Sporting News Wins!
Hey there,
I tried to do you all a favor this year and at the same time hopefully save you some time and money. As you fantasiers know, this is mass-spam time for fantasy baseball preview magazines. Which one(s) do you need and which of the them is the best bang for the buck? Well, I have investigated a large portion of them, the ones I saw at my local book stores, Target and Wal-mart and I am proud to announce that Sporting News Fantasy Baseball 2010 is the winner! Congrats!
Now, I want this to be a positive post so I am not going to mention the other magazines I examined. Most of them weren't bad, though one in particular had a lot of silly articles -- like how to improve your draft by drafting naked. I like humor as much as the next guy, probably even more, but when chunk down close to $10 bucks for a magazine you want content that will help you prepare for the upcoming baseball season.
I didn't include any online previews because I am not a huge fan of them, to be honest. I like being able to take my fantasy research materials with me where ever I go, including the special study room that us men like to use for quiet time. ;)
Anyway, back to the winner and what I liked about it. For one, the pages are all magazine pages, not cheap recycled paper. Better quality pages lead to a magazine that will hold up all year. Since this will be a main tool for me this year, I'll use it often.
Covers aren't that big of a deal to me, but this one does a decent job of highlighting the content inside. By the way, Albert Pujols is this year's cover boy extraordinaire -- he's on just about every mag' out there which can actually make all the publications blend together. The SN added pictures of Tim Lincecum, Mark Teixeira and Joe Mauer to make them less AP overkilled.
A removable cheat sheet is a nice little extra and again it's fairly sturdy (many times "pull outs" are unpulloutable without mass ripage - I call the rights to "unpulloutable", you heard it hear first!).
They break down each position, as well as 3-year averages which is handy and then towards the back they have easy-to-read projected lineups for each team. I really like that because in a draft sometimes you want a quick glimpse at a MLB team's line up to find some over-looked potential sleeper.
The only down side is that since this was also one of the first publications to hit the shelves, they don't have most of the big off-season roster moves (Cliff Lee still listed as a Phillie and Roy Halladay as a Blue Jay etc...). That has to be one of the toughest decisions to make as a publisher of this type of reference magazine -- go to print too early and you miss player movement, too late and you miss a huge chunk of your targeted audiance.
So, there you have it, Sporting News Fantasy Baseball 2010 is my officially endorsed fantasy magazine for the 2010 baseball season. Congrats to Bill Bender, Matt Lutovsky, Brad Pinkerton and George Winkler for their great work on the content and to publisher, Mike Kallay, as well as everyone else involved with bringing the excellent magazine to market.
Go buy it, and may the fantasy gods smile upon you this season! I am not affliated with the Sporting News in any way, this is just my opinion.
-Johnny Archive




