more than just memories. It gave me the first concrete new-content idea for the upcoming book.

I've mentioned the struggle to decide exactly what the book will look like, what material it will include, what percentage of it will be original versus new. The process is a bit like taking four or five jigsaw puzzles and tossing all the pieces together in a single pile on the table. You know there's a good picture in there, maybe even more than one, but to get to the end you're going to have to not only make the correct pieces fit, but you're going to have to throw out three-quarters of the ones you start with.

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I ran my 2010 season preview at Rotowire, including a series of fantasy-leaning divisional previews followed by my traditional breakdown of all 30 teams, including runs allowed and runs scored projections. With their permission, I'm running my predicted standings here in the book blog as well.

For those who have asked, work on the book came to something of a halt during March, as college basketball, season-preview work, fantasy drafts and other things took precedence. I still find myself thinking about the question of what the book will be, and to that end have read or re-read books that to one extent or another touch on aspects of what I'm trying to do. I banged through Bill Simmons' The Book of Basketball, Josh Wilker's Cardboard Gods, Paul Krugman's The Great Awakening (a re-read) and parts of various Baseball Abstracts by Bill James. I need to close ranks on this question soon, because while I'm comfortable with the writing volume ahead of me, for my sanity I'd like to end the discussion in my head.

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This is why there won't be a section of the book entitled, "Why I Kick Ass at Fantasy Baseball."

I play fantasy because it's fun. Or rather, I play fantasy baseball when it's fun. To me, that means playing in leagues with friends. I don't play NFBC or online leagues or anything where there isn't some connection to the people involved. The fantasy and Strat leagues that I am in because of the people.

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I knew that when I made a call for suggestions for articles to include in my upcoming book, it would probably complicate the decision process. I thought I'd been fairly thorough in looking through the last decade of writing, thought I'd narrowed down the list to something manageable, thought there was little chance I'd missed anything of note. I was wrong. There were a number of pieces suggested to me by e-mail and in the comments section that I hadn't considered. Some had already been tossed-by and large pieces to specifically tied to events, that I think won't play well in a book-but some had simply made less an impression on me, in the re-reading, than they had on the readers. It is interesting, as a writer, to not realize what of your output has actually made a lasting impression.

When I talked out this book with Dave Pease over the winter, it started out in my mind as a collection, then developed into something that included more original material than that. The longer I live with this concept, the more I see that the decision between those two categories isn't just a matter of finding sufficient material to make it the former, or writing enough of the latter. It's actually a battle for the identity of the book. Is this going to be a "greatest hits" collection, a means of having all of my best work in one place as both a retrospective of and an introduction to Joe Sheehan, or will I create more of the book from whole cloth?

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Welcome to the blog for "The Untitled Joe Sheehan Book," which will presumably have a catchier title at some point. In this space I’ll chronicle the process of writing my first solo book, which should be out just in time for you to enjoy on an off-day during the World Series. The idea for a blog like this is, to some extent, stolen from the great Joe Posnanski, who started The Soul of Baseball blog while he was working on his wonderful biography, with the same name, of Buck O’Neil.

Since we announced "The Untitled Joe Sheehan Book" a month ago, I’ve spent most of my time reading what I’ve written over the past decade for Baseball Prospectus, trying to pare about 1,500 pieces down to a couple dozen for inclusion in the book. Those pieces are going to form the framework of the book, serving as both a "best of" for longtime readers and an introduction for new ones. Make no mistake about it; as much as I want the people who have read BP for years to buy the book, I want to be able to reach beyond that group as well. I want all baseball fans to be able to pick up the book and enjoy it even if they’ve never heard of BP.

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Every year I try to project every team's record and runs scored and allowed, using as much information as is available to me in the waning days of March. I do it because it's fun, and because the process of making those predictions is very educational for me in the ramp-up to the season. The process, rather than the end results, is what is important, because the chance of getting many teams' overall records or run differentials correct is fairly slim. The value of the pieces I write at that time is in the analysis, the words; the numbers are for information purposes only.

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