John Hunt, who should need no introduction, Deric McKamey, the minor league expert at BaseballHQ.com, and Dave Studeman, of HardballTimes.com, have joined Graphical Pitcher author John Burnson to create Heater, an online magazine about baseball. While in the first issue Hunt and Studeman write fine “early season roto” columns, the heart of the Heater are the 30 pages of team statistical profiles and charts, and the umpteen more pages of position breakouts (as well as a page tracking minor leaguers).
Heater will be coming out each week, and for the fantasy player or the hard core baseball fan the wealth of charts, graphs, timelines and other details about this week, last week and next week, as well as a whole lot more stuff (I’m really just scratching the surface) is organized in an exacting and pleasing way. It’s like the back stats pages of Sports Weekly were totally rethought and reorganized to actually present the data in a way that made it easy to find trends and nuggets about players and teams. Radical.
In a word, all of it is useful, all of it is easy to understand, none of it is presented anywhere else in so fine and complete a manner. Don’t take my word for it. There is a sample copy at the link above. You’ll then have to decide if your money is well spent for this sort of thing. I’m hoping it is, because as long as they keep putting this stuff out my job is going to be a lot easier (and I’m going to look a lot smarter).