Previews are us

Congratulations to the Houston Astros, now proudly atop the AL West. Shows what all the baseball pundits know.

That’s what the preview issues are all about: picking who will finish where, which team will win it all, who will be the big award winners come the end of the season.

The two primary publications, to my mind, are Sports Illustrated and ESPN The Magazine. The former is a weekly, the latter, i-weekly, so you would figure they would have the most up-do-date information of the “glossies.” Annual baseball previews are notoriously unreliable, better suited to recapping the previous season than prognosticating on the upcoming one. All those hours I spent memorizing projected starting line-ups while I was on jury duty have suited me only half well, thanks to injuries, cuts, trades, etc.

ESPN, which carries a publishing date of April 1 (I’m always leery of such things, waiting for someone to pull a “gotcha” because of April Fool’s Day) and features the Reds’ Joey Votto on the cover for Buster Olney’s lengthy profile.

There’s also a lovely photo essay on the two Los Angeles teams, which combine for salaries of $365 million for 2013 and a profile of the Tigers’ Miguel Cabrera.

My favorite section, however, is the MLB Confidential poll which asks such questions (and examines the answers) as “Do you know of any gay players?” (5 percent answered “yes”); “Who is the last player you’d ever want to add to your clubhouse?”; and “How many guns do you own?” (46 percent claim to be “armed”). I wish there was more of this stuff (“If you were a tree…”)

The team capsules introduced an “unpredictability index,” defined as factoring in “age, injury, and statistical highs and lows going back four years, and making its projections based on database comparisons across MLB history.” In other words, they’re covering their collective ass.

The team snapshots suggest highs and lows in wins based on “ifs,” pretty much another way of offering the usual. For example, the magazine put down the Astros for a low of 54 wins and a high of 62, so they have either 53 or 61 to go.

Despite the relatively dire predictions for a depleted Yankees team (i.e., they might not make the post-season this year), Sports Illustrated, which also is dated April 1 (the magazine carries a Monday cover date), seems to be sucking up the the biggest market by making C.C. Sabathia its cover boy. At least that’s the cover in the NY area. There are also versions with the National’s Stephen Strausburg, the Rays’ David Price, and the Tigers’ Justin Verlander, each with a personalized tease (“Can the Yankees Shatter the Hopes of AL East Upstarts?” It should be noted that only Tom Verducci’s analysis of Tampa Bay’s staff actually has anything to do with the cover photo.)

In a previous post, I mentioned how a few of the magazines thought to publish articles about the use of “next-generation” statistics and thought there were enough topics out there that they shouldn’t have to repeat any. Well, SI and The New York Times both wrote extenive pieces about the uptick in strikeouts (the Times carried this in their baseball preview section over the weekend.)

Verducci also contributed a feature about the Nationals and Michael McKnight wrote about Brian Cole, “The Greatest Player You Never saw.” Cole, a Mets prospect, was killed in an auto accident in 2000.

The SI team capsules are a bit fuller that ESPN‘s, with projected lineups and rotations, best-and worst-case scenarios, and in keeping with the strikeout theme, “The K Meter: percentage of 2012 plates appearances that ended with a strikeout, and major league rank.”