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)?