Every weekday until the start of the season, a different writer will preview his/her team. We asked a gaggle of writers, from the Web, from print, from books, to tell us, in as many or as little words as they need, Where Their Team Stands. This is not meant to be factual, or dispassionate, or even logical: We just asked them to riff on why they love their team so much, or what their team means to them, or whatever.

Today: The St. Louis Cardinals. Your author is Will Leitch.

Will Leitch is the editor of Deadspin and the author of three books, including God Save The Fan, released by HarperCollins in January. His words are after the jump.

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You know, all told, it's not all that bad of a time to be a Cardinals fan. Sure, it's probably gonna be a long year — unless you're overly persuaded by the fastball stylings of Todd Wellemeyer — but we know that coming in. It's not like we're the Giants or anything; we clearly see that the Cardinals need to get younger, so this is a transitional year, purging the Rolens and Edmonds and giving kids like Brendan Ryan, Ryan Ludwick, Brian Barton and, yes, Rick Ankiel a chance. If the Cardinals finish .500, it will be a success, and no one will consider the year an unmitigated disaster of they don't.

As a sports fan, I tend to only find myself truly passionate when I am attempting to head off failure. (It's like this in life too; it's really quite awful.) Don Denkinger in 1985 was awful. Losing to the Giants the year Darryl Kile and Jack Buck died was awful. Being swept by the Red Sox in four games — and having Drew Barrymore and Jimmy freaking Fallon run on our field directly afterwards, like they owned the place or something — that was awful.

This year? Nothing too awful can happen this year. When expectations are low, it's difficult for the news to be too devastating. Barring an implosion of Albert Pujols' aorta, nothing can go too wrong this year. We're looking at positive increments forward, with the inevitable steps back easily shaken off.

Except: The Cubs.

The Cardinals-Cubs rivalry is every bit as storied as the Yankees-Red Sox, but, you know, a little nicer. Neither team's fans are ever in danger of being throw off the balcony when they show up at the opposing team's stadium, for example. But do not mistake this for passivity; Cardinals fans and Cubs fans revile each other teams with considerable fervor. May I remind you of my favorite Cubs memory:

October 2003. I was at my apartment in the Inwood neighborhood of Manhattan, listening to Cubs-Marlins Game 6 on the radio because I didn't have cable. Cubs were up 3-0, bottom of the seventh. My phone rings. It's my father. I know what he wants.

"Jesus, it looks like they're really going to do this."
"I know."
"I don't really know what to do with myself now. I don't know if I'm ready to live in a world where the Cubs have made the World Series."
"I know."

Pause.

"Dad?"
"Yeah?"
"I've been listening to the game on the radio. But you know what? I think I should go downstairs and watch the end. I mean, I've hated them for so long, I feel like their history is kind of my history. In a weird way, I feel like I owe to them. I should watch them do this. They've earned it, I think."
"You go ahead. I'm going to bed.

I put on some pants and went to the bar downstairs. The top of the eighth began. I ordered a cool, icy Budweiser, brewed in St. Louis, Missouri, and settled in, ready to begrudgingly salute the enemy.

So yeah: That's probably my favorite Cubs moment.

I like to consider myself a reasonable nice person, but, jesus, that's just mean. And that's what I'm talking about. In a season in which the Cardinals have no real stakes, the only thing that can truly go wrong is the Cubs making/winning the World Series.

As you've all heard ad nauseum, this year marks the 100th year since the Cubs last won the World Series. In that time, the Cardinals have won 10 World Series. Obviously, that was not a number any Cardinals fan has to look up. We all take much pride in this number; in my home town of Mattoon, it's about 65 percent Cardinals fans, 35 percent Cubs fans. We loved to remind that 35 percent of that number repeatedly.

But lo, the Cubs look far superior to the Cards this year — and it hurt my soul just to type that — which means that the only thing that can go wrong in 2008 is the Cubs winning the World Series. Imagine it. Lou Piniella on the cover of Time. The Cubs becoming America's wild success story (we're sure Chicagoan Obama, White Sox fan or no, would get some mileage out of it too). And someone would certainly drag poor Steve Bartman out for Matt Lauer too. The Cubs would be everywhere. It would be poetic and wonderful and all we dream of for our great game.

And God: It would be awful.

Every weekday until the start of the season, a different writer will preview his/her team. We asked a gaggle of writers, from the Web, from print, from books, to tell us, in as many or as little words as they need, Where Their Team Stands. This is not meant to be factual, or dispassionate, or even logical: We just asked them to riff on why they love their team so much, or what their team means to them, or whatever.

Today: The San Francisco Giants. Your author is Rick Chandler.

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Sorry, Barry Bonds don't work here no more. Moose out front shoulda told ya.

Yeah, Barry is gone. And so Mom, suddenly single, has packed everyone into the old station wagon and headed toward a big new life. It's going to be scary at first, trying to raise a family on just her salary. But she had to break it off; Dad was always on the juice; he beat mother and ignored the kids. For his eighth birthday they took little Edwin to see him play, and Barry didn't even show up (15-day DL, shrunken testicles). So Mom decided that she had been enabling him long enough. What has become of Barry now? Sadly, he lives in a van, down by the river.

The good news is that the Giants have started dating again. The bad news is that they're mostly losers; not a potential husband in the bunch. When Will posted his NL West Preview on Thursday, he chose the Giants for last place, affectionately calling the pick "the easiest call in baseball." That's Will: Ever mindful of hurting my feelings. Here's a likely Opening Day starting lineup (provided all are healthy), and you decide for yourselves. (By the way, I have a baseball with all of their signatures; and to give you an idea of how star-studded this lineup is, four of the players paid me to sign it).

• Dave Roberts, LF. A solid outfielder, but also often injured; missed a month due to elbow surgery last season. Overview: By taking one step in any direction will automatically cover more ground that did Bonds. Not nearly as much fun to heckle, though.

• Ray Durham, 2B. Dedicated veteran has just returned from a hamstring injury, and says his age will not be a problem. Overview: Was once John McCain's babysitter.

• Randy Winn, RF. Is hitting .339 this spring, after a .300 season last year. Plus, he adds speed. Overview: He'll have to patrol the entire field like Benny The Jet Rodriguez to make a difference.

• Bengie Molina, C. Is hitting .452 this spring with five homers. Fantasy owners take notice! Overview: Can he throw out anyone at second? Magic Eight Ball says: Ask again.

• Aaron Rowand, CF. Comes over from the Phillies where he hit .307 with 27 homers last season. Is hitting .305 this spring. But can he stay healthy? Overview: Ow! My spine!

• Rich Aurillia, 3B. Played for the Giants for nine seasons before departing for three seasons with the Padres, Mariners and Reds, then rejoining the Giants last year, when he hit .252. Overview: I'd feel better about this if he weren't also second on the depth chart at every other position, including catcher.

• Brian Bocock, SS. Overview: ??? (hits own head with mallet) ...

• Dan Ortmeier, 1B. Muscled six homers last season in the traditional power slot. Overview: Lord help us.

• Barry Zito, P. May have gone 11-13 last season, but he can buy and sell you. Overview: Took the loss against the Fresno Giants in a spring training game.

To make an impact: Pitcher Matt Cain "Mutiny;" second basemen Kevin Frandsen (will undergo surgery on Saturday for ruptured Achilles tendon), Eugerio Velez (hitting .303 with 14 stolen bases); outfielder Fred Lewis (may bat leadoff); P.A. announcer Renel Brooks-Moon; infielder Jose Castillo (acquired on waivers from Marlins Saturday); a host of others. Manager Bruce Bochy used 124 different lineups in 2007, to list them all here would be pointless.

So yeah, everyone mock the Giants. But here's the thing: I didn't attend a single game over the past two seasons, disheartened as I was with that hollow, Faustian home run record chase, and the typical behavior of the hometown faithful who chose to watch the games with their heads stuck in the sand. And now here's this 2008 team, which the Chronicle is already calling The Bad News Giants; by all accounts perfectly awful in every respect. Their predicted last-place finish may indeed be the easiest call in baseball, other than the one I made to buy tickets for Opening Day.

Every weekday until the start of the season, a different writer will preview his/her team. We asked a gaggle of writers, from the Web, from print, from books, to tell us, in as many or as little words as they need, Where Their Team Stands. This is not meant to be factual, or dispassionate, or even logical: We just asked them to riff on why they love their team so much, or what their team means to them, or whatever.

Today: The Baltimore Orioles. Your author is Tom Scocca.

Tom Scocca is a writer for The New York Observer and is currently writing a book about the 2008 China Olympics. His words are after the jump.

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Remember those inspirational 2007 Colorado Rockies? How they plodded through the summer around .500, then pulled together to put on a thrilling 14-1 finishing kick, sending them sprinting to the pennant?

Well, the Baltimore Orioles do that every year. Only backwards. Beyond plain categories of optimism and pessimism live those of us who see a sparkling half-glass of water and know for sure that the Orioles are eventually going to take a crap in it.

People who don't pay attention to the O's — and why would you? — might look at the uninterrupted decade of lousy finishes (nine in fourth place, one in third) and assume the team has been steadily, hopelessly terrible. The truth is far more humiliating: The Orioles are quitters. Year after year, there comes a moment at which the Birds look up and down the standings, scan the clubhouse and collectively decide that whatever combination of talent, enthusiasm, and guts it takes to get through 162 games, they don't have it. So they stop trying.

Pick a season.

July 18, 2005: After a surprising run in first place for most of May and June, the Orioles are still hanging on in second, only half a game out. Over their next 15 games, they go 1-14, then toss in stretches of 2-11, 1-10, and 1-11 the rest of the way for good measure.

August 23, 2002: The Orioles reach .500, at 63-63. They then go into a 1-18 freefall, after which they close out the season with a separate 12-game losing streak.

Managers and lineups change, but the O's can always be counted on to put the dog in Dog Days: 0-12...0-8...0-9...2-18. Last year was a two-for-one special. They struck earlier than usual, opening June with a 2-14 swan dive, which served to get manager Sam Perlozzo fired. Two months of adequate baseball followed, and the front office announced that Perlozzo's interim replacement, Dave Trembley, would manage the team in 2008. The team immediately went out and submitted to one of the worst beatings in baseball history, a 30-3 clubbing by the Rangers — the first game of a 3-18 skid.

But this year is different. This year, under the leadership of Peter Angelos' general-manager-type-executive-of-the-moment Andy MacPhail, the whole franchise has decided to quit before the season started.

Officially, the name for this is "rebuilding." Here's how it works. Let's say your team has two All-Stars in the middle of the infield, a budding young star in right field, and the most gifted starting pitcher fans have seen in a generation. But the rest of your lineup, particularly the power spots, is clogged with aging veterans who were never any good to begin with, and your bullpen is infested with washouts and arsonists. Hypothetically speaking.

