Another bird sighting

Earlier this month, I posted about the joys and sorrows of the rare creature known as the baseball magazine. And we’re not talking about those publications geared specifically towards fantasy baseball enthusiasts; goodness knows there are plenty of those.

Last week I picked up a copy of another perennial favorite of mine, Athlon Sports’ 2016 MLB Preview.

This is pretty similar to The Sporting News‘ version. After all, how many ways can you say ham and eggs? Athlon also offers four pages per team. Instead of one general article, as does TSN, they break their report into categories: overview, starting rotation, bullpen, middle infield, corners, outfield, catching, DH/bench, management, and final analysis.

Like TSN, Athlon (also holding the same $7.99 cover price as last year’s edition) gives the teams’ projected starting lineup (with “bonus” next level snippets). They also give a “scouting report” from a member of the opposition; little items of statistical interest, as well as a “beyond the box score” feature; a schedule grid; a roster (TSN lists MLB stats or none at all while Athlon gives both major and minor league numbers); and each team’s top 10 prospects and top farmhand.

Then there are the usual predictions for regular season standings and post-season (They have the Blue Jays beat the Giants in the World Series) and major award winners (MVP, CYA, ROY). Again the “nature of the beast” for print publications is that they’re already out of date (Yoenis Cespedes), an issue that could easily change how they perceive the fates of the ball clubs.

The back-end of the magazine is loaded with 16 pages of fantasy info and just a few pages of league stats.

Of course, what really separates the two magazines are the features. Athlon gives its readers “Short Hops,” small interesting nuggets of info designed for those with short attention spans. A “Calendar of the Weird” recaps the 2015 season with unusual tidbits (and those that don’t seem so unusual, but merely needed to fill the space).

There are “16 Things to Watch for in 2016” and “10 Baseball Truths,” again a bit of filler that might strike some as arbitrary and gimmicky. There’s a report on the top 24 college baseball teams; top 25 high school and college draft prospects, and top 50 minor league prospects

Among the more interesting features in Athlon are a revisitation of the 2006 draft and a conversation with baseball writers Sam Miller and Ben Lindberg who have collaborated on The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team (due out in May), about their experiences running an independent league team.