I've Got Til 5! - Favorite Baseball Websites

In order to be best prepared for the upcoming season, I thought I'd share some of my favorite resources on the web. I'm not saying these are the only five I use, but these are definitely my favorite. Except for this site... of course.

Feel free to go to the comments and share some of your favorites as well.

If you have a question regarding somebody's contract, other than somebody on the Yankees of course, then Cot's Baseball Contracts is the place to go. You'll not only find out how much a player makes, but they will break it down by year, and will also list things like no-trade clauses, incentive clauses, perks, etc. Cot's even has contract information for some players overseas.

While you can find a number of different statistics for players, including lesser-known stats such as WARP, Baseball Prospectus also has Pitch F/X date, articles, fantasy information, and my favorite thing... a list of transactions including injury history. I use this site a lot when giving biography information regarding a player. You can imagine how much I used it when I wrote about Brian Roberts.

There's a good chance that if you watch a lot of baseball analysis, you've heard of the site Fangraphs. They have a ton of statistical information. What you may not know is that they have a lot more to offer. News, blogs, and projections from various sources. One of my favorite parts of Fangraphs is their leaderboard, where you can look at a myriad of stats in order to compare players and/or teams.

Like Fangraphs, Baseball Reference has a ton of statistics to wade through. However, on top of that, you can find biographical information such as a player's birthday, high school, where and by who a player was drafted or signed, uniform numbers, and on and on. Also, like Fangraphs, Baseball Reference has their own formula for figuring out Wins Above Replacement. There is also Hall of Fame statistics, as well as similarity scores so you can see who a player compares to (for example, Derek Jeter compares to six Hall of Famers).

Oh, and you can even see statistics for players in Japan. I could keep going, but just take a look around if you haven't already. And then bookmark the site, because you're sure to use it later.

While MLB Trade Rumors aren't known for having a lot of in-depth articles (they do have some, just not a ton of them), you won't find a better place on the internet to find up to the minute news regarding the league or any particular team. They also have excellent free agency coverage, including a tracker that lets you see all the free agents for a given year. That tracker will not only tell you where they signed, and for how much, but will even tell you about qualifying offers (you'll see Type A and Type B free agents in year's past).

That's not the only tracker at MLBTR, as they also have one for transactions, and another for players that were Designated For Assignment.

Basically, if you don't want to watch Twitter 24/7, this you'll want to check out this site.