So the way you rebuild the team is: You get rid of three of the four guys who are any good. It's a measure of how emotionally and psychologically damaged the fan base is that people are declaring themselves to be happy about this.

Sending shortstop Miguel Tejada to the Astros was at least a defensible move — even a bit of a thrilling one, given that MacPhail somehow managed to move Tejada hours before the Mitchell Report was due to drop. Tejada was the best hitter in the Orioles lineup, but it was hard to shake the feeling that his MVP slugging skills and joie de vivre were both sagging under the twin crackdowns on steroids and greenies. And Luke Scott, who arrived in the grab bag the Astros sent to Baltimore, may finally force the Orioles to stop giving people like Jay Payton hundreds of at-bats at positions like left field.

But MacPhail's ongoing effort to sell off leadoff man and second baseman Brian Roberts is churn for the sake of churning. No one else on the team is a second baseman, and no one else can hit leadoff.

And then there's Erik Bedard. The Bedard trade was almost universally hailed, and why not? In return, the Orioles got the most dominant strikeout pitcher in the league, entering his prime — a big-game pitcher who can match zeros with anyone, the kind of talent the late-Torre-era Yankees died away because their money couldn't buy.

Oh, wait, that's what the Orioles gave up. In return, they got a minor-league outfielder.

I know I know I know, Adam Jones is a guaranteed superstar. He hit .246 in Seattle last year, but that's because he was only 15 years old and his legs were tired from riding his bicycle to the ballpark every day. Now that he's got his driver's license, everybody says they can pencil him in to hit .350 with 40 home runs. Put him together with Nick Markakis and you've got a pair of young outfield talents like nobody's seen since — well, technically, since any two of the last five 21-year-old superstars that the Tampa Bay Devil Rays have put out there. Or whatever that team is called. The last-place team.

Nonetheless! Andy MacPhail is the savior. It's a funny sort of housecleaning that leaves Aubrey Huff and Kevin Millar at DH and first base, but that's the kind of unhealthy obsession with the present that the Orioles are trying to get beyond. McPhail is about the future. He is going to trade and trade and build the 2010 Orioles into a dynasty to rival those world-champion Cubs teams he built in Chicago.

Every weekday until the start of the season, a different writer will preview his/her team. We asked a gaggle of writers, from the Web, from print, from books, to tell us, in as many or as little words as they need, Where Their Team Stands. This is not meant to be factual, or dispassionate, or even logical: We just asked them to riff on why they love their team so much, or what their team means to them, or whatever.

Today: The Chicago Cubs. Your author is Mike Bruno.

Mike Bruno is an editor for Entertainment Weekly and a former writer for The Black Table. His words are after the jump.

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Has it really been a hundred years? My, how time flies. Not that I've suffered through the whole thing, of course. I may grumble about a bad hip and have to pee more often than I used to, but I'm still a few decades shy of the century mark, which makes this anniversary feel more like a legend — a fable, if you will — than a landmark within a tangible losing streak I've endured. Besides, there were some sweet moral victories last season. For one, the Cubs made the playoffs. Two, despite a horrid start, they wound up finishing last season stronger than any other team in baseball. Plus, of course, they placed above the St. Louis Cardinals — the ultimate moral victory for any Cub fan.

My obsession with moral victories may fuel the theory that I am your stereotypically delusional Cubs fan, fervently rooting for a loser, generating excuses instead of accepting that the sun is more likely to explode and turn every man, woman and child into a blotch of molten plasma before the Cubs actually win a World Series. So go ahead and laugh at me — for loving my baseball team unconditionally, for having my allegiance tested like no other team's fan, for never giving up hope. Because this year, my friends, 100 years after "Three-Finger" Brown, Jack Taylor and Ed Reulbach drove to Wrigley in those rickety old cars you have to crank to start and won their second of two consecutive World Series by defeating the Pittsburgh Pirates, on this year, with one of the fattest batting orders and most promising pitching staffs in the game, the Cubs really could do it.

That's right. I'm saying it. It's the 100-year mark and the Chicago frickin' Cubs are winning the damn pennant, and there isn't a goat, geek or Garvey that's gonna stop 'em. Delusional and pathetic, am I? False hope and a pocket full of stupid excuses, have I? Please allow me to break it all down using the most objective logic I can muster.

100 Years, 100 Schmears

The 100 years thing is meaningless and overhyped. The fact is, the Cubs were a baseball powerhouse back in the 1900s, whereas the Texas Rangers, Houston Astros, Milwaukee Brewers, Washington Nationals (Montreal Expos), San Diego Padres and Seattle Mariners have all NEVER won the World Series. And yet everyone is so fond of pointing out a former dynasty's failings while subordinating the futility of those losers. (I could also point out that the Cleveland Indians haven't won since 1948 and the San Francisco Giants haven't been crowned champs since 1954, which is also pretty sad.) Speaking of losers, what about the New York Yankees? Oh, they're so great, what with their 26 World Series titles. But they haven't won a Series since 2000. Think on this: the 21st century actually started on Jan. 1, 2001, right? Which means (yes!) that the Yankees haven't won a Series in a century either. That's right. But Chicago, always the second city, gets saddled with the century-of-losing mantel. So, so typical.

Kosuke Fukudome

The Cubs may have spent a lot more money ahead of last season, but it was this offseason that they finally filled the biggest hole in their roster and signed a Japanese player. I am really excited about this. Boston won last year, and who was their big off-season acquisition? Dais-K. Japanese guy. And the Yanks, while in the midst of a century-long World Series drought themselves, did pretty well last century with that Matsui guy. Where's he from again? Oh yeah. JAPAN . Plus, Fukodome hits left-handed and, I hear, is very strong (always good). The Japanese is really just icing on the cake. Hell, look what Ichiro has done for... crap, what team is he on again? Well, whichever, I'm sure they're good.

Carlos Zambrano

This is the year Z jumps from "potential" to "actual" Cy Young contender and here's why: the six-year contract extension. Zambrano's trouble in the past as been focus, but now that his financial well-being is taken care of with a guaranteed extra few million, Z can finally focus and fulfill his obligation as the team ace. Plus, the Cubs finally dumped that jerk Michael Barrett, who was always antagonizing Zambrano when all he wanted to do was pitch and occasionally point up to the sky and scream in Spanish.

Rest of the rotation

Hello, yesterday? This is today, and I'd like you to my version of Prior and Wood: Ted Lilly and Rich Hill. These guys both had career years last season, and... well that's darn near certain to continue in 2008 (name one reason why not). Then there's Jason Marquis, who looks to be extremely serviceable bordering on satisfactory in the fourth slot, plus Jon Lieber is set to make his big comeback, if he can beat out Sean "We Are" Marshall at No. 5, and... well... Zambrano!

Bullpen

The bad-ass two-headed monster of Bob Howry and Carlos Marmol should get the job done at closer (two guys have got to be better than one Dempster, and he was good enough to take the division). Then there's Wood in the bullpen, which should work out fine once he hashes being able to pitch in back-to-back games. Really, the bullpen is pretty stacked from top to bottom, now that Will Ohman is gone. Cuz let's face it, last year's post-season collapse was really Will Ohman's fault. His and Michael Barrett's.

Sluggers

Soriano, Lee, and Ramirez: Sick. That's the only word you can use to describe them... behind the plate. Sick behind the plate. When they play up to their potential. The only way to describe them. Add Fuko to the mix, and the Cubs now have four .300 hitters capable of 40-45 home runs and 100-125 RBIs. And although Soriano will probably insist on leading off, with Barrett finally gone, this year he should get more chances to knock in hitters from the bottom of the order. Plus, Fukudome is from Japan.

Other new guys

Not only did the Cubs sign a big, strong, left-handed Japanese guy, they also landed one of the top prospects in all of baseball this off-season with Soto, making it possible, if not likely, that the Cubs will have the Cy Young winner hurling to the 2008 NL rookie of the year. It's such an improvement over that idiot Michael Barrett it isn't even funny. And then we have Felix "Twisted Nad" Pie, who's finally making his big league debut surrounded by hype we haven't seen since the Cubs drafted Mark Prior over Mark Teixeira in 2001.

The rest of the lineup

The corners are two of the best in the game, but up the middle they're merely above average. Until the inevitable signing of Brian Roberts, we'll have to settle for Mark DeRosa at 2B (assuming the heart condition doesn't sideline him - man up, DeRosa). At shortstop we'll again see Ryan Theroit, who really "sparked" the offense and finished just 24 points short of batting .300 last season. As Adam Sandler once said, not too shabby.

Lou Pinella

Let's face it, the guy's a winner. And he isn't afraid to do whatever it takes to get it done, even if it means having to pretend he's a crazy, hat-kicking old man to motivate his players. He's already got a World Series ring, but I have no doubt that Bak... er, Pinella has another one in his future.

So there ya have it, haters. The Cubs are finally the team to beat this year, at least in the National League... Central. With Barrett finally out on his ass, there really are no holes, save possibly for Scott Eyre, the middle infield, various injury concerns, and the closing and No. 5 rotation spots. The only question left is will the Cubs take the NL Central with 85 wins or 90? If they peak at the right moment (and don't think Pinella won't let last year's post-season spanking motivate him to finish strong this year), there's no reason this club can't win the pennant. Oh wait, Ryan Dempster predicted they'll win the Series this year. Ryan Dempster said that. Okay, then. It ends this year.

Bite me, Pujols.

Every weekday until the start of the season, a different writer will preview his/her team. We asked a gaggle of writers, from the Web, from print, from books, to tell us, in as many or as little words as they need, Where Their Team Stands. This is not meant to be factual, or dispassionate, or even logical: We just asked them to riff on why they love their team so much, or what their team means to them, or whatever.

Today: The Boston Red Sox. Your author is Eric Gillin.

Eric Gillin is the editor of Esquire.com and a founding editor of The Black Table. His words are after the jump.

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This photo tells you everything you need to know about being a Boston Red Sox fan entering this season. I took it in Fort Myers, Fla., where the Sox and Minnesota Twins both hold their Spring Training camps. And although this was taken before the opening game of the Twins' spring season, it's quite clear that Twins Territory — like the rest of Major League Baseball — has a problem with illegal immigrants from Boston.

What makes the Red Sox this popular? The same things that made the Chicago Bulls and San Francisco 49ers so wildly popular in the 1980s and '90s. They won championships. It's easier to root for a winner, and given the recent success of the Red Sox, the bandwagon has turned into a caravan, filled with angst-inducing pink hatted masses and other non-baseball types who also feel an overwhelming need to belong to something.

