I have been a subscriber to Fantasy Sports for about a year. While I am pleased with some of their content, I find that they are lacking in depth of analysis and are mostly for novice and slightly intermediate rotisserie baseball and fantasy football hobbyist. To reiterate what I just said, if you have ever heard of Bill James or KC Joyner and read some of the stuff they have published, then this magazine is not for you. However, if you have not heard of either of these people and are interested in improving your knowledge of rotisserie baseball or fantasy football, then I suggest trying Fantasy Sports magazine out.
What this magazine is about
Fantasy Sports is written for only two sports: baseball and football. The magazine attempts to analyze the top 100 players, typically 20 – 50 at each position and provides both a review of their statistics from prior seasons along with a projection for the upcoming season. While this seems valuable, it really isn’t because you can easily pull up all of this information on the web at ESPN or Yahoo! Sports. However, I will say that not all of the information found in this magazine is available free to the public. I have found some decent insights on players and I have successfully followed some of their recommendations in the past – so there is some value in this magazine. With that said, I would say about 85% of the content of this magazine is not valuable to an intermediate fantasy sports manager. In fact, I think their rankings are worthless and I do not follow their rankings. And their articles on the national fantasy sports competition are complete filler. Who wants to read about these geeks that fly to Tampa Florida to pay $5,000 to enter a fantasy football league? Anyway, getting off my soap box, there is decent value in this publication, you just have to patiently search for it. Their player analysis is decent, usually runs about 5-6 sentences per player, but rarely reaches the level of depth many managers crave for. But to be fair, I have almost never seen a publication that has done a great deal more research and analysis than this magazine does. With that said, I do wish they would dig one layer deeper on many of the players they analyze.
Issues
There are two baseball issues (both before the season starts) and two football issues. Now, the first issue for each sport is the valuable one. The second comes 1-2 months later and often 70% of the magazine contains the EXACT same content as the last issue. The player analysis is the same and sometimes the rankings are the same. The 30% that is different usually involves some good analysis on sleeper picks or unconventional wisdom, which is sometimes valuable information. In addition, they usually include an article on rookies, which I often find valuable as well, since there is a great deal of uncertainty and little data on new players. That said, you really only need to buy one of the two issues for each sport (preferably the second edition), to get all the information you’ll need to prepare for your draft.
Subscription
A one year subscription costs $9.95 for four issues. This is quite a bargain considering that one issue costs $6.99. At only $2.50 per issue, I think the risk/reward ratio is excellent. Even if you get one piece of insight that helps you beat your competition, I think it’s well worth the investment. In addition, when I renewed my subscription they offered me two years for $16.95, so you might be able to get an even lower rate if you pay a little more.
Customer Service
Their customer service is actually pretty good, surprisingly. I have emailed them through the website a few times and they usually respond within 2-3 days and have fixed any problems (i.e. missed issues) that I have had. I’m not sure if they actually have a phone number, but contacting customer service via email has worked fine for me. I would just add that if you intend to buy this magazine subscription from a 3rd party (like Ebay), I would recommend against that. I did so with my first subscription and ran into some problems getting my service started.
Conclusion
Fantasy Sports is great for the novice to lower intermediate roto baseball and fantasy football fan. The player analysis is okay, but could go deeper. Some of their articles and recommendations are valuable, however a lot of the content is recycled from issue to issue. Bottom line is there indeed are better publications out there, but this is a great value at only $2.50 per issue.
Recommended:
Yes
Primary Reason for Buying: Articles Recommended For: Hobbyists/Enthusiasts
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