Fan News

The Cactus and Grapefruit Leagues are winding down. The 2015 Major League Baseball season approaches. We said baseball! Can you taste it?

Yet with less than two weeks remaining in the exhibition slate, some of the spring's most hotly contested position battles linger, unresolved. And there's no guarantee they'll be resolved once the games count; a few could stay fluid well into the regular season.

Still, someone's going to get the Opening Day nod at all nine positions for all 30 teams. It's simple math, people.

So long as no one asks any current or former Cincinnati Reds about anything related to hitting philosophy, the time is ripe to realign our focus back to the game. It's almost time for real baseball, and there are a few observations we can make on what will soon be the 2015 roster.

Without dissecting everyone's performance in faux baseball, let's discuss some of the universal takeaways from camp. The following is a short list of five things we learned about the Reds in Goodyear:

At the start of spring training, the possibility existed that the Detroit Tigers' top two hitters might miss the start of the 2015 Major League Baseball season. With only a little more than a week left before Opening Day, however, Miguel Cabrera and Victor Martinez look ready to rock.

We are now just two Sundays away from the start of the 2015 MLB season, after a long, eventful offseason. 

Many of the spring's more pressing on-field questions have already been answered at this point in camp, but a handful of off-field issues have arisen to become talking points for many across the league. 

We've all been there before—you want to enjoy your nachos at a ballpark, but all the shouting, cheering and general calamity happening around your seat prevents you from being able to eat them comfortably. Luckily, the Milwaukee Brewers have thought of a solution.

The Brewers' "Inside the Park Nachos" allow you to enjoy taco meat with a crusting of Doritos, all on a stick for portability. It will be topped with cheese sauce and sour cream and served with a side of salsa, because, you know...America.

The Fresno Grizzlies have a lot of confidence in their MLB affiliate, the Houston Astros, to win the 2017 World Series.

In fact, they felt so strongly about it, they created an entire promotional campaign around it, including 2017 World Series championship rings to hand out to fans.

This is all part of a Back to the Future-themed promotion, which includes DeLorean-inspired jerseys, complete with a flux capacitor on the front.

Spring training declarations are a difficult beast to tackle. Putting too much weight in March statistics would be misguided, as Jake Fox and his 10 Grapefruit League home runs in 2011 remind us. "Jake Who?" you ask? Precisely. 

At the same time, this is the first extended look at the 30 MLB clubs, and in some cases managers are determining roster spots based on performance. So these games aren't entirely meaningless; they just have to be viewed through the proper lens. 

This winter, the Washington Nationals set themselves up to mow down any team that stands in the way of a World Series title, but now it's time for the Nats to put their $156 million where their mouth is. 

That number is Washington's total payroll obligation in 2015, according to Baseball Prospectus.

If any team is going to recreate one of the most iconic scenes from The Sandlot, it might as well be the New York Yankees. 

At this year's spring training camp, a group of Yankees players took some time to recreate the classic scene in which Scotty Smalls realizes who the Great Bambino is.

Most people wouldn't identify the San Diego Padres as a rival of the Los Angeles Dodgers, despite their proximity in Southern California.