MLB Spring Training

If you’re looking for the news and stats from the game, you’re probably reading the wrong article, but I can tell you a few things that I noticed.

Joba Chamberlain looked a little rough in the first inning. By a little rough, I mean he let up a couple of home runs in the first inning. That’s never sexy, but at least it was better than what happened the last time I saw him pitch. It was in Cleavland, there were a bunch of bugs, and it was during the playoffs. Need I say more?

The vast improvement of the Baltimore Orioles’ minor league system brings much hope for an organization trying to break a string of 11-straight losing seasons and return to contention in the cutthroat American League East.

However, two decisions made over the weekend signal a harsh reality of the present, and the need for more patience as the organization waits for its bumper crop of starting pitching to mature in the minor leagues.

It's the middle of March, and spring training games are getting more competitive. Pitchers are pitching more innings, and players are starting to get back into the swing of playing Major League Baseball everyday.

It's the middle of March, and spring training games are getting more competitive. Pitchers are pitching more innings, and players are starting to get back into the swing of playing Major League Baseball everyday.

The transition from spring training to the regular season is beginning to take place.

With that in mind, there have been numerous predictions, division breakdowns, rankings, and lists about who will win, lose, win awards, an so on.

If you're a Dodger fan, which of the following are you thinking when you wake up these sunny Los Angeles' mornings?  After you've had your coffee and read the latest Manny Ramirez updates?

1.  Oh [expletive], Manny's hurt.

2.  Oh [expletive], Manny's already faking an injury to dog it.

3.  Oh [expletive], Manny's got an option after 2009 so we have to do this all over.

4.  Even if Manny only plays 100 games hard, we're still the favorites to win the National League West (as long as they're the right 100 games).

This is gonna be a little experiment driven by necessity.

I'm borrowing the idea of joint and several liability from law to solve an irritating little glitch. The idea is to write a single article, lop it in two, and have the two parts work autonomously. More accurately, it's to write two articles at the same time that are the product of a single thought process.

It may work or I may thoroughly confuse myself and end up writing about the National Football League by the end. We'll see.

With all due respect to the Tampa Bay Rays, the two favorites are finally in the building—the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox.

I feel a little bad about doing this because it's one of the primary reasons people really hate these two franchises—they get all the hype no matter how recent and thunderous their failures.

Boston lost the American League East and the AL Championship Series to Tampa in 2008. New York failed to even qualify for the playoffs. Yet, here I am, touting both as the kings of the hill with no reason except offseason headlines.

Well, they're here—the carrots at the end of the stick, the Three Gorillas in the American League East.

The Tampa Bay Rays, New York Yankees, and Boston Red Sox look like enormous, rampaging beasts who will run roughshod through the rest of Major League Baseball while recovering from titanic clashes with each other.

Baseball rarely shakes down according to specs, but it's really tough to see how the mere mortals of the MLB world can deal with these guys on a daily basis.  Even if you make every effort to see the gaps in armor and soft underbellies.

This probably won't be a popular article in Maryland, all the more so because a lot of baseball people are creating some irresponsible hype around the Baltimore Orioles.  I say irresponsible because Oriole fans deserve better than to be grossly misguided like that.

Make no mistake about it—Baltimore is done.  DOA.  Forget one fork, the Os have four protruding from their collective corpus.

One from the New York Yankees, one from the Boston Red Sox, one from the Tampa Bay Rays, and one from the Toronto Blue Jays.