Horsehide Chronicles

When it comes to ballplayers, "the greatest of all time" is a touchy subject. There have been many great ones, and trying to whittle the list down to one definitive GOAT is an exercise that will give you brain aches.

If only there was an easier way...And to this end, I have an idea.

Well, to be honest, college basketball has an idea that I'm stealing. To determine who's the best among many, college basketball rounds up the top 68 contestants, seeds them, puts them in a bracket and then goes until "One Shining Moment" starts playing.

The Major League Baseball season is long and hard for everyone, but the "hard" part is more pronounced for some clubs. In regard to peril, not all schedules are created equal.

So here's a reform question for MLB: Should the league take that into consideration when the postseason rolls around?

If there's a team in Major League Baseball that's well-equipped to deal with an injury to a starting pitcher, it's the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Major League Baseball fans love a good milestone chase. Such things add another layer of interest to the game and serve as an excuse to bust out all the usual rhetoric about baseball history.

And so it will go in 2013. There are a handful of milestones to be chased, and there will be a handful of noteworthy players doing the chasing. Additional layers of interest? That's a check.

As for whether any of the milestones being chased actually matter...Well, that's another question.

You may have noticed at some point within the last couple years that today's hitters in Major League Baseball just can't stop striking out.

Don't worry. It's not just you. There's an actual trend going on.

As Baseball-Reference.com's records can show, major league pitchers have been striking out more and more hitters every year since 2005. The per-game numbers look a little something like this.

Because so much went right for the San Francisco Giants in 2012, they really can't be expected to do it all over again. And, honestly, it wouldn't be a disaster if they didn't repeat as World Series champions.

Hey, don't look at me, Giants fans. I'm just summarizing what Matt Cain is thinking.

Of all the things that are worth fighting for, numbers aren't a very good one. 

But Major League Baseball fans are fighting over numbers anyway. One army is fighting to advance complicated numbers calculated for geeks by geeks, and the other army is fighting to defend the less complicated numbers handed down by the founding fathers of baseball statistics.

The Texas Rangers made themselves into a baseball monument with back-to-back trips to the World Series in 2010 and 2011. But over the last few months, the monument has been slowly chipped away.

So much so, in fact, that it now feels like only the face remains. And now that may be going too.

Yes, now. The Rangers lost their superstar when Josh Hamilton left town, but his departure didn't leave the franchise without a face. 

Some love it and some hate it, but what's true either way is that Major League Baseball fans can't escape WAR. 

When the Miami Marlins sent Jose Reyes, Mark Buehrle, Josh Johnson, Emilio Bonifacio and over $100 million in salaries to the Toronto Blue Jays in November, that would have been a good time for team owner Jeffrey Loria to speak up.