Opinion

If a pitching rotation is like a sandwich, consider this the recipe.

Every sandwich has the same basic ingredients: The bread to keep things together on the ends, the meat in the middle and the cheese and mustard for a little kick on top.

The Los Angeles Dodgers lost to the San Francisco Giants on Friday night, courtesy of a Buster Posey walk-off home run. But more importantly, they may have lost their starting shortstop for a significant period of time.

He is the quintessential jack of all trades, master of none.

Getting rid of him would be like letting nine mediocre players walk away. But he’s open-minded; he’ll try anything once—and he has.

Don Kelly has done it all on the baseball diamond. He just hasn’t done it all that well.

Ah, but what would baseball be without the Don Kelly's of the world?

When pitchers start to develop their craft, the fastball is usually the first pitch they develop. A great fastball can get a pitcher attention among the baseball world and have fans and scouts debating your bright future.

However, just because someone can bring the heat does not guarantee them a long and successful career in baseball. This list consists of six pitchers who could light up the radar gun but were not able to have much success in Major League Baseball.

Now a month into the MLB season, it's as good a time as any to take a look at the latest trade buzz around the league.

Phillies Itching to Sell?

The St. Louis Cardinals are engaged in a tight battle already in the NL Central, and some sobering news on Friday will make their fight to stay alive in that race a little bit tougher.

According to Barry Petchesky of Deadspin.com, an authentication expert concluded that a 1964 game-used Mickey Mantle bat that was going up for auction contained cork in the barrel.

There, in the distance, I see smoke and white flags being waved!

Such is my vision of the 2013 Major League Baseball season. There will be a point, right around the July 31 non-waiver trade deadline, when some teams just plain give up and go into fire-sale mode.

Not a hard prophecy to conjure, really. It happens every year, and it will happen again this year. The only question is which teams are going to be the ones doing the giving up and the selling?

Finding sleepers in fantasy baseball is a process very similar to discovering them just as a fan and/or analyst of the game. Too often, we get caught up in the easily discernible numbers, like batting average, to say that a player is having a breakout season.

Thanks to enhanced metrics, as well as a deeper dig into stats, you can tell when a player is doing something different that is sustainable and who is in for a rude awakening as the season moves along. 

On a day where doctors clearing Alex Rodriguez for baseball activities dominated the Yankee headlines, the revelation of Michael Pineda's throwing session (via Hardball Talk) could turn out to be the news item baseball fans in New York remember most moving forward.