Tout Wars AL 2011 Champion Larry Schechter found this year’s Guide in an unnamed store at lunchtime today, and bought a copy, even though there’s one in the mail to him as we speak.

Larry was perhaps looking for his fun story, “The Gutsiest Trade I’ve Ever Made,” on page 20, about a deal he made last August in Tout Wars with Ron Shandler.

The official release date for the magazine is next week, but it seems that it’s landing on shelves now!

In fact, here’s a shot of it on the Fantasy Baseball rack at Barnes and Noble in Park Slope, Brooklyn! We’re out early, and I couldn’t be happier.

C: Brian McCann is one of the top catchers in the game. David Ross doesn’t play much, and won’t hurt your batting average. Continue reading →

C: Miguel Montero will see all the at bats he can. Henry Blanco is coming off a career year, but at 41 this year he can be expected to repeat. Craig Tatum was recently claimed and is less of an offensive presence than Blanco. Continue reading →

This year’s guide is at the printer, and should start showing up in stores soon. Here’s the front cover.

The Patton $ Evaluator is Windows software that lets you sort through last year’s stats, apply your 2011 fantasy team rosters, and analyze just what the hell happened, good or bad.

It’s free and we hope serves as in introduction to the Patton $ Projector, which will be released on February 5, with roto prices from Alex Patton, Mike Fenger and me, as well as my championship player projections.

To download and install the Windows program, right click here. Then click the option Save Linked File, or Save Target File. The file will download.

To install, rename the file setup.msi. (This is a security measure. Windows won’t allow you to download an executable file.)

Double-click to launch the installer, and follow the instructions.

Have fun!

I was invited to participate in a 15 round NFBC style mock draft. I had the 10th pick and took Carlos Gonzalez (over Adrian Gonzalez and Robinson Cano). I share my whole team over at pattonandco.com, in the Carlos Gonzalez comment. But here is a taste of the endgame (last 10 rounds)…

14) Justin Masterson–Like this.
15) Lonnie Chisenhall–I’ve never been that sold on this guy, but he was a funner pick than Danny Valencia.
16) Ryan Doumit–Yes, two Twins catchers in 16 rounds.
17) Johnny Giavotella–A bit of a risk but the alternative was Maicer Izturis, no knock on him.
18) Dayan Viciedo–A young star or a wipeout, it’s hard to tell. My other needs were pitchers, and it seemed like there were a bunch of similar ones.
19) Edwin Jackson–Veteran stability in the clubhouse.
20) Dan Bard–I certainly don’t know if that’s a good pick.
21) Phil Hughes–I think this is a very reasonable bet.
22) Francisco Liriano–Same here.
23) Gerardo Parra–With the Kubel signing maybe Parra’s PT is endangered, but that’s crazy. Parra is a great defender and produced with the bat and feet last year. Push him aside for a star, but for Jason Kubel? I have no idea about the D’backs’ plans.

It’s a fun group. The magazine comes out in the middle of February.
I really like my team, blah blah blah.

Voting for the colorfully named Canadian Blog Awards is underway, and our friends over at RotoRob.com are nominated for best sports blog. After carefully visiting and evaluating each of the other nominated blogs I voted for RotoRob.com, even though I’m only secretly Canadian. And you can, too!

Well, this actually broke a month ago, by Mike Fast at Baseballprospectus.com, but I just saw it. In a nutshell, Mike uses pitch data to show that pitchers and hitters influence the Horizontal Speed of the Ball off the bat. This metric is derived, if I’m understanding correctly, by dividing the distance the ball traveled by the time it takes to go that far. Hard hit balls get places faster, more softly hit balls get places slower. Pop ups, almost always outs, don’t go far at all and take a long time to get there. By virtue of some commonsensical tests, Mike shows that pitchers have some effect on how hard the ball is hit against them. This appears to be groundbreaking work that confirms and quantifies what all of sensed intuitively: That BABIP isn’t completely random for pitchers. Good stuff.

Yes, in this quirky little game that Tom Tango has put together over at the ever enjoyable and challenging insidethebook.com blog, Ask Rotoman won the official Best Projections of 2011 competition, edging out the Consensus picks of all 22 forecasters (as well as beating the 21 other forecasters, as well).

You can read Tom’s post about the competition, which is for the most part his way of trying to demonstrate that the value added of a “projection system” over the weighted averages he uses for his Marcel the Monkey projection are slight. There is another side to that story, but we’ll leave that quarrel for another time.

The bottom line is that projections take many forms, for a variety of distinct purposes, and no one has come close to cracking the rather substantial variance in player performance that can only be attributed to luck (or unluck). I make projections for my own use, because I need to know what’s going into them, and I offer them to customers because they ask for them. I hope that’s because they trust that what I’m putting into them is the best stuff we have to work with. This year it turned out that the Challenge agreed, which is nice.

Congratulations to Consensus, RotoWorld and KFFL, each of which won one of the unofficial contests, and to Consensus and RotoWorld, which finished high atop the z-score derived standing for the four combined contests.

Deadspin has published a takeout of “King of Sleaze Mountain” super agent Dan Lozano based on anonymous files it was sent recently. It is no endorsement of Lozano and his behavior over the years to say that this story of a preternaturally adept chameleonic salesmanship and cheesy hooker procurement leaves one feeling a little dirty, because there are only two real issues that seem to have legal legs and a sports implication:

Does Alex Rodriguez own part of Lozano’s business? This is not allowed under the rules of baseball, I gather, for all the obvious ethical reasons you can imagine, but there is some evidence that he does, and Deadspin doesn’t dig beneath the surface of the accusation to find out if that evidence is real or not. And,

Did Lozano push Albert Pujols into an ill-advised contract back in 2004 in order to generate cash flow he needed personally? Again, Deadspin makes the accusation and leaves it at that.

My friend, Cardinals-watching Brian Walton, didn’t leave it at that, and takes a look at the facts of what happened in 2004 with Lozano, the Cards and Pujols at scout.com. You can read his excellent piece at stlcardinals.scout.com.

All we can say to Deadspin is, That wasn’t hard now, was it?