It's fun to have something like this to belong to. Most people don't attend church. They don't join the Elks, or the Kiwanis club, or the Knights of Columbus. Nowadays, people are not joiners, not really, not unless you count Facebook. And that's not much of a club. Fifty-five year old men have Facebook pages now.

If anyone can be a Red sox fan just by virtue of liking them, what does it mean to be a Red Sox fan right now, after two championships in four years has replaced the old algebraic rule that said "Red Sox fan = abject agony"?

At its most obvious, I would argue that to be a Sox fan simply means that you want the team to win when they play other teams. I don't believe that a "true fan" needs to be able to name seven players on the team that aren't Manny Ramirez, David Ortiz or Jonathan Papelbon. I don't believe that true fans don't wear pink and have to attend at least one home game a year. And I don't believe that true fans even exist, except in the mind of insecure fans who feel that these new fans haven't "earned" it, in the same way that people who liked Nirvana when they were on Sub Pop have to remind everyone that came after who "found" the band.

There is a poor, deluded core within Red Sox Nation (a construct is precisely the kind of thing that happens when you have winning teams — the hypothetical Republic of Kansas City could hold their meetings in a photo booth) that has done everything in their power to stay miserable. As if misery were what it still meant to be a Red Sox fan. They call in to WEEI and complain, bitterly so, that the Red Sox didn't do enough in the offseason. That we didn't get Santana. Or that we tried to get Santana, and should have looked elsewhere. They complain about what the rotation will look like in 2009. They discuss balance sheet issues in 2012 and how the third-stringers in rookie ball are playing, ever searching for more to bitch about. To prove their fandom.

Which brings us to this season.

I believe this is the year that Red Sox fans — the pink-hats and the die-hards, who have been eyeing each other suspiciously for five years now — finally have it out with each other. This is the season where what it really means to be a Red Sox fan finally bubbles to the surface. Will the essence of fandom be defined by front-running, merchandise-loving bobble-heads? Or will it be defined by morose, woe-is-me, you-don't-know-pain, Calvinists out there? Do you have to sing "Sweet Caroline?" Can you still do "The Wave?"

I'm not sure. But I know the first few months of this season will be the trigger. The team is largely unchanged from last year — and indeed, at Spring Training, there were only three roster spots still open. Expectations, as a result, are impossibly high. We're expected to repeat and dominate. The sports people on the TV set and in magazines say so. We believe them, because they tell us what we, as Red Sox fans, want to hear.

But the beginning of this season will be a nightmare. The Sox play two official games in Japan, then some more exhibition games, then back into the regular season again. The 17-hour flights aren't the problem, really. It's the fact the Sox don't get to play as many Spring Training games. So when it's mid-May, they'll be in mid-April form. They'll get blown out by the Rays and everyone in Walpole will be put on suicide watch.

Then the sky will fall and people will panic. I mean, look at how terrible this team is. Staff ace Josh Beckett has back spasms! Daisuke Matsuzaka is a waste of money who leaves you hungry 20 minutes after a start! Curt Schilling's a lying-faced-liar who couldn't bring himself to clap at a McCain rally! The back half of the rotation consists of two young guys (Clay Bucholtz and Jon Lester, shown here after getting shelled by the Twins) who should be garroted in the street with their own jock straps!

(Yup, I can see WEEI's phone lines ablaze come late-May with irrational fans wondering why we didn't do more for Santana.)

I don't think the team will be that bad to start, but we won't be that great, either. Among the position players, there are other concerns, as well. Jacoby Ellsbury, who Men's Vogue called "baby Jesus in cleats," has had a dreadful spring. Jason Varitek, while solid behind the plate, seems to get slower each year. Julio Lugo is a total mystery. J.D. Drew only seems to look good hitting ping-pong-sized baseballs on a foreign continent. Both Manny and Papi looked to be in amazing shape in Fort Myers — especially Papi, whose belt buckle is once again visible — but those guys tend to be slow starters.

It's entirely plausible that this year's Red Sox team starts a bit more like last year's Yankees squad. I don't worry about the Red Sox team giving up, however. They're as loose as ever. (This picture is Jonathan Papelbon wearing Manny's #24 to pitch, since he'd left his at home. When asked why we wore Manny's jersey, Papelbon said there were always loads of extra Manny jerseys around, "just in case.") But when the going gets tough — and I suspect it will — I worry if these fans can handle losing bad and often without throwing the team under the bus.

And that's when we'll see what kind of fans, no matter what color their hat, are rooting for the Red Sox.

***

A sad note. Jason Forget, friend of Deadspin, tragically succumbed to his battle with cancer at the age of 27 a few weeks ago. Each year, his father organizes the East Woonsocket Little League Memorial Tournament to benefit the Jimmy Fund and Dana Farber Cancer Institute. It's a worthy cause and we wanted to spread the news about it. Anyone who would like to make a donation in Jason Forget's name can do so to:

The Jimmy Fund
10 Brookline Place West, 6th floor
Brookline, MA 02445-7226

Thanks.

Every weekday until the start of the season, a different writer will preview his/her team. We asked a gaggle of writers, from the Web, from print, from books, to tell us, in as many or as little words as they need, Where Their Team Stands. This is not meant to be factual, or dispassionate, or even logical: We just asked them to riff on why they love their team so much, or what their team means to them, or whatever.

Today: The Pittsburgh Pirates. Your author is Don Spagnolo.

Don Spagnolo is a freelance writer and editor of Mondesi's House, a Pittsburgh sports comedy blog. His words are after the jump.

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16 Reasons Why the Pirates' Streak Won't End in 2008

I sat in this spot last year and labored through not one, not two, but 79 reasons why it's hard to be a Pirate fan. The research alone for that article made me question why I still bother with this organization. Of course, that in itself was the answer: they're a gold mine of comedic material, whether they try or not.

So what did the 2007 Pirates do to prove me wrong? For starters, they went 68-94, extending their streak to an amazing 15 consecutive losing seasons. Their big bat, outfielder Jason Bay, who never met a called strike three that he didn't like, watched his offensive output fall quicker than Roger Clemens' credibility. Freddy Sanchez, the 2006 NL batting champion, neatly shaved 40 points off of his batting average. Hired gun Adam LaRoche longed for the Mendoza Line for a significant part of the season. 2001 first-round pick John Vanbenschoten was called up to The Show and responded with a line of "0-7, 10.15". And remember Zach Duke, the wunderkind with an 8-2 record and 1.81 ERA in his rookie season of 2005? Well, that Pirate juice finally marinated in his system, and his numbers leveled off to a more appropriate 3-8, 5.53. Good thing we had pitching coach Jim Colborn around to straighten him out. No, not even a roster loaded with the likes of John Wasdin and Don Kelly was enough to turn the 2007 Pirates around.

So the on-field product was a mess. Shocking, I know. But not to be outdone, the Buccos' front-office managed to aggravate fans to levels previously unknown to these parts, which is saying a lot. The selection of relief pitcher Daniel Moskos as their first-round pick in the amateur draft sent Pirate fans into a fit of blind rage. Ironically, this happened around the same time that the Pirates were getting their heads handed to them during a weekend series at Yankee Stadium, so it's nice that they were able to synchronize the fans' on- and off-field disgust so nicely. The remaining tortured souls privately known as Pirate Fans actually organized a walkout, complete with the bashing of promotional bobbleheads that the team has secretly built their hopes around.

Following this comedy of errors, CEO Kevin McClatchy stepped down, leaving HUGE, Shaquille O'Neal-sized shoes to fill. Manager Jim Tracy was shown his walking papers, so now he can finally pursue his career goal of managing the 2004 L.A. Dodgers to a championship. For those of you who don't follow the Pirates, which would be all of you, Tracy would talk endlessly about his '04 Dodgers. How deep did this fixation run? Well, he basically told Jack Wilson, a three-time runner-up for the Gold Glove, to approach ground balls more like Cesar Izturis. He told Jose Castillo to be like Adrian Beltre. He told players to be versatile, like Jose Hernandez. It was a sickness.

Pirate Nation was finally gifted with the firing of GM Dave Littlefield, who took over a 62-100 Pirates team in 2001 and magically turned them into a 68-94 team a short six years later. Rival GMs around the league shed a tear, as they will no longer have the human Blue-Light Special around to gift them that perfect stocking-stuffer third baseman at the deadline. As his final act, Littlefield and the Pirates pulled the trigger on a trade for $9.5 million dollar pitcher Matt Morris, who was plodding along with a 4.35 ERA, to strengthen the Pirates for their postseason run. Sure, they were 42-62 at the time, but that division was wide open. If you ever want to know more about Dave Littlefield, there are plenty of fine books at your local library. But an easier way would be to read his Wikipedia page, where his failures are outlined in a neat little package.

In typical Pirate fashion, they tried to distract their paying customers from the spectacle on the field. Bobbleheads. Airborne hot dogs. Pierogi races. And the pièce de résistance, a viral video parody of The Sopranos' final episode. This is what we've evolved to. Pops Stargell is spinning in his grave.

So with that as a backdrop, prepare to be wowed with this year's list, 16 Reasons Why the Pirates Streak Won't End in 2008. Yes, this is the year that the Pirates go for the record: they can tie the Phillies' streak of 16 consecutive losing seasons from 1933-1948 and presumably break the record in 2009. Hey, at least it will give us a reason to watch games later in the season.

16. We've heard this the last 15 years.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 15 times, shame on me.

Every year, the Pirates have a new spin on the idea that this will be the year that their fortunes change. Usually, they pitch the notion of an exciting core of young players ready to turn the corner. Sometimes, they do turn the corner...and after that, they end up playing third for the Cubs.

When they're not selling the up-and-comers, they bring in a token veteran or two to toss to the winning-starved Pirate fans. More often than not, they're about 5-10 years too late (see: Mondesi, Raul and Bell, Derek), although they do give quite the inspiration for someone trying to name their new blog.

So where you once saw the names "Kris Benson", "Jason Kendall", and "Jose Guillen" as rays of hope, you now see "Freddy Sanchez", "Jason Bay", and "Jack Wilson". In both cases, they were nice players. In neither case were they players to build a franchise around.

15. They hired Sid Bream!

Imagine the worst moment in your favorite team's history. Then imagine your favorite team hiring the player that helped beat them. Because that's exactly what the Pirates did when they hired Sid F-ing Bream as the hitting coach for their single-A short-season team, the State College Spikes. Was Francisco Cabrera unavailable?

It was Bream's desperate dash for home plate that beat the Pirates in the 1992 NLCS, kicking off a decade-and-a-half of losing baseball. And since Barry Bonds hadn't yet met Greg Anderson or Victor Conte, the less-than-fleet Bream beat Barry's throw, sending the Braves into the World Series and running the Pirates' streak of consecutive NLCS losses to three.

