Baseball

That Clay Buchholz was battered by the Minnesota Twins on Tuesday will raise few red flags in the Boston Red Sox clubhouse, as the lanky right-hander suffered the thumping during an admittedly sleepy spring training tune-up.

The Calendar still reads March, which is to say the numbers don’t matter yet.

But the Red Sox need to hope the numbers are impressive when they do.

The Yankees were in an unfamiliar spot on Thursday, Oct. 29, 2009. They had lost the first game of the World Series they night before, dropping a 6-1 decision in Game One. Yankee fans everywhere were frightened to see the Bronx Bombers down 0-1 to a team like the Philadelphia Phillies.

Any real fan of the Toronto Blue Jays knows that this year is going to be a long one. The first year of a rebuild always is.

As spring training comes closer to the end and the roster cuts keep piling up, it becomes clearer that the Jays are looking thin.

There is no doubt that a National Football League fantasy season is fun. Major League Baseball's storied infatuation with statistics and the length of its season just happen to make the diamond's make-believe game infinitely better.

I mention this because I'm of the camp that believes our resultant addiction to fantasy baseball skews some current observations of the game.

One example appears to be the growing import of Spring Training numbers.

The Yankees have yet to make an official announcement, but according to Joel Sherman of the NY Post , in the next couple of days they will announce that the winner of the 5th spot in the rotation will be Phil Hughes :

Like it's American League counterpart, the National League Central is considered to be much of a wide-open race. The one difference is they've got more of a legitimate favorite that could very well go deep into the playoffs.

The reason that they've got a favorite in St. Louis, yet can be considered wide-open is the pure fact that there is a lot of unknown for some teams. Even the Cardinals have their own questions.

At the beginning of the 2008 season, the bookmakers gave 250 to 1 against the Tampa Bay Rays winning the World Series that year. The Rays in fact failed to do so, but came a lot closer than almost anyone would have expected.

Going into the Fall Classics, the odds were 7 to 5 in their favor, which is to say that someone who had paid "$1" for the bet, could have cashed out for over $100 (instead of winning $250) before the final resolution.

Joe Beimel waited and waited for a major league contract offer, but couldn’t find one. Instead, he signed a minor league deal with a team he is pretty familiar with.

Beimel signed a minor league deal with the Colorado Rockies yesterday. Beimel will make $850,000 if he makes the Rockies’ roster and he can earn another $350,000 in incentives.

As Yankee bloggers we all bow down to River Ave Blues and they had another great couple of articles over the past two days going over Brian Cashman’s best and worst trades as the Yankees GM.