Rankings/List

Nearly seven weeks have passed since the 2010 fantasy baseball season began, and now is the time to start making crucial decisions about your team.

Relief pitching is the most overlooked position in the history of Major League Baseball.

It’s amazing because about 30 percent of the team bus consists of relief pitchers today.

It makes it all the more amazing that most historians have never made a thorough relief pitching all time list.

Every year, there are a handful of players who shock us in the season's opening weeks.

There are nobodies, rookies, and washed-up veterans who emerge as the game's top players by May, while some of baseball's biggest stars make their fans embarrassed to don their jerseys.

In this week's Featured Columnist poll, 16 of Bleacher Report's top baseball writers weighed in on which hot hands and slow starters we should begin idolizing or start worrying about, respectively.

This slideshow showcases 10 hot starters (look for the cold-starter results tomorrow), each with a rating of "the real deal,"

Who's the greatest left handed pitcher of all time? Ask that question, and you'll get a variety of answers.

Warren Spahn has the most wins, Randy Johnson the most strikeouts, and Lefty Grove the most ERA titles. And, oh yeah, Sandy Koufax was pretty good too.

In my opinion, there's a clear cut answer. All the pitchers on this list were very good. All are, or should be in the Hall of Fame. But one guy stands alone as the greatest lefty, and possibly the greatest pitcher, who ever lived.

The Sox have been hard to watch this season. Most expected them to be roughly .500, but the pitching hasn't been nearly as strong as expected and only two players are hitting over .260. The Sox are seven and a half games back after their win today and could be selling at the trade deadline if things don't improve relatively quickly.

However, that's not what this article is about. Not everyone on the Sox is struggling, and rather than dwell on the negative I'm going to highlight these players.

Somehow I found 6 slides for this article.

When Roy Halladay joined the Philadelphia Phillies, I made a comment on local sports-talk radio that Halladay immediately joins the Phillies' Mount Rushmore of starting pitchers. Was this hyperbole?

Could a guy in his first season with the Phillies ( a team founded in 1883) possibly be one of the top four starting pitchers in the team's history?

Let's take a look at the All Time Phillies pitching staff.

Begin Slideshow

1. (↔) New York Yankees (24-13)

The Yankees showed their offensive prowess again by scoring in the top six in each batting category this week on their way to 140 points. New York currently leads the AL Wild Card but needs to improve on its road record (12-10). Their top four starters (Phil Hughes, CC Sabathia, Andy Pettitte, A.J. Burnett) are a combined 18-4 on the year.

2. (↔) Tampa Bay Rays (26-11)

With the Red Sox and Yankees meeting again this week, here’s my rundown of the best moments of the past decade in baseball’s greatest rivalry.

There are any number of moments I could have picked.

If you were to poll the general population as to which jersey number a person wore as a kid over the last few decades – it’s likely that Michael Jordan’s number 23 would be at the top of the list.

However, the most underrated jersey number in sports just may be No. 5 – specifically in the baseball world, where there were a slew of big-time players that donned this crooked number on his jersey – including arguably the best of today and yesterday.

In particular, here are my top ten greatest baseball players to wear No.

There are certain players in baseball who have been fantasy studs over the first month and a half of the season that would help any team. At the same time, there are players who have overperformed and are bound to come back to life.

In this list, I will point to five players who have been fantasy stars so far and helped your team win that are not going to be able to hold up this level of production throughout the season. I will also list five players who's skills at the plate or on the mound does not transition well to the fantasy game.