14. The "Bizarre" Freddy Sanchez Contract

By all accounts, Freddy Sanchez has been one of the very few bright spots in the Pirates' organization the past two seasons. He's a hard worker. He's overcome a clubbed foot. He won the batting title in 2006. He has an extremely likable personality and fans love him. He's basically everything that you would want in a player on your team.

So as you would expect, the Pirates jerked him around in contract negotiations until he finally signed a new deal earlier this month. The headline in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette read, "Pirates, Sanchez agree to unusual three-year deal". Only the Pirates would have such a banner when signing what is probably considered the face of their franchise.

Of course, the Pirates haven't exactly given Sanchez the diva treatment during his time here. The only reason he played so much in 2006 was due to an injury to starting third baseman Joe Randa, who is currently playing for...no one. In another example of the Pirates not knowing how to evaluate players, they brought in Randa, a mediocre-at-best third baseman, who was at the end of the line (and at a cost of $4 million) when they had the eventual batting champion wasting away on the bench. Yep, we're all going to miss Dave Littlefield and Jim Tracy.

13. Introducing...John Russell!

Since the Pirates relieved the manager of the 2004 Dodgers of his duties, they had a rare chance to add a top-flight skipper. Who would they bring in? Joe Torre? Joe Girardi?

Come on, this is the Pirates! It doesn't matter if they had Casey Stengel in his prime. Knowing that, the Pirates went for former third base coach John Russell, who was actually canned in 2005 by the team. Since he couldn't handle knowing when to send or hold runners back then, you can feel confident that he'll now oversee the entire team.

Luckily for Russell, he joined a franchise where .500 would be celebrated like an NFL team going 16-0 and WINNING the Super Bowl. So to say he's playing with house money is an understatement.

12. You know things are bad when Johnny Estrada says no

The Pirates are like the ugly kid that can't get a date. In this year's crop of free agents, they were turned down by the likes of catcher Johnny Estrada, who instead chose the freaking Nationals. They were also the runners-up for reliever Luis Vizcaino, who signed with Colorado, and Chad Durbin, who instead chose Philadelphia. It's like the Pirates are offering players foreign currency; to sign a legit player, Pirate dollars would have to be at least double what an established franchise would fork over.

Needless to say, they didn't even bother asking A-Rod out.

11. No free agent? No problem? Let's make a deal. Or not.

OK, so the Pirates landed zero big free agents in the offseason. Sorry, but I don't think Chris Gomez falls into that category. Our hope then shifted to the trading block. Would the Pirates unload one of their better players to bring some building blocks back in return? Maybe Jason Bay, Jack Wilson, or Ian Snell? Welllllll....no.

The biggest deal that was on the table was Bay and catcher Ronny Paulino to the Indians for outfielder Franklin Gutierrez, catcher Kelly Shoppach and either starter Cliff Lee or a minor-league pitching prospect. Needless to say, our new GM turned his nose as this proposal, the first sign that he might be better than his predecessor.

10. OK, how about Bartolo Colon?

Making the transition to "truly desperate," the Pirates watched pitcher/human zeppelin Bartolo Colon pitch in the Carribean Series. Colon was also scouted by the Astros, who ultimately didn't sign him because his size wasn't a result of HGH, as they had hoped.

While Colon's 6.34 ERA and $14 million paycheck sounds perfectly suited for the Pirates' expensive, washed-up superstar approach that's worked so well in the past, they have resisted the urge (so far) to sign the burly righthander.

9. Jaret Wright's still alive, isn't he?

Not to be denied, the Pirates did pluck a former big-name off the scrap heap, this one being Jaret Wright, whose career likely peaked in 2004 with Atlanta. "His history of arm troubles will help him fit right in," I imagine GM Neal Huntington saying the day he signed him.

As an amusing sidenote, I found out that Wright uses the alias "Turd Ferguson" on the road, in order to avoid unwanted fan attention. Somehow, I think that nickname will stick in Pittsburgh, only this time it will be for on-the-field performance.

8. We need a first baseman

The Pirates acquired first baseman Adam LaRoche from the Braves last year in a deal that had waaaay too much local hype. To quote myself from last year's preview:

10. The arrival of Adam LaRoche. LaRoche was celebrated as if the Pirates traded for a combination of Albert Pujols, Babe Ruth, and Roberto Clemente times 100. Anything less than 82 home runs and 195 RBI this year would be considered a disappointing season.

Would you consider a sub-.200 batting average until Mid-May a disappointment? Eventually, LaRoche raised his average later in the season during all of those pressure-packed games in August, when the team really needed it. But for the full season, the disappointment level was a solid 9 on the 1-10 scale.
So the Pirates elected to bring in Doug Mientkiewicz from the used car lot for a thorough tire kicking in 2008. Mientkiewicz is a career .271 hitter with 64 homers in 10 MLB seasons, and his most famous baseball achievement is taking home the last-out ball from the 2004 Red Sox, to the chagrin of Red Sox Nation. So it's safe to say that we're stuck with the Klopek kid from The Burbs for the forseeable future.

7. Tom Gorzelanny, Injury Candidate

Tom Gorzelanny was a pleasant surprise in 2007. He threw 200+ innings, he won an amazing 14 games on a 68-win team, and he had a 3.88 ERA. But we're Pirate fans. We're used to the sky eventually falling.

So imagine my lack of surprise when SI's Tom Verducci placed Gorzelanny on his list of "Seven young pitchers most at risk for injury or a significantly higher ERA in 2008". Says Verducci:

"Gorzelanny was 1-3 with a 5.77 ERA in September while throwing 639 pitches, his second-highest monthly total (by only five pitches) of the season. While Gorzelanny was passing his career high in innings, the Pirates let him throw 105, 118, 107, 107 and 117 pitches in meaningless consecutive September starts. Why?"

Because they get quantity discounts at Dr. James Andrews' office, that's why. This is an organization that's sat by as first-rounder after first-rounder has suffered an arm injury to stop or severely slow their career. Luckily, they drafted a pitcher yet again in the first round in 2007, so even if Gorzelanny doesn't blow out his arm, odds are that Daniel Moskos will.

6. They're bad at everything

The 2000 Baltimore Ravens managed to win the Super Bowl despite glaring offensive weaknesses. Not even the great Brian Billick could figure them out, even in his greatest hour. Is there any chance of the Pirates being strong at one part of the game to the point that it could carry them to the postseason?

No.

The Succaneers hover near the bottom in numerous MLB categories. In 2007, they ranked 22nd in home runs, 23rd in runs, 20th in batting average, 25th in on-base pct., 26th in ERA, 28th in saves, 26th in shutouts, 25th in strikeouts, 29th in opponent's batting average, etc., etc., etc. You get the point.

No, not even Trent Dilfer nor Qadry Ismail would make a difference for this squad.

5. Jason Bay is not happy

Jason Bay usually makes about as much noise as your average mime. Never before have I seen a player so inappropriately thrust into a leadership role. So you can imagine my surprise when The Muted One finally opened his mouth to reveal that he was disappointed with the Pirates' offseason inactivity.

Fantastic. I'm glad that Bay feels comfortable enough to speak his mind. Unfortunately, the 2004 NL Rookie of the Year chose a time when he's coming off his most disappointing year as a Pirate, as his numbers fell from 35/109/.286 in 2006 to 21/84/.247 in 2007. And as previously mentioned, he's turned the called strike three into an art form, which the city has duly noted.

His impeccable timing has already irked the new front office, which preferred that Bay aired his grievances with them rather than through the media. It's great to see that one of our star players is starting off on such a good foot with his new bosses.

He's obviously bitter over the dead-end trade with Cleveland, but that's for two obvious reasons:

1. All he was worth on the open market was Cliff Lee, which is a major shot to any slugger's ego, and;
2. He's still stuck in Pittsburgh, at least until he pulls a Raul Mondesi and concocts an extortion plot to get his release.

4. There's not much help on the way

Minorleagueball.com recently ranked each team's top 20 prospects, and sorry Pirate fans, but I don't have much good news to pass along for the future. Outside of outfielder/futureYankee/Met/Red Sock Andrew McCutcheon, no prospect earned an "A" grade, and only three others reached even a "B". The author adds, "What a horrible system. There isn't much else to say about it."

There might not be another organization in pro sports that's frittered away more high draft picks than the Pirates. It would be the baseball equivalent of a Ryan Leaf-level disaster, year after year after year. But at least the Chargers eventually turned things around. They had a Tomlinson fall into their lap. They picked up a Merriman, a Rivers.

The Pirates' drafts have been run like the guy in your fantasy league who's had one (or 15) too many. Eventually, that catches up with you, and the cupboard is bare. Which would explain the Pirates fans starving for a winner.

3. Historically bad pitching

Last May, I pondered about the Pirates' pitching. Then I started doing research. And that means a lengthy post. Among my findings:

—The Pirates have had a grand total of six 20-game winners in the past 60 years.
—The Pirates have 34 players in the Hall of Fame Eight are pitchers, and of the eight, none played for the Pirates for more than seven seasons. The only one in the postwar-era (Jim Bunning) played just two seasons.
—The Pirates have had two Cy Young winners. Ever. That would be Vern Law in 1960 and Doug Drabek in 1990.

So my conclusion was that the Pirates never had a Randy Johnson-type on their squad. I know, it's groundbreaking research. While they've had many good pitchers, the truly elite hurler has eluded their grasp for practically their entire existence.

What's this mean for 2008? Well, we have Tom Gorzelanny's soon-to-fall-off left arm, Paul Maholm's 5.02 ERA, Zach Duke's destroyed confidence, and Matt Morris' bloated contract (and ERA to match) to look forward to. Our lone shot to change this trend looks to be Ian Snell, a fiery 190-pound righthander who takes way too much pride in his work to be a Pirate. Unfortunately, history is not on his side.

2. The Nuttings

The face of the Pirates' front office has been Kevin McClatchy. It's a nerdy face that often sat behind home plate in shirt, tie, and ballcap, the look only acceptable if you just got picked in the NHL, NBA or NFL draft:

McClatchy rescued the Pirates, he kept them in the city, and he even got an incredible new stadium built. The only part of the equation that he forgot was the winning part. A minor detail, yes. So McClatchy finally went by the wayside in July 2007, stepping down as CEO. He was replaced by Frank Coonelly, who had been a senior vice president in the commissioner's office.

So without McClatchy to kick around, Pirate fans quickly realized that they could direct their anger towards new majority owner Bob Nutting. Nutting's served as the Pirates' Chairman of the Board since 2003, which means he's been on the clock for his share of atrocious baseball.

