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It’s the 2008 Hardball Times Baseball Annual!

• The 2007 Season
• Ten Things I Learned This Year, by yours truly
• Division reviews of each of the six divisions, written by THT's "in house" writers. I have no idea what "in house" means these days. We don't live together, thank goodness.
• Matthew Carruth covers the events of the postseason.
• 2007 Commentary
• I've got a little something I call "The Story Stat," which uses WPA to cover some of the major events of the season.
• Will Leitch of Deadspin returns with his own take on the 2007 season.
• SABR's David Vincent, the "guru of home runs" (or something like that) contributes insight on the many home run milestones of 2007.
• "Championship Hangover" is Brian Gunn's excellent summary of the travails of 2007's St. Louis Cardinals, who had one of the more Shakesperean summers in recent baseball history.
• Another great team "story" in 2007 concerned the Seattle Mariners, and USS Mariner's David Cameron pitches in on the improbable season in the Pacific Northwest.
• First Inning (and THT) writer Chris Constancio covers the top prospects of the game.
• THT's Brian Borawski, a member of SABR's Business of Baseball committee, reviews the business events of the year.
• Derek Carty, of THT's Fantasy Focus, has an early look at the top "overs and unders" of 2008
• Jonathan Helfgott, who spent a year researching the globalization of baseball, has contributed an outstanding piece on the current state of the international game.
• And Bill Ferris, of the Detroit Tiger Weblog, has contributed the newest version of our annual "GM in a Box," this time highlighting Dave Dombrowski. As Bill pointed out, the last two GMs who suffered through our glare, John Schuerholz and Walt Jocketty, recently lost their jobs. Time to start talking about a "THT Curse."
• History
• "The Months of 2007 in History," by our Richard Barbieri, provides some intriguing historical context to the year just past.
• John Brattain chronicles the "decline and fall" of the Major League Baseball Players Association, otherwise known as the union.
• Chris Jaffe continues his managerial ruminations by researching the managers who most loved (and avoided) small ball strategies, and
• Guest writer Jon Daly has placed former manager Billy Southworth "in a box," a la Bill James' Manager in a Box series.
• Analysis
• MGL kicks off our Analytic section with a superb "before and after" look at how each team performed. His uses his Super Linear Weights, including UZR and baserunning linear weights, to pick the highlights and lowlights among all teams.
• "The Best Fielding Teams of 2007" is John Dewan's regular contribution to the Annual, applying his fielding plus/minus system to all teams, as well as key bunting and throwing defensive stats.
• "A Random Walk through a Markov Model in 2007" sounds terribly imposing, but it's simply John Beamer's review of the mathematical model that best "explains" baseball, with some specific examples and a terrific spreadsheet to download. You'll definitely love both the spreadsheet and article if you like to play baseball "what if."
• Bill James has contributed a piece called "Mr. Clutch," which is also a sneak peek at what his new book The Bill James Gold Mine will include.
• Tangotiger has contributed two terrific pieces. The first is called "With or Without You," and it exploits Retrosheet's data to isolate the impact catchers and pitchers have had on baserunning. The article includes a complete list of every catcher who was behind the plate for at least 15,000 batters during the Retrosheet years, and ranks them all in terms of defensive prowess.
• Tango's second article is called "With or Without Derek Jeter" and applies the exact same analysis to Jeter's fielding chops, perhaps the most controversial sportswriters-vs.-analytics topic in baseball today. I'd like to see sportswriters pick a hole in this one.
• "The Dollar Value of Player Performance" is a contribution by Vince Gennaro, who has written the fantastic Diamond Dollars. Vince picks apart the economics of player development vs. free agent strategies and critiques each team's current strategy and Major League Baseball's current operating practices.
• "Do Managers Matter?" is a great piece by David Gassko, researching the impact managers have on player performance.
• John Walsh has used MLB's Pitch f/x data to find out what causes the "platoon advantage." Why, exactly, do lefties hit right-handed pitchers better, and vice versa?
• Our final article is from Greg Rybarczyk, of Hit Tracker. Greg reviews the "technical" highlights of 2007's home runs, and then does something brand new: He combines his Hit Tracker system with Pitch f/x data to analyze the quirks and foibles of two of this year's high profile free agents, Torii Hunter and Andruw Jones.