The 2009 Hardball Times Annual

It ships next week, and based on Dave Studeman's description of it, it sounds really sweet:

• We boosted the amount of writing in the book, from 32 to 40 awesome
articles. That's a 25 percent increase!

• We recruited even more of the best baseball writers we know. Guys like
Rob Neyer, John Dewan, Joe Posnanski, legendary sabermetrician Craig Wright, Don
Malcolm (the editor of the Big, Bad Baseball Annual) and many other fine writers
all agreed to come on board.

• We revamped the format of our season review, putting more information
into graphs and tables and allowing our writers more freedom to comment on each
division.

• We better focused our statistics section, dropping the leaderboards and
one of the Appendices (though you can still download all the data we've provided
in the past). This freed up pages for the extra commentary and made the
statistics more manageable.

Less thrilling than all of that, but perhaps of interest to some of you seeing as though you're reading this blog, is that I have an article in that bad boy as well. It's about the Mitchell Report. But don't worry, because (a) there is only one use of the term "buttocks" in the whole article; and (b) I broke the whole thing up with quotes from Oscar Wilde and Ben Franklin and stuff, so you can even feel like you're getting a little culture along with it.