While knowing very little about him, I can only assume one thing: he's already smarter than McClatchy, as he allowed the ex-CEO to absorb most of the slings and arrows of the past few years that he was at least partially responsible for.

On the other hand, his 2007 letter to the Pirate fans touting "our core group of exciting, young, talented players" and "the leadership of Jim Tracy" looks kind of silly in retrospect.

His father, Ogden Nutting, has been an investor in the Pirates for years and was very much on-board with the Pirates' thrifty ways. Like McClatchy, Nutting is a newspaper man. I found these glowing quotes about the Nutting's other business, which translate almost exactly from newspapers to baseball:

Nutting newspapers are "not known for the best pay," and they have a reputation as "tough bargainers," said Edgar Simpson, chief of policy and administration for Ohio's attorney general and former state editor for United Press International.

"They weren't focused on winning (journalism) awards," said Cleveland Plain Dealer education reporter Ellen Kleinerman, who worked at The Intelligencer, the Nuttings' morning newspaper in Wheeling. "They're focused on running a business."

First thing to cross my mind when I see these quotes: See you at the World Series!

1. They kept together the nucleus

Perhaps the biggest reason that the Pirates' fortunes won't change: they've largely kept the nucleus of their 94-loss team intact.

Pirate spin-doctoring would have you believe that most players underachieved last year. But if that's the case, then they historically underachieve. With few exceptions (most notably Mr. Bay), most players, such as Jack Wilson, Freddy Sanchez, and Adam LaRoche, equalled their career averages.

So how little did the roster change? Well, gone from 2007 are pitchers Tony Armas and Salomon Torres, Utilityman Josh Phelps, SS Cesar Izturis, 1B Brad Eldred, and 2B Jose Castillo. Among them, I count zero impact players.

Incoming are RHPs Marino Salas, Kevin Roberts, and Ty Taubenheim, SS Ray Olmedo and Josh Wilson, IF Chris Gomez, and the aforementioned Wright and Mientkiewicz, on minor-league deals. Among them, I count zero impact players.

Basically, the hot-stove league was a wash. Thankfully, we have Big Ben and Sid the Kid to keep us occupied, otherwise the city's sports fans would have surely perished due to sheer boredom this winter.

As a fan base, we've given up the hope of signing a big-ticket free agent or even trading for a high-end player. Why? Because we're more than a player or two away. And whoever we'd trade for would surely soak up the losing culture within their first five minutes of putting on that uniform. How many more games would the Pirates win if they had A-Rod? Five? 10? Great. We're still under .500.

In all seriousness, the Pirates do have some nice players. But they don't have that "10" that has eluded them since Barry Lamar Bonds fled to the West Coast some 15 years ago. And until they find that elusive missing piece, their consecutive-seasons losing streak will continue to directly correlate with the loss of the slugging malcontent.

Which brings me to my final point/suggestion. Currently, a free agent outfielder sits on the open market. He had 28 home runs and an on-base pecentage of .480 in only 126 games last season. Both of those would have led the Pirates in 2007. He'll sell tickets. He'll get people talking about baseball in Pittsburgh again. But who is this mystery man the Pirates need to sign to lift them out of their 15-year funk?

Every weekday until the start of the season, a different writer will preview his/her team. We asked a gaggle of writers, from the Web, from print, from books, to tell us, in as many or as little words as they need, Where Their Team Stands. This is not meant to be factual, or dispassionate, or even logical: We just asked them to riff on why they love their team so much, or what their team means to them, or whatever.

Today: The New York Yankees. Your author is Amy Blair.

Amy Blair is a former columnist for The Black Table and now writes a weekly column for Eater. Her words are after the jump.

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My parents divorced in the early 1980s, and my father, seemingly having no idea what else to do with me when he had me for weekends, carted me off to the Bronx in a Ford Pinto with no air conditioning every other Saturday for a ballgame. The custody agreement granted me the Yankees and all the hot dogs I could eat, which seemed like a perfectly fair trade-off for, you know, domestic tranquility and what-not.

Back then the upper deck was vacant save for a spattering of old drunks and Yankee traditionalists. You could buy a ticket for $1.50, yet it was frequently so empty that I would be sent halfway around the stadium to fetch foul balls hit into sections where no one was sitting. This is difficult to imagine now. Of course, all I could think about was catching a homer off Dave Winfield. I don't mean to veer off too far into sentimentality; I am after all, the same person who punched a Red Sox fan outside of Yankees Stadium once, but this being the last year in the Stadium and all, well, it's getting me a little ... misty. (Isn't that precious; a sad Yankees fan!)

Not only is this the last season in Yankee Stadium, but it's looking to be a pretty big transition year for the Yanks all around. A lot hinges on Joe Girardi, since for the first time in eleven years someone other than Joe Torre will be managing the team. This is scary shit for Yankees fans, especially because I am still not entirely convinced that letting Torre walk away was the right decision (I know, I know, but we did, after all, see the postseason every year while he was coaching, along with that neat little prize of four World Series titles). But, like everybody else, I am completely over that debate (been there, done that). Not to mention the fact that I actually LIKE Girardi and think that New York is a great town for him as a manager. And anyway, if he shits the bed, we can always rely on the fact that the Steinbrenners will just buy us somebody better (ha haaa).

Our pitching staff is also in a major transition this season. Part of me is really excited about the possibilities, and part of me weeps when I think about the uncertainty. We are starting off a year in which, in a nutshell, half of our pitchers are too young and half of them are too old. Among the young ones, Philip Hughes looks like he should be flipping burgers at the Amarillo Checkers, Joba Chamberlain once weighed 290 pounds and looks suspiciously like he might decide to eat Latroy Hawkins (I have no idea who that is either), and Ian Kennedy is described as having all the tools of a — woohoo — #3 or #4 starter. The rest of the pitching staff is seemingly made up of a bunch of sixty-five year old retirees whom the Yankees scouted during a Bocce Ball tournament in Boca Raton. (Strangely, they're fan favorites). All that being said, it's the most promising and exciting (and yes, unpredictable) pitching staff we have seen in years.

As for the rest of the roster, nobody is really certain what the hell Robinson Cano is saying when he speaks, so who knows what's going on with him. And as we have all been told over and over again, there are a hundred other guys out there just as good as Melky Cabrera (lies, blasphemous lies!). Bobby Abreu, despite a slow start, still finished with his usual strong stats last year, and was deceptively solid and consistent over the second half of the season, providing every reason for the Yankees to exercise an option in his contract to bring him back. Jorge Posada had a career year, consistent from April through September, and shows no signs yet of slowing down, an amazing feat for a thirty-six year old everyday catcher. Johnny Damon showed up last year out of shape and was a mess for most of the first half. But he regained his place as one of the league's most effective leadoff men the second half of the season, and even reasserted his running abilities. Hell, even Shelly Duncan put on an electrifying display of power, and became a solid pinch-hitting option during the course of the year. And of course Jeter and A-Rod who are, and remain, Jeter and A-Rod. Everything should be fine and dandy, as long as Girardi doesn't let Giambi anywhere near first base.

But seriously, there is a youthful energy this spring that I have not felt since 1994 when Jeter, Williams, and Rivera were virtual unknowns. A large dose of uncertainty? Yes. But even so, it is undoubtedly nice to hang our hats again on homegrown young guys, and not the Kevin Browns and 'Roid Rockets of the world. Sure, the pitching issues, the new manager and the preseason brawl in Tampa Bay (didn't I mention that?) would probably equal very bad news for another team, but come on, this is the Yankees we're talking about. And wouldn't it just be so...Yankees-ish for us to win the World Series in our last year in our glorious old stadium? (Cue the booing, I can take it).

And if you aren't a Yankees fan, you can at least sleep well at night knowing that it wasn't your team that played a preseason game this year with Billy fucking Crystal. I'm still hurting from that one.

Every weekday until the start of the season, a different writer will preview his/her team. We asked a gaggle of writers, from the Web, from print, from books, to tell us, in as many or as little words as they need, Where Their Team Stands. This is not meant to be factual, or dispassionate, or even logical: We just asked them to riff on why they love their team so much, or what their team means to them, or whatever.

Today: The Kansas City Royals. Your author is Will McDonald.

Will McDonald writes Royals Review and is a grad student writing his dissertation on eighteenth-century American poetry. His words are after the jump.

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Are you ready for a universe in which the Royals are good?

All apologies for the cheesy rhetorical question opening aside - I'm sure someone learned like Bob Costas would have started with a quotation from Thucydides or an anecdote shared by Paul McCartney on Later - its better that you prepare yourself emotionally for a more or less OK Royals team now, than suffer the cognitive dissonance later. Sure, we're all excited to see the Rays (nee Devil) emerge from seed like a beautiful flower, but the Royals aren't far behind from what many are wishcasting for Tampa. 2008 won't be a reprise of 1985 (Greenland leaves the European Union, the Royals win the World Series), but it might be a reprise of, say, 1993, when the Royals finished with 84 wins and Raven-Symone joined the cast of Hanging with Mr. Cooper.

Considering that any given week of Roger Clemens or Barry Bonds coverage eclipsed all the annual ink spilt on Kansas City's baseball team, you likely didn't notice it, but the Royals were actually a fairly competent baseball team last season. And while the Royals weren't repeatedly charged with destroying our previously unsullied National Innocence (no outrage over Rafael Betancourt though, of course not, as steroid hysteria has never actually been about steroids) ad nauseum like those two mentioned above, anyone who has had to watch the Royals over the last decade might argue that the Royals have done much more damage to all things holy. Nevertheless, in the last eighteen months a great cleansing purge has taken place, as the refuse from the Allard Baird Era (including Allard himself) has been removed: gone are such luminaries as Buddy Bell, Angel Berroa, Runelyvs Hernandez and Paul Bako. Thus, last season's inspiring run at a non-100 loss season - their first since 2003 - has generated a disproportionate level of excitement amongst the hundreds of remaining Royals fans.

A major factor in this newfound era of good feeling is the shiny new management team, led by hotshot general manager Dayton Moore. Whatever his ultimate merits as a GM, Moore is an interesting reflection of multiple trends taking place inside baseball. Hired at 39, Moore is yet another wunderkind, long on rumored brilliance and short on experience, especially as a player. Unlike most examples of this type however, Moore is not part of the saber-revolution, in fact, he's a proud counter-revolutionary, complete with the Braves-based resume that counts as real bonafides in these matters, considering that Atlanta has long been held up as the morally superior alternative to all things Beane-inspired. No, in Atlanta they just scout those fine young southern boys with good faces and even better intangibles until the cows come home and keep winning. Or something like that. Just read the anti-Moneyball screed Scout's Honor- The Bravest Way to Build a Winning Team if you don't believe me.

