Rankings/List

After an offseason of research and preparation, it's finally here.

It's time for your annual fantasy baseball draft, and what you need now is all of that offseason research and information at your fingertips in one easy, convenient article.

That's exactly what you'll find here in Bleacher Report's 2016 Fantasy Baseball Draft Cheat Sheet.

Few things get baseball fans more excited than the prospect of, well, prospects.

Last season gave us Kris Bryant. Carlos Correa. Francisco Lindor, Miguel Sano and Noah Syndergaard. Two years ago, it was Jose Abreu, Dellin Betances, Jacob deGrom and Masahiro Tanaka. Three years ago? Try Chris Archer, Nolan Arenado, Jose Fernandez, Shelby Miller and Wil Myers.

Year after year, Major League Baseball is flooded with rookies, and the 2016 season will be no different.

We've been told for years that spring training stats don't matter, that buying into the hype they produce only leads to disappointment once the regular season gets underway. More often than not, that tends to be the case.

Yet there are always a handful of players that prove that theory wrong, and we've honed in on five of the spring's biggest stars—four position players and a pitcher, listed in no particular order—that are poised to do just that.

Gaudy spring training statistics are like finding the car of your dreams at an absurdly low price. Everything looks great until you pop the hood and find an empty void where the engine should be.

Yet that doesn't stop us from dreaming big and hoping against hope that maybe, just maybe, our favorite team has struck oil and stumbled upon a game-changing talent who flew under the radar, or that a perennial underachiever has finally figured things out.

Established veterans shaking off the rust and heralded prospects trying to make an impression alongside big league talent—that's generally the storyline during spring training.

But what about the guys who fall somewhere in between?

Each team has a handful of players fighting for a spot on the 25-man roster, and mixed in with those bubble guys there are always at least a few former top prospects who are still trying to break through.

Not all highly touted prospects pan out, but the flops don't simply disappear either.

It's not just his unreal knack for swiping bags that earns Billy Hamilton the title of best natural base stealer in MLB. It's also the fact that the king of thieves almost never gets apprehended.

In the process of drawing up the rankings of the 10 purest base stealers in the game, let's focus on two key factors:

With the halfway point of spring training upon us, the time to take a look around baseball at each team's most pleasant surprises and biggest disappointments has arrived.

Every team has its own needs and expectations of the players it invites to camp, and how those individual storylines play out ultimately helps those clubs make their final roster decisions before Opening Day.

"Do we really need another updated MLB power rankings here in the middle of spring training?"

Absolutely.

"Has anything really changed?"

Of course it has.

Midway through the spring slate, teams are closing in on roster-cutting time as they look to trim things down to the best 25 guys with which to break camp.

Injuries, troubling or encouraging individual performances and one writer's ever-changing opinion all played a role in any shifts you may see in the rankings this time around.

Being labeled a top prospect in any sport, especially baseball, doesn't guarantee success and stardom at the game's highest level. Those who develop into Bryce Harper or Mike Trout-like superstars are the exception, not the rule. 

That doesn't mean there's not a lot of young star power on the horizon, whether it be a player who's just getting his major league career started or a prospect that has yet to make his big league debut. But only a select few have the total package to become baseball's "next big thing."

It would be easy to scan the spring training leaderboards, find the player with the best numbers at each position and slot them into a spot on our 2016 All-Spring Training team. But sitting among the league leaders alone doesn't land a player on our squad.

While the numbers matter, we set out to fill this year's squad with players who have taken advantage of their opportunities in spring training. The roster includes prospects who weren't expected to contribute this early, players who have surged ahead in position battles and veterans chasing a chance at redemption.