Opinion

Baseball enthusiasts, like players, have tendencies.

Some players tend to perform better after the All-Star break than they do before it, while others tend to have far more success against left-handed pitching than they do against right-handed pitchers. For fans and pundits alike, we tend to wax poetic about our team's top prospects.

No matter how small the sample size may be, comparisons to current and former All-Stars are made, expectations are raised and...we wind up disappointed with the results.

Minnesota’s Prairie Home Baseball Companion is mostly everything you would want for $184 million over eight years, at $23 mil per season: On-base machine, world-class bat speed, face of the franchise, astute baseball mind, flexible enough to change positions, hometown hero, clubhouse icon.

He is everything you would want, except for one not-so-subtle thing: Joe Mauer does not put baseballs over the fences.

The 2014 Philadelphia Phillies are a confounding baseball team, stuck between a successful past and a bleak future. In the present, a mediocre potential contender has emerged due to the parity engulfing the National League East.

With the 2014 MLB draft less than three weeks away, it's time to take a look at who the San Francisco Giants should target and which players could end up in the team's farm system by season's end.

Thanks to the Giants' 76-86 record last season, they'll pick 14th in the draft, which gives them an excellent shot at cashing in on the abundance of pitching talent available early in the draft.

From the "oohs" and "aahs" of baseball fans when they see this larger than life figure walk out onto a baseball field to the crack of the bat when he strikes a baseball to the sound of a teammate's mitt popping when he guns a throw from right field to the sound of his car engine when he's

• Baseball
• Los Angeles Dodgers
• MLB
• NL West
• Opinion
• Yasiel Puig