Prospect Retrospective Project released Tuesday morning

The Baseball Prospect Retrospective Project has been released. The .pdf has been sent to everyone who has ordered.

When I say this is a "project," I mean exactly that. This is a project. It is a skeleton, a (very) raw prototype for a much larger and more detailed project. The immediate project is a proof-of-concept if you will.

The final page count for the Project tomorrow will be 159 pages. The ultimate version (which will be an actual book) will be over 1,000 pages and will likely take several years to complete, so don't look for that soon!

However, the immediate Project includes five sections of material:

Part One is the introduction, which includes a history of how I ended up doing this for a living and how I look at players.

Part Two is an examination of all of my top prospect lists from 1996 through 2013, with a very brief shorthand of how the player performed.

Part Three is a look at the biggest busts of this era and a very brief shorthand of the factors that appear to be correlated with their failure or, if you’d prefer, my failure to properly predict how they would perform. I am well aware that correlation is not causation and that every case is different. Untangling the correlative and causative factors is part of the larger project for the historical book.

Part Four is a look at the top players in baseball as of mid-August 2014, with a list of what grades they received when they were prospects, plus selected comments drawn from past Baseball Prospect Books.

Part Five is a brief impressionistic summary of lessons learned over the years. The ultimate project will put these impressions on firmer empirical ground, or reject them entirely if they turn out to be incorrect.

If you haven't ordered but are interested, this is an electronic product released in .pdf format. You can order it at johnsickels.net and it costs $9.95. It will be emailed to you within 24 hours of ordering.