Welcome to the baseball equivalent of purgatory. Or perhaps you prefer Schroedinger’s Cat (maybe we should call it Schroedinger’s Bat)? Is it a playoff team or not? How will we ever know if they don’t play the game?
Jake Peavy and Josh Fogg at Coors Field. Updates throughout the evening…

Sure, it’s early. But is it really? I mean, don’t we pretty much start speculating on who will win the MVP as soon as the season begins?
Heck, some of us do it even sooner than that.
Jacob at Vegas Watch has devised a quick-and-dirty system for identifying the top position players in each league using adjusted WPA and UZR. I’m still digesting this, but it’s a fascinating technique with pretty reasonable-looking results: AL | NL.
I’m particularly interested to see so many of the young hitters I talked about at The Hardball Times before the season show up on the NL list. …read more

I almost forgot to tell you, I’ve got a new article up at The Hardball Times about San Diego Padres first baseman Adrian Gonzalez. In a very short time, he’s become one of my favorite players to watch on a daily basis. He’s also better than a lot of folks might realize. Read the full article to find out why…