It is with considerable chagrin that I announce something that several astute readers have already determined: a few players are missing from Baseball Prospectus 2007. To be precise, it looks like we’re missing four guys: Bob Wickman, Wladimir Balentien, Adrian Beltre, and Hernan Iribarren. The frustrating thing about it was that this was an error generated by an unforseen technical glitch (not an oversight by the chapter authors), and more frustrating still is that we caught this before we went to press while generating the Index. I was assured by our layout team that the missing quartet would get squeezed in, but this was with roughly 36 hours to spare before delivering the finished product to the publisher, and it appears that getting those four guys pasted in got overlooked in the final flurry of activity. We learned of the problem the same time you did–when we opened our copies of the book.
So, what can we do with those four player comments we were supposed to give you? Run them for free here on BP.com, along with their full PECOTA cards. Just enter their names in our “Find Player” feature, and you’ll find exactly what it was we had to say about them, as well as a more involved projection and statistical analysis of each player’s performance. It’s a way for all readers to see what a full-fledged PECOTA has to say about a player, and it’s the one way we can fix an annoying error.
Please feel free to get in touch with me about this or any other complaint about the book–the goal, as ever, is to make it better every year, and deliver the best annual on the market.
Sincerely,
Christina
Addendum
Some people have also noticed a persistent but not universal error with the listed birth dates of players born before January 1, 1970–many of them end up being assigned December 31, 1969 as a birth date. Now, rather than give you the mistaken impression that emergency rooms were swamped that particular New Year’s Eve, this is instead another unfortunate glitch from our content management system. You’ll find those players’ correct ages (as of July 1) in their Age field in their name line, their listed ages in their seasonal data, and in their PECOTA line. While exasperating, the correct information as far as the birthdays of the almost-fortysomething and older set can be found here on baseballprospectus.com on their Player PECOTA cards. For example, take a look at Roger Clemens’ DT Player Card.
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