As these things go, from France to Rome, we know that the counter-revolution is always more aggressive than the revolution ever purported to be, and it wouldn't be a shock to see Moore trumpeted for his wholesome baseball approach at some point by the usual suspects. Finally, Moore is, along with his new managerial hire Trey Hillman, a devout/born again/someone who talks about Jesus a lot in seemingly secular contexts/ Christian. It remains to be seen how the religious factor plays itself out, but considering that Hillman was essentially Moore's only candidate to replace Buddy Bell, and that he flew to Japan find him, the odds are good that this will become a story should the Royals ever start winning. Either way, it represents yet another sense in which Moore is the anti-Theo Epstein or Mark Shapiro.

To his credit, Moore has almost entirely reconfigured and rebuilt the pitching staff, highlighted by the acquisitions of Gil Meche, Brian Bannister and Joakim Soria, all scouting and intangibles based moves, nonetheless. While Bannister seems likely to fall back a bit, the Meche signing (5 years/$55 million), a year after being lambasted, looks inspired. Thanks to a solidified rotation and a secretly awesome bullpen, the Royals put together a pitching staff that was comparable to their division rivals, a stunning achievement. In 2006 the Royals allowed a staggering 971 runs, the 21st worst total in the history of the game. After Dayton's first full season as a GM, that total had dropped to 778, a 193-run improvement. Looking at the same data another way, the team actually finished 7th in the AL with an ERA of 4.48. Thanks to their first non-horrible pitching staff since ... 1996, the Royals were able to compete in the sturdy AL Central, despite a still Royalsian offense. For long stretches of time in fact, the Royals were actually pretty good, as they went 41-39 from June through August. Basically, for three months they were a National League playoff team.

If we stop right here, tell ourselves that Moore knows pitching and that Alex Gordon and Billy Butler are ready to carry the offense for the next decade, it all sounds terrific. Unfortunately, we can't stop here, however. While the pitching staff has improved from terrible to mediocre - the Royals still don't strike anybody out, and no Royals team has finished higher than 12th in the league in Ks since 1999 - the offense remains a major problem and a potential source of anxiety. Moore has show inklings of a knack for finding pitchers, but has matched every hurling success with a complete offensive flop. Aside from the team's pathetically lame splash signing of malcontent Jose Guillen, Moore's major positional moves have been: trading for, then extending Ross Gload, a first baseman who doesn't walk and doesn't hit for power, trading for Ryan Shealy, one of the worst hitters on the planet last season and bringing in Tony Pena Jr. and Miguel Olivo, who combined might only draw 20 walks all season. From the beginning, Moore has dutifully followed the precedent set by his first trade, which netted the Royals Joey Gathright: keep adding ill-fitting parts.

At issue in Kansas City is a misidentification of what makes a lineup work. Fitting hand in glove with all of Moore's lovable old-schoolness is Trey Hillman's fondness for small ball, which is how he made his name in Japan, the land of the first inning bunt, an achievement rather on the order of gaining renown in West Virginia for one's methamphetamine making skills. Not surprisingly, we've thus seen a handful of Spring Training stories about the virtues of fundamentals and the little things and moving runners over and on and on, complete with glowing references to the glory that is the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. But the problem with the Royals the last few years hasn't been a lack of situational hitting or productive outs or any other Buster Olney-inspired buzzword. No, it's much less seventh-grade subtle than that: the Royals simply can't hit, not for average and not for power, especially the latter. In 2007, in the American League, the Royals only managed to hit 102 home runs, a stunningly low total. Throwing out the strike shortened 1994 season (but not, mind you, the also shortened '95) that's actually the lowest HR total by an AL team since 1992. 1992! The 2007 Royals only had two players hit double-digits in home runs and had no one over 18, en route to scoring a anemic 706 runs. So in a perverse way, focusing on small-ball makes sense. Just as it makes sense to learn how to use your other hand if you break your arm. Yet most of us would still want to also wear a cast and have the good arm heal, not just celebrate our new status as traditional and novel.

At the very most, doing the little things well is a nice complimentary skill set for an already adequate lineup, but the Royals aren't an adequate lineup: They don't hit for average, they don't walk, they don't have power. Moreover, the truly scary thing is that the only patches of adequacy and the only projectable bright spots remain vestiges from the Baird regime. If we consider the dictum that the horizons of our realities are defined by the limits of our dreams, then it's telling to note that this is a fanbase that's been dreaming about middling Mark Teahen's breakout for years now. But hey, the Royals added Jose Guillen, he was like the fourth best Mariner in the world last year, and he extended his epic Consecutive Teams Played For who Let Me Finish the Season in the Locker Room streak to two.

Nevertheless, everything in the paragraph above does not really represent the consensus feeling of the normal, patriotic and tax-paying Royals fan, and perhaps it shouldn't. Without much squinting you can see the Royals blossoming in much the same way the Brewers have, with Butler and Gordon playing the roles of Fielder and Braun. Speaking of Milwaukee, to tell the truth, if the Royals and Brewers switched leagues for 2008, the smart money might be on the Royals snagging more wins. But sadly, that isn't a possibility. Stuck as they are in a tough division in a tough league, the Royals have a difficult climb ahead of them. While it may not be reflected in the raw win total, on merit, the 2008 squad will probably be the best Royals team since the mid-90s.

Progressing from awful to average is the easy part, and the Royals appear in line to do just that. The history of the game is filled with teams that shared in this very progress, were heralded as rising gate-crashers, but two years later were terrible again. We'll see if they can make the next step, or if they'll merely remain in the dustbin of the league.

Every weekday until the start of the season, a different writer will preview his/her team. We asked a gaggle of writers, from the Web, from print, from books, to tell us, in as many or as little words as they need, Where Their Team Stands. This is not meant to be factual, or dispassionate, or even logical: We just asked them to riff on why they love their team so much, or what their team means to them, or whatever.

Today: The Arizona Diamondbacks. Your author is Jim McLennan.

Jim McLennan grew up in Britain so never saw live baseball for the first three decades of his life. He's making up for it now, and rants, on a daily basis, about the Arizona Diamondbacks over at AZSnakePit.com. His words are after the jump.

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If any Arizona fan tries to tell you last year was expected to happen, don't believe them. Just about everything about 2007 was a surprise: Arizona's offense fizzled, our bullpen proved a tower of inconceivable strength and we survived the loss of Randy Johnson, while Doug Davis and Livan Hernandez pitched out of trouble with cheerful abandon, both men apparently pitching permanently from the stretch. Despite playing in a hitter-friendly park, we had the lowest average in the NL, scored 20 runs less than our opponents and still managed to post the best record in the league. We then swept the Cubs in three delicious games - more on them later - and though the wheels fell off the Saguaromobile in the Championship series, the season can only be described as exceeding all expectations.

More of the same in 2008? I certainly hope not. My digestive tract can not cope with another year of 52 one-run games, accompanied by six more months of every statistical analyst on the planet telling us we shouldn't be winning. No: this year, I want the Diamondbacks offense to be what we thought it would be last year, and then some, while Randy Johnson's back should possess the suppleness of a well-oiled young willow, and Dan Haren joins Brandon Webb at the top of the rotation to form a 1-2 punch unrivaled in the majors. KTHXBAI.

Wishful thinking aside, there does seem ground for optimism. Most of the roster return from last year, with the majority young enough that they'll be better, simply through age and experience. The few changes are indisputably improvements, most notably replacing Hernandez with Haren in the rotation, a move not far short of the Mets acquisition of Johan Santana, as far as impact. Sure, the D-backs sold a good chunk of the farm to do it, but with the exception of 2B Orlando Hudson, the entire starting lineup is signed at least through 2010. Given that, hoarding prospects was pointless - after all, you don't get any additional wins for having a really-good Triple-A roster.

Certainly, the Arizona rotation is a thing of potential beauty. Webb will likely be one of the Cy Young candidates again, while Haren started the All-Star game for the American League last year. Randy Johnson's back is once again a question mark, but apparently feels much better than last year, and Davis will walk far too many people, yet somehow escape. Then there's Micah Owings, who might be the best-hitting pitcher since Babe Ruth last took the mound - just ask the Braves, against whom he went 4-for-5 with two homers and six RBI, plus seven innings of three-hit ball in a game last August.

We should, hopefully, not be relying on the bats of our pitchers this year, and if there's an area where the D-backs really need to improve, it's at the plate. It was a young team, and it showed: in particular, shortstop Stephen Drew and right-fielder Carlos Quentin were weak spots. Quentin has gone, swapped for an A-ball player who became part of the Haren deal, and is replaced by phenom Justin Upton. The list of 20-year olds who played full-time in the majors of late is short: in fact, over the past fifteen years, it's Adrian Beltre, Andruw Jones and A-Rod. Upton is that good, potentially. Drew remains, though may find some of his playing time given to Chris Burke if he struggles again.

Elsewhere, Chris Young's 32-homer rookie season led the team, stealing 27 bases to go with them - just don't look at the 141 strikeouts or the on-base percentage which ended at only .295. It was notable that a lot of the Arizona players had significantly better second halves; 1B Conor Jackson and C Chris Snyder, in particular. I would hate to point fingers, but do note that the D-backs fired their hitting coach, Kevin Seitzer, at the All-Star break. The team added 38 points of OPS in the second half, with September being the offense's best month, by quite some distance. Here's to more of that in 2008.

The bullpen kicked ass, with just about every member outperforming all expectations, capped by Jose Valverde, who led the majors in saves, and also in opposing fans irritated, thanks to his patented post-save celebrations. He's now gone, traded to the Astros, so we'll get to see what life is like on the receiving end this year. Replacing him is Brandon Lyon, almost the anti-Valverde: far less demonstrative, and possessing four decent but not overpowering pitches, rare for closers, who usually dominate with two. I'm hoping our relief corps get given some more runs to play with, but they should be reliable, and the addition of Chad Qualls will help plug the gap left by Valverde.

It is kinda scary to think that veteran presence and leadership in the Arizona clubhouse will now be supplied by Hudson and Byrnes. This is because Tony Clark left the D-backs contract offer on the table while shopping around, only for it to be withdrawn. (He ended up getting a shorter, less well-paid deal with the Padres, for whom Adrian Gonzalez played 161 games at first-base. Clark's ass may well have fused with the pine on the Petco bench by season's end.) One suspects that things will go well, as long as things are going well - but as we saw at the All-Star Game, he couldn't even control his dog. Can a man driving a 2005 GMC van, which Byrnes calls the "shaggin' wagon," really command respect from his teammates?

