Of the sites I most frequently use for analyzing players during the off season, two (now three) have made significant recent improvements.

Career minor league statistics are crucially important to consider for any player who has been in the majors less than a couple years. Surprisingly, of the dozens of career players stats available for free on line, only a few carry career minor league stats. Only Rotoworld, Baseball America, and MiLB.com give you current minor league stats, but they won’t take you back any further in time. Baseball Cube is the only source for career minor league stats of retired players of the last 10 years or so, but that site is riddled with annoying pop-ups and ads from which there is no apparent escape.* The Toronto Star Player Index was my favorite until last year. It is completely clean and gives a little scouting report, describes transactions, call-ups/sent-downs, and DL stints along with their career Organized Baseball record. It has career high info that I don’t pay any attention to, but it is fun to see where a player was born and what he considers his home town. They lost my loyalty last year, because their name cross-referencing wasn’t working. You had to click on the letter representing their last name, then scroll down and find their name from there. CBS Sportsline worked better, though, the minor league stats are in a completely separate box at the bottom of a long page from the major league stats. There isn’t much else on that long page that is useful or particularly interesting. I do look at their player news sometimes, but there are better sources for analysis and injury updates. Their statistics are plentiful, but primitive. Toronto Star fixed their index, so I’m back with them, now. Besides, you have to pay to get ESPN’s scouting reports, so I use The Star’s unless I have better info from Baseball America or John Sickels.

*Correction Jan. ’07: Baseball Cube has been cleaned-up and is now an excellent site. It’s advantage over the Toronto Star site is that it gives the pitchers’ home runs, hits, walks, and strikeouts per 9 innings. Other nice bonuses are play-off stats, fielding stats, cross-referencing on players who are from the same home town, high school, or college. It even indicates to which organization the player’s minor league teams belongs and a season-by-season list of managers he played for. The strong points for the  Toronto Star are its scouting reports, injury history, and overall cleanness. For example, it is much easier to find and read the transactions associated with the player. The Baseball Cube is too busy with advertisements and a wonky layout. I do thank them for removing the most offending ads, however. And, if you look at Vernon Wells or Rich Harden, you can see I’ve been a supporter of theirs for a long time – when a lifetime sponsorship was ten or fifteen bucks!

________________

Here in early January, I found only two Depth Charts Depth with data base links that are up-to-date with player movements: Rotoworld and MLB.com. Rotoworld has revamped their look after abandoning their old depth charts late in the season last year. Neither site has a master page such as CBS Sportsline’s. Both require selecting a team from any other team’s page. However, Rotoworld index is a bit wonky on my computer. MLB.com has the much nicer index and the nicer graphic. You see the players distributed across a baseball field by position, while Rotoworld merely has them listed in rows and columns. MLB.com shows who might play whichever other positions rather than just showing the members of the bench at only one position. Here is MLB.com’s depth chart for the Blue Jays. The Rotoworld index which requires first clicking a drop down button that doesn’t even work right. Not all the teams show up and there are extraneous “player” choices.

However, in my opinion Rotoworld has far more realistic predictions of who will be starting where. The list below shows where they differ. After each comparison I call the winner. Note, I didn’t quibble over who was listed first through fourth in the rotation. That really doesn’t matter. However, the 5^th starter is the one most likely to lose a job or at the very least, a few starts, so I did point out those differences. Both web sites often listed multiple pitchers in the 5^th spot, although Rotoworld listed far more candidates.