Horsehide Chronicles

The arrival of spring training marks both the unofficial beginning of the spring season itself, and the unofficial end of baseball's offseason.

Teams don't know what their Opening Day rosters are going to look like yet, but by now they're all stocked with enough players to pick and choose from over the next few weeks. The free-agent market, meanwhile, is almost entirely dried up.

When spring training begins next week, teams will have dozens of players to get a good look at in the weeks to come before the season arrives.

All the while, they'll have a magic number in mind: 25. They need to take a couple dozen and somehow, some way cut it down to 25.

This is going to involve saying "thanks, but no thanks" to the majority of the non-roster invitees they've invited along for the ride. For non-roster invitees, spring training may as well be one great big Thunderdome: Many will enter, few will leave.

If baseball fans were to pen a screenplay about Scott Boras, baseball's most infamous agent, the result would surely be a horror film.

It would open with ominous music playing over a wide shot of a haunted house. Then Boras would be shown scowling on a throne of skulls, or perhaps regenerating in one of the globe things that Darth Vader had in The Empire Strikes Back. Then he would go and do things that villains do.

Major League Baseball has been given an excuse to pursue some unfinished business with Milwaukee Brewers slugger Ryan Braun, but a renewed pursuit may not lead to the result the league wants.

"Pah! Spring training doesn't mean anything!"

We say it (or something like that) every year. The notion that spring training results are meaningless may as well be a scientific fact, especially when it comes to teams and players that do well.

The Miami New Times report linking Alex Rodriguez to a new performance-enhancing drug scandal gave the court of public opinion grounds to hammer away at his already damaged reputation. Now, the New York Yankees star could be finishing the job himself, completely dest

Never mind what George would do.

George Steinbrenner is gone from this earth, and you can tell he's gone just by looking at his old team. The New York Yankees have changed, becoming more conservative and more business-minded than they ever were under The Boss.

This is not a bad thing. It's just a different thing.

Spring training is two weeks away. 

With the calendar turning to February, you can feel the palpable excitement among baseball fans. Maybe you can hear their hands rubbing together with anticipation. Winter is that much closer to being over. 

Every Major League Baseball offseason has its own quirks and peculiarities, but this offseason has been sort of like a Tim Burton movie crossed with a Wes Anderson movie. 

The free-agent market has been greatly altered by new rules in baseball's latest collective bargaining agreement, and altered even further by the unwillingness of certain teams to be as aggressive as they usually are. That same reality has impacted the trade market as well.

Yu Darvish announced his presence to the baseball world at-large during the 2009 World Baseball Classic.