For the third year in a row, I spent countless hours in November and December writing player capsules for Fantasy Baseball Index 2008, a magazine-style fantasy guide that should be making its way to newsstands and Amazon right about now (unexpected perk: my first author credit on Amazon, along with a brief bio).

As with the 2007 edition, I covered the pitchers in both leagues as well as creating staff depth charts for all 30 teams. Nearly 300 hurlers made the cut for the writeups, with projections for another 150 or so included in the alphabetical index. Alas, some of my best (or perhaps funniest) work writing about guys on the fringes wound up on the cutting room floor, but it’s tough to complain when those guys have no fantasy relevance whatsoever. “Cow tipping” is the term my BP editor, Christina Kahrl, uses for writing about bad pitchers. It’s easy and entertaining, if a bit cruel, to take the time to savage such defenseless beasts.

Anyway, this year’s Index contains 829 player capsules with 2008 projections, position-by-position rankings, the FBI signature pullout “Cheat Sheets” with dollar values for 4×4 and 5×5 single and mixed leagues, depth charts, and a bunch of good features, including an experts poll, John Sickels on this year’s crop of impact rookies and a piece that I wrote on ERA estimators (similar to last year’s). The mag goes for $7, which also gets you an electronic update featuring revised projections, depth charts and Cheat Sheets as well as camp notes and analysis at the end of February. Also for sale via the Index store where you can order your copy directly is a separate series of electronic updates that happen on a weekly basis through March; for the third year in a row I’ll be doing those as well. Get ‘em while you can.