Opinion

Coming off a season that yielded just 72 wins, it may surprise some that the Kansas City Royals entered spring training with very few positions up for grabs.

Still, they need to decide who will be pegged to see the most time at second base, and who will emerge as the team’s fifth starter.

If there is one thing we know about Major League Baseball, it is that trying to predict what will happen with teams and individual players from a year-to-year basis is a fool's errand. That goes doubly true when you are talking about prospects. 

One big reason that the minor leagues and prospects have exploded in popularity over the last decade, aside from being a cheap way to see the next great wave of players at a much cheaper price than when they make it to the big leagues, is because of the possibility of what could be. 

Every year it happens—one guy in your fantasy league is convinced he's had the most epic draft ever and brags about how stacked his lineup is or how deep his pitching rotation will prove to be.

And then it happens. A key player goes down to an injury. A guy here or a guy there turns out to be a bust. Before he knows it, your buddy has a team of chronic underachievers and a full disabled list.

Stephen Strasburg dominated hitters for five months in 2012. If he has his way, he'll have a chance to do it for six or seven months in 2013.

It always seems like the trades that make the most sense from both teams’ perspectives are the ones that rarely happen. Team A has bullpen depth and is looking for a right-handed hitting fourth outfielder. Team B has some outfield depth and would like to shore up their bullpen. Simple enough from an outsider’s point of view, right?  

As spring training begins to wind down, each organization continues to make rounds of cuts, as they option many of their roster hopefuls to either a specific minor league level or simply re-assign them to minor league camp.

For many of these players, it seems as though it will be only a matter of time until they either return to or reach the major leagues for the first time

After spending the last two years trying to get Brandon Belt to change his hitting mechanics, the San Francisco Giants want another one of their top prospects to rework his stance according to Andrew Baggarly of CSN Bay Area. Baggarly wrote,

Coming into spring training, the A's had five potential starters battling for playing time at second base in 2013.  Surely the A's could find a starter in a pool of players consisting of Jemile Weeks, Scott Sizemore, Jed Lowrie, Adam Rosales and even Andy Parrino.

Yet the A's find themselves just more than two weeks from opening day and nobody has emerged from the crowd.  

On paper, the Los Angeles Dodgers look great.  When you look at their current roster, it looks menacing and capable of winning the National League West.  But let's be honest: The team has plenty of question marks going into the 2013 season, and player injuries are at the top of that list.

2012 was an abysmal year for San Francisco Giants' starting pitcher Tim Lincecum.

The former Giants' first-round draft selection in 2006 exploded onto the scene in his first full season with San Francisco in 2008 and became a national sensation nearly overnight.