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Jim Margalus deserves a heckuva lot of credit for producing this tome, which is effectively a labor of love for him. A journalist by trade, he is a passionate displaced White Sox fan living in the MLB-starved boonies of upstate New York (I should know, I grew up there) who must spend hours a day, after his day job, following the White Sox and their farm system via satellite TV and the internet. He not only produced this summary of the 2008 season, but he also runs two web sites: State of the Sox, which provides write-ups on each Sox game; and Sox Machine, which contains many other articles about different aspects of the White Sox team and organization. I doubt he makes much money off these... More > endeavors yet, but when you see the quality of his work and his analysis, you can imagine that he is positioning himself to someday be one of the more well known (and well paid) White Sox journalists and analysts.

I didn’t stumble across Margalus’s web sites until after the 2009 season, but once I did, they quickly became one of my favorite online sources of White Sox analysis, and I now read them on a near daily basis. Since becoming a Sox fan I have desired to have a series of volumes which summarize the key events and the team’s performance for each season, that can be referred to years in the future to recall what happened in a specific season. That is exactly what Margalus has embarked upon in writing this book, the first of what will hopefully be an annual series.

So I ended up ordering and reading White Sox Outsider 2009 almost one year after it was published, which provided an interesting perspective on the quality of Margalus’s analysis, because White Sox Outsider 2009 is both a summary of the 2008 season and analysis and predictions about the 2009 season and how the team and each player will perform. Reading Margalus’s predictive analysis of the 2009 season after it happened, I can vouch that Margalus’s accuracy rating is very high - not perfect, of course, but much better than most analysts. Even though Margalus does not have direct access to the team, he has an in-depth understanding of the details and nuances of the game of baseball, and a command of the secondary statistics. Combined with his passion for the White Sox and the time he spends analyzing the minor league system, he is able to produce a very accurate view of the future. I was impressed.

I have only two minor quibbles with White Sox Outsider 2009, which cause me to rate it at 4 stars instead of 5: it could have used a fact checker to verify all the information (there are a few mistakes, such as calling Daniel Hudson a left-hander), and it could benefit from some photos or illustrations to spice up the pages.

All in all I am very impressed with Margalus’s first edition of White Sox Outsider, vintage 2009. I hope he continues to produce these volumes for years to come. < Less