Book 'em, part I

I always know that another baseball season is right around the corner when all of the new baseball publications start popping up and showing up in my mailbox. With that in mind, I thought I'd start a little mini-series here on the ATM blog about books with a Minor League bent to them. Today, I'm going to focus on two sitting on my desk as we speak:

Minor League Baseball Analyst
By Deric McKamey

As the description states, McKamey is able to combine sabermetrics and "traditional" scouting to analyze over 1,000 Minor League players. It's a must-have for all fantasy players, in my opinion, and fans of prospects in general will find it incredibly useful. McKamey provides capsules on all of these players -- mini-scouting reports, if you will -- along with a stunning array stats and indicators  fans of Baseball HQ (and the general Jamesian set) have come to appreciate.

The Newberg Report
By Jamey Newberg

Texas Rangers fans are undoubtedly familiar with Newberg's work, but I must admit this is the first time I got his Bound Edition. If you want a volume that covers one organization as much as it humanly can be covered, this is it. Newberg is all over the Rangers from top to bottom and he's even got a blog going on MLBlogs. Reading through all the information in this Report makes me wonder why there aren't 29 others like this for every other organization. Maybe Newberg should tackle that for his next project...