Somworld.com

[jmccully61]

I am thinking about joining this site for the information. 1. Does this site have quality information, and 2. if they do is it worth it?

[MARCPELLETIER]

Well, the Basic access costs you only 10$, and it gives you a one-year access to all archives and current articles. There is about 5 years of archives, so it's hard to not find something that interests you along the way.

By far and away, the folks who will find somworld most useful are the keeper-league players. If you're an experienced leaguer, the site gives you very useful ahead info, such as the best rookies available in the draft, pretty accurate projections about the upcoming cards (useful when you're discussing trades in-between seasons). But the site will be even more useful if you're unexperienced and plan to get into a keeper league. The site will give you useful tips about the dos and donts. I have played in a keeper league before, and it took me four years before I first made the playoffs, and the reason is the learning curve I had to undergo. If I had had tips such as those given in this site, I'm sure I would have had a winning team much faster.

For TSN-players, there is not a lot of info. They have a system that evaluates the best cards, but sometimes it's way off-line. To give one example, they have for this year Prado as a better second-baseman than Roberts, straight-up, or they had Callapso as a better second baseman than Iwamura!!! Still, I find it interesting to see those evaluations. I might not conclude that Callapso is better than Iwamura, but it certainly can tell that he's perhaps a bargain in TSN, or that Iwamura is overpaid (both the case, in my opinion). But I find too many mistake and a need for some edit work. The case of Prado above is one example (going through their numbers, I found out that they assess his 2b value with his 3b defense rating), but there are other mistakes.

They also have an evaluation of the MLB players, but it's pretty amateur, I find. It might be unjust to monday-morning quarterbacking, but they had Y.Betancourt and JJ Hardy as players who will have a break-out season in 2009. They finished with .245/.274/.351 and .229/.302/.357 respectively. You better look for baseballprospectus or hardballtimes for such information (they both had Hardy and Betancourt pretty bad).

So overall, I had a good time for my 10$ looking around, but I'm not certain I will renew my subscription, as I'm not in a keeper league.