One good step forward is the feeling that the D-backs are finally building rivalries with other teams. The Rockies are probably the most likely contenders, with both organizations building from within, and on a limited budget: there is some dislike there, with Troy Tulowitzki a particular lightning-rod for hatred. The problem is that it's still too "nice," though the hurling of bottles onto the field at Chase, after a questionable umpiring decision in the NLCS, certainly showed that the fans in Arizona could be provoked into passion, albeit not perhaps in a manner approved by Bud Selig.

For, let's be honest, Phoenix is a town of fickle, frontrunning fans - an inevitable result of being a city where almost everyone is from somewhere else and brings their loyalties with them. Nowhere is this more apparent when the Cubs come to town and all their fans living in Arizona suddenly come out of the woodwork. [I got a lot of flak during the season for observing how it was odd they feel such fierce loyalty to Chicago, yet apparently have no desire to live there...] But I have to say, something about the late-August series against Chicago galvanized the local fans, and by the time of the playoff series, Chase Field was no longer Wrigley South. Here's to more of that in 2008 as well.

The NL West promises, once again, to be among the tightest divisions in baseball - save the Giants, who will suck in a manner you'd expect, given the replacement of Barry Bonds in the cleanup spot by Bengie Molina. But I think the addition of Haren has kept the Diamondbacks at the front of the pack, and if the offense can perform even adequately, our pitching staff will do more than keep us in most games. Unlike last season, you won't find Arizona at 66/1 for the World Series this year, and if the anticipated division title occurs again, no-one will fancy facing Webb and Haren, with a side-order of Big Unit, in the playoffs.

Every weekday until the start of the season, a different writer will preview his/her team. We asked a gaggle of writers, from the Web, from print, from books, to tell us, in as many or as little words as they need, Where Their Team Stands. This is not meant to be factual, or dispassionate, or even logical: We just asked them to riff on why they love their team so much, or what their team means to them, or whatever.

Today: The Atlanta Braves. Your author is Jay Busbee.

Jay Busbee is the editor of Yahoo! Sports' NASCAR blog From the Marbles and Atlanta Magazine's Atlanta sports blog Right Down Peachtree. He's also the author of The Quiet Dynasty: The Inside Story of the Atlanta Braves' Championship Run, coming out next year. His words are after the jump.

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So this is what life is like for the rest of you.

If the Braves Dynasty isn't dead, it's clearly on life support and nonresponsive. The Atlanta Braves are now two seasons removed from their last playoff appearance, six years from their last playoff series win, and twelve—twelve!—years from that lone World Series ring. Atlanta is now like that creepy dude who graduated from college but hung around in town afterward, still going to parties at his old fraternity. Yeah, the Tomahawk was friggin' money back in the day, but now...no, no, don't make eye contact, he'll come over here—Hey, Tomahawk! How ya been! Great, great...

Braves fans insist that Atlanta's fine, that the Braves are going to run with the Mets and the Phillies. But a lot of that is fantasy-league delusion—we've got Glavine, Smoltz, Chipper, and Javy Lopez, we won a World Series with these guys! Somebody get Ryan Klesko and Steve Avery on the phone!

Thing is, it's not a completely insane thought that we'll challenge for the pennant. As old as he is, I'll still take Smoltz over all but a handful of starters in the NL. Tom Glavine's Manchurian Candidate routine of last October—torpedo the Mets' playoff hopes, then jump ship and re-sign with Atlanta—was baseball schadenfreude of the highest order. Tim Hudson is justifying the monstrous salary Atlanta threw his way after he left Oakland. Rookie Jair Jurrjens is pitching like the second coming of Greg Maddux.

At the plate, Chipper Jones, long past caring whether you call him "Larry," is putting the final grace notes on a Hall of Fame career. Mark Teixeira is going to become one of the game's marquee players over the next five years, though Braves fans are dreading the likelihood that he'll be playing somewhere well northeast of Atlanta this time next year. Brian McCann is the sweetest-swinging catcher in the game not named Mauer, and everything's lining up for right fielder Jeff Francoeur to have his breakout season. Shortstop Yunel Escobar, who snuck out of Cuba four years ago, played well enough in his rookie season for the Braves to send Edgar Renteria to the Tigers.

So, yeah, with a solid lineup of at least three likely 15-game winners and four .300 hitters, Atlanta should be challenging for the division title and probably the NL crown, right? So how do I know that come September, Atlanta's going to be burbling along at four games out, unable to close the gap between them and the Mets/Phils?

Sure, you could blame injuries. You could blame a bullpen that has a tendency to implode and bats that go limp at the worst possible moments. You could, but those problems hit every team. I'm looking in another direction.

I blame us. That's right, the Atlanta fans, the perennial postseason punch line. (Hey, alliteration!) It's our fault the Braves can't get over the hump. Our fault they can't give any more than ninety-eight percent. Our fault their eyes are cloudy and their hearts are half-full.

We've got this strange combination of insecurity and flop sweat—we want the world to pay attention to our team, but when they do, the Braves belly-flop spectacularly. We suffer the sanctimonious smugness (More alliteration!) of hack sportswriters when we don't sell out playoff games, but don't go thermonuclear when everybody ignores the fact that, say, the San Antonio Spurs are suffering the same early-round playoff fatigue.

We boo Tom Glavine, one of the three or four greatest A-Braves ever, and give a standing ovation to Julio freaking Franco after he jumped to the Mets and then returned to Atlanta. The finest moment in our team's history—the Game 6 win over the Indians in the 1995 World Series—was colored by the fact that David Justice had to call us out the morning of the game. He didn't think we knew how to get fired up for the final games of a World Series. And he was right.

So we can make all the excuses we want—Turner Field's too tough to get to, Georgia Bulldog football is more interesting, we're just tired of all this winning—but the truth is, we're as much to blame for the Braves' shaky public image as any gopher-ball-tossing closer or flailing utility infielder.

We need to realize winning isn't our birthright. We need to get off our asses and get to a ballgame now and then. We need to cheer this team like it's 1991.

And I promise I will. The very next time they're in town. Promise.

Every weekday until the start of the season, a different writer will preview his/her team. We asked a gaggle of writers, from the Web, from print, from books, to tell us, in as many or as little words as they need, Where Their Team Stands. This is not meant to be factual, or dispassionate, or even logical: We just asked them to riff on why they love their team so much, or what their team means to them, or whatever.

Today: The Philadelphia Phillies. Your author is A.J. Daulerio and ... Bill Conlin.

A.J. Daulerio will be the senior writer at Deadspin starting March 31. Bill Conlin covers the Phillies for the Philadelphia Daily News. Their words are after the jump.

For Christmas this year, I received that shirt you see in the right hand corner. It was a gift from my well-intentioned fiancée, who decided that she'd invest in something sports-oriented. It is a thoughtful gift, isn't it? It is very well-made and its colors suggest the Phillies baby blues of the 70's, replete with red and white racing stripes on the arms. And the number: 22. Why, that's the number worn by Jay Loviglio in 1980. Then it was Bobby Dernier's number for a while. Now? It's mine. I'm sure my first reaction when I unwrapped the shirt was the way a parent reacts when their toddler gives them heartfelt, but completely useless presents like a shoe box full of grass or a broach made of bowtie pasta. My second reaction was pure bewilderment — when had I expressed my desire to start dressing like Jermaine Dupri?

Look, I'm a Phillies fan, but I've never been much of personalized jersey guy (except in unique circumstances, of course). It's always bothered me that Philadelphia sports fans have this odd tendency to buy team jerseys, then put their own surnames on the back. You can get away with this if you're a famous singer or a politician, but not a Jewish mortgage broker from Bryn Mawr. (Honestly, you're not helping the cause if you take the Taxi Crab to Broad and Pattison then show up sporting a Flyers jersey with the "Schwartzenstein" on the back.)

And this isn't even a jersey. It's a button-down shirt that looks like a jersey. This is just awful.

But I wore this shirt-jersey (shirsey) to a New Year's party this past year, fully expecting to get mercilessly ridiculed (or, actually, I was hopeful she would). But each time I forced people to comment on the shirt, even with a generous amount of ironic build-up, the reaction was oddly ... positive.

"Seriously? Are you looking at this thing? Do you honestly think anyone can pull this off if they're not a member of Boyz II Men?"

"It's kind of awesome, actually."

Granted, some of these guests were full-blown ape-fisted Phillies fans and by that point this was a few drinks into New Year's Eve, but ... come on. Not even a snicker?

The reason this wasn't as big a joke? The Phillies were winners. They won the N.L. East. Remember? In dramatic, holy shitballs-fashion. So this New Jack shirsey was tolerable because it still served as a reminder of last year's breathtaking fall.

And in order to look forward to this season, you have to look back. For many Phillies fans, the first time they heard a Harry Kalas homerun call hooks them. The first looong drive walk-off sticks to your insides for the rest of your life. But when you start to pick up the paper and read about the Phillies the first guy to leave that sort of mark was ... Bill Conlin.

He's the writer that pulled you into the wondrous haze of Phillies baseball. Each of his columns reeked of hot dogs and the late night post-game boozefest at the local crap tavern. He was there; he was part of it. Even if he wasn't actually cooze-chasing with the players anymore, he still wrote like he did. At least you know he did at one point. It made the team more likable, more human — this was your team. He ripped the guys that needed it and doled out compliments only in small doses, because as poetic as his baseball beat could be, he absolutely wasn't soft. When you're young and first gaining an appreciation for both baseball and writing, Conlin was mesmerizing. He even made the ugliest of Phillies squads amusing. (Did Conlin just compare John Felske's managerial style to some failed WW I general?) So at the start of what would most likely be another memorable Phillies season, it seemed only fitting to ask him if he'd help out. But would he?

That's the thing about Conlin: even though he can be the grouchiest son of a bitch at times, the man's not going to turn his back on a Phillies fan. Even a lowly pamphleteer.

He agreed to participate and share his thoughts on the upcoming season ... and send along pictures of himself surfing.

AJD: So, is this Mets/Phillies rivalry the best one you've ever seen?

CONLIN: 1975-83 Phillies vs. Pirates was intense, combative and needed no help from the media. Those Pirates of "Fam-i-lee" fame played with "attitude" before the term became a buzzword. Mix a squad heavy with talented blacks and Latinos, add a little coke, sprinkle liberally with greenies, turn up the volume on the clubhouse sound system, put a permissive players manager like Chuck Tanner in charge and step back and watch the line drives fly. You know it was intense when a laid back guy like Mike Schmidt charged the mound and broke a knuckle on the bony head of Bruce "The Assassin" Kison. Phils were in awe of the Big Red Machine, who swept them in '76 and went downhill after they lost Pete Rose and their pitching collapsed. Once the Pirates were moved out of the East, the Mets should have become the natural rivalry, but until the Phillies got into their current almost-good rut, it seemed that whenever they were decent, the Mets were wretched and visa versa. Now it appears destined to become the real deal.

