Who’s ready for baseball season?
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February is the month where baseball fans start to get the itch. Most of us are kept occupied by the NFL, but the Super Bowl was two weeks ago. College basketball doesn’t matter until March anyway, so it’s still too early to REALLY care about it. So logically, the collective sports fan’s mind begins to think about the upcoming baseball season.
Maybe it’s the weather. We are closer to spring than we are fall, and the beginning of the baseball season means nice weather is on the way. Spring training is fast approaching, and we read articles saying how this player is in the best shape of his life and is going to have a great season. This is the season of the optimist. Pretty much every team* has something to be excited about, and they feel that if a few things work out in their favor they could have a great season.
*Sorry Astros.
February is also the month in which baseball experts like to try to predict the future. Not the future like when we are going to have sweet hover boards like in Back to the Future or whose going to win American Idol this year. They try to predict who the best players in baseball will be in 5 years.
They really do. Many baseball websites rank the top 100 prospects in all of baseball and a lot of them rank the top 10 players in each organization. The experts are ranking these college-aged players who have faced much different levels of competition with a very small sample size, some of whom haven’t even played professional baseball yet. It’s kind of absurd when you think about it.
People love it. I love it. Everybody wants to predict the next big thing. It’s exciting. My favorite list is Baseball America’s Organizational Top 10 in their Prospect Handbook. They include which player in the organization has the “Best Tools,” such as best hitter for average, best athlete, and best defensive catcher.
Baseball America also projects the major league team’s lineup in three years based on which prospects they think will make it to the big leagues. These projected lineups don’t take into account free agency and trades, so they are usually very far off. But they are still fun to look at. Check out the 2009 Prospect Handbook to see what Baseball America predicted lineups should be for this year.
Below I have the World Series champ St. Louis Cardinals projected 2011 lineup from the 2008 Prospect Handbook and the most common lineup the Cardinals actually used last season. The rotation would have been 3/5 correct if Adam Wainwright wasn’t injured for the whole season. Impressive.
You should take a look at your team’s projected 2012 lineup. It’s a pretty fun diversion from NBA highlights on Sportscenter.