The most timely and thorough free internet baseball news reporting comes from Rotoworld. It actually summarizes and links the original news reports – not just trades, but rumors, positional changes, hot/cold streaks, management issues, etc. When you click into the player’s profile, you can check all the news blurbs on him since they started saving the news blurbs. Of course, that comes with plenty of stats and graphs. Rotoworld has a nice package of Fantasy Baseball tools including, perhaps, the industry’s most up-to-date and handiest depth charts. Each league is all on one page.

Caution: many Depth Charts can be a bit lax keeping up-to-date - especially during the off-season. In different years, different depth charts are the ones keeping up. The nicest looking and best functioning depth chart is CBS Sports. The injured players are flagged. Each player has a data summary bubble including their latest news and injury reports. Each name is linked to their player profile page for even more details.

If you are going to pay anything for your baseball hobby beyond the cost of your Scoresheet teams, I strongly advise becoming a Premium subscriber to Baseball Prospectus. It is a pittance to pay for the Injury Histories you get on their Player Profiles, the hilarious and insightful adventures of scout Jason Parks, a useful Team Tracker, leading edge sabrmetrics, Kevin Goldstein’s voluminous and thorough prospect reviews, insightful transaction analyses, and many articles of the highest standards. Another item that makes BP so indispensible is the “Scouts View” section at the end of John Perrotto’s On the Beat features. These tidbits provide intelligence on whether a player’s sudden improvement or decline is likely temporary or permanent. You also get the PECOTA projection spreadsheets, which are the only well regarded projections based on comparisons of similar players. As far as I know, all the rest of the projection systems out there are based on the direct regression and aging of each player’s individual stats. Some are more sophisticated than others, but PECOTA is likely the best one to have as a second opinion.

I would not dissuade anyone from plunking down their shekels for Rotowire, if only because John R. Mayne and Jeff Erickson provide such entertaining and/or astute writing. However, I have yet to find anything in Rotowire I would consider indispensible except their “Search for Player” box. Yes, during the off-season it is the quickest way to see the team to which a player is signed or if he is signed. You don’t even have to finish typing in his name – a bubble appears after three letters with all the possible players and their current team. As you type each letter thereafter, the list is filtered – or you can just paste in his name if you can cut it from somewhere else. It’s the fastest player search on the world wide web.