AJD: Does having a woman like Anna Benson (presumably) in this city cause a distraction in the clubhouse? Has there ever been a player on the Phillies who had an equally (potentially) distracting wife or girlfriend?

CONLIN: I don't understand how a trophy wife would cause clubhouse problems unless she insists on sharing Benson's locker. It becomes a problem if the other wives bitch about her at home. It becomes a real problem if she pullls a Mary Jane Johnstone and the club lets her fly charters with Kris. Mary Jane flew every charter with Jay, accompanied by two tiny toy poodles she carried in her handbag and her presence in the road hotels really put the club's large number of chasers in deep stealth mode.

(Ed. Note. Mary Jane Johnstone was wife of Phillies former outfielder Jay Johnstone. Probably best known for his rain delay antics and his appearance as the first batter called out on strikes by Lt. Frank Drebin in "The Naked Gun.")

AJD: Last year, Inquirer writer Sam Carchidi almost got the crap kicked out of him by Brett Myers? Did you ever come to blows with any of the players?

CONLIN: When I went on the beat in 1966, I was 32 years old and was still an active surfer, 6-1 and about 225. Ashburn once wrote in his Bulletin column that I was stronger than a lot of guys on the ballclub. I was never physically threatened by any player, although traveling sec Eddie Ferenz and I went a few no-decision rounds one night in Montreal during a Molson's induced argument. Ferenz once cold-cocked reliever Dick Selma, knocking him onto the baggage carousel in Newark Airport. In 1986 I was inducted into the Ocean Rowing Hall of Fame. These photos were taken around 1970:

AJD: Last year I talked about how Burrell's engagement might impact his play and brought up his alleged lady-killer past. Out of the guy's you've covered, which Phillies player got the most ass?

CONLIN: Bo Belinsky without a close second. How can you match a stable that included Ann-Margret, Connie Stevens, Tina Louise, and Mamie Van Doren, And then the guy marries (and divorces) Playmate of the Year Jo Collins, then tree heiress Janie Weyerhaeuser. On a trip to LA in 1966, I took him surfing at a famous Orange County break called Cotton's Point (Nixon later bought the Henry Cotton Estate the point was named after and turned it into the Western White House). To show his gratitude, Bo took me clubbing in Hollywood after the game. The details are classified. Here is Bo from that day. He was an ungainly but fearless surfer:

(Ed. Note: Bo Belinsky!)

AJD: Oh, what do you think of that shirt?

CONLIN: Nice enough to get you beat up at Shea...

Every weekday until the start of the season, a different writer will preview his/her team. We asked a gaggle of writers, from the Web, from print, from books, to tell us, in as many or as little words as they need, Where Their Team Stands. This is not meant to be factual, or dispassionate, or even logical: We just asked them to riff on why they love their team so much, or what their team means to them, or whatever.

Today: The Florida Marlins. Your author is Jacob Luft.

Jacob Luft is a senior editor at SI.com and blogs at LuftOnDeck.com. His words are after the jump.

———————————-

The Florida Marlins already have won their biggest game of the season: They succeeded in extorting a (mostly) publicly financed stadium from the city of Miami.

Set to open in 2011, the gleaming new facility will feature a retractable roof and all of the creature comforts we have come to expect from latter-day "mallparks." What it won't feature are any players who have — up to this point — ever worn a Marlins uniform.

Oh, there's an outside shot that stud shortstop Hanley Ramirez will be around in what would be his sixth major-league season, after which he could be eligible for free agency. But don't count on it. By then the Marlins would have had to lock up Ramirez to a long-term deal or absorb his arbitration-enhanced salary for three straight seasons. That would go against this ownership group's M.O. of trading players before they reach their walk years (see: Cabrera, Miguel; Willis, Dontrelle).

That's the only drama surrounding this franchise now that it has suckered the local politicians into playing the stadium game: Whither Hanley? The answer to that won't come till at least after this season, the kid's third and last before becoming arbitration eligible.

Now, I know this is supposed to be an homage to why I love my team, but it's hard to muster any enthusiasm — real or feigned — when the ownership gives us the finger at every turn. The breaking point for me was the Cabrera trade to Detroit this winter. The guy isn't even 25 yet and is crafting a Hall of Fame career. That's they guy you build around, not trade away. He isn't even set to hit free agency until after 2009, but Florida's owner decided he's rather buy a new Ferrari (no joke) than pay anything close to market value for a true superstar. Suffice it to say I'll be watching a lot of Detroit Tigers games this season.

Whatever happens on the field for the Marlins this year is irrelevant — they have already admitted as much by holding tryouts for a male cheerleading squad. The only people who should care to follow this bunch — inside or outside of Miami — are fantasy league owners. For their sake, I'll provide a quick rundown of who to draft. Please don't bypass any of these hitters because you are afraid they don't have enough "protection in the lineup." That's always been a bullshit argument. Good hitters will get their numbers in any lineup; for all the times they get pitched around, it's more than made up for by the fact that they will be on the wrong end of many blowouts, when opposing pitchers have no reason to avoid them.

• Hanley Ramirez, SS. Since errors and defensive indifference don't matter in fantasy baseball, Ramirez is a top-five pick in any league. Take him before Jose Reyes. If you want to wait a little later and get Jimmy Rollins instead, that is perfectly understandable.
• Jeremy Hermida, RF. The former cover boy of Baseball America's Prospect Handbook absolutely raked in the second half last season, batting .340 with a .956 OPS. It was no fluke; he's always had the talent but couldn't stay healthy. He qualifies as a sleeper in mixed leagues. PECOTA has him down for a batting line of .284-.380-.485. Look for him to exceed those numbers.
• Dan Uggla, 2B. With the glove, he's got all the range of a fire hydrant. But he'll continue to mash with the bat. Look for a bounceback in batting average (he hit only .245 last year) and the same prodigious 30-home run power.
• Josh Willingham, LF. I once asked a scout where the Marlins should play "The Hammer," since he was originally brought up as a catcher. The scout's answer: "Who cares? The guy can hit!" You're beginning to see why the Marlins had the worst defense in baseball last year: Nobody can field. No matter. Willingham's bat can play on any fantasy team.
• Mike Jacobs, 1B. If he can stay healthy, he'll post respectable power numbers for a corner infielder. At 27, he should be entering his peak.
• Kevin Gregg/Matt Lindstrom, RPs. Gregg is a good bet for at least 20-plus saves. Again, don't get sucked into the "lack of a supporting cast" garbage. If anything, you want your fantasy closer to play for a bad team — when they do win, it'll be a close game. Look at Bryan Harvey on the '93 expansion Marlins: 45 saves for a 65-win team. Lindstrom throws in the 100s and has closer written all over him. (Florida stole him in a deal with the Mets. As Nelson Munce would say, "Ha-ha!")

  This is how the rest of the everyday lineup looks:

  CF: Commander Cody Ross/raw rookie Cameron Maybin
  C: Black hole
  3B: Black hole

  Those three spots will negate many of the positives coming from the fab five atop the lineup, most likely putting the Marlins in the bottom half of runs scored in the National League (Baseball Prospectus has them finishing 10th in the NL in runs).

  The starting rotation is an injury-riddled mess. Scott Olsen is a feast-or-famine lefty who will strike people out but kill your ratios, and he already has come down with a shoulder ailment this spring. Ricky Nolasco could be back from injury and would make decent waiver-wire fodder, as would the talented Rick Vandenhurk. Sergio Mitre and Anibal Sanchez are fighting the injury bug. Blue-chip prospect Andrew Miller is a great pickup in NL-only leagues and for owners who have a rookie fetish. (You know who you are, you damn pervs.)

  Unlike the 2006 Marlins, who flirted with the .500 mark fresh off the club's latest firesale, there isn't any mystery or romance with this bunch. They'll hit a little bit, won't play any defense and will churn-and-burn however many starting pitchers it takes to get through the season. The bullpen could be decent, but that hardly matters when nothing else falls into place.

  When it's over, the biggest positive that will be said about 2008 for the Florida Marlins is that the year is, in fact, over. It's all about 2011 for this club. Start the countdown.
  

Every weekday until the start of the season, a different writer will preview his/her team. We asked a gaggle of writers, from the Web, from print, from books, to tell us, in as many or as little words as they need, Where Their Team Stands. This is not meant to be factual, or dispassionate, or even logical: We just asked them to riff on why they love their team so much, or what their team means to them, or whatever.

Today: The Detroit Tigers. Your author is Ben Mathis-Lilley.

Ben Mathis-Lilley is an editor at New York magazine. His words are after the jump.

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In my mind, last year's parallel-universe Tigers season did not end with a fade into September irrelevance. Parallel Universe Gary Sheffield and Kenny Rogers didn't get hurt, while Parallel Jeremy Bonderman mastered his early-inning control problems and nagging elbow injury. Parallel rookie call-ups Andrew Miller and Cameron Maybin excelled, Parallel Brandon Inge's August wasn't one continuous strikeout, and Parallel Universe Curtis Granderson outdid his real-universe's 20/20/20/20 season (HR, 2B, 3B, and SB) with a 40/40/40/40/40 effort (that last 40, unfortunately, is for DUIs. For some reason, Parallel Granderson is a real a-hole.).

The Tigers weren't quite good enough last year in the here and now; fortunately, the offseason couldn't have been better no matter which universe it occurred in. Things did look grim, at least through my Baseball Prospectus-colored glasses, when trades for Jacques Jones and Edgar Renteria had the team heading toward a Giants-like squad of seasoned veterans savvily winning 75 games. (Just imagine if the Giants make the playoffs sometime. So much post-season experience! Some of it dating back to the 1930s! Joe Morgan will lose his goddamn mind!) The pursuit of Alex Rodriguez, in which the team was commonly referred to as a "dark horse suitor," went nowhere, probably because "dark horse suitor" sounds like a euphemism for "marauding rapist."

But then, lo, the Chosen Dombrowski delivered unto us Miguel Cabrera — a 25-year-old, saner version of Alex Rodriguez — along with a free bonus portion of Dontrelle Willis. In the glorious light of THAT deal, I even embraced the savvy seasoning Jones and Renteria would bring to the team. The only winter downer occurred when Joel Zumaya, the man famous for a Guitar Hero finger injury, hurt his shoulder moving storage boxes out of a family home in the path of a wildfire.

Despite that disappointment, Tiger fans' expectations are high right now. Tickets went on sale last Saturday, and I heard there were lines around the block at Comerica Park for at least five hours after the box office opened. And you know what that kind of popularity means: It's only a matter of time before all the longtime fans start getting priced out by bankers. Detroit being what it is, there aren't any indigenous bankers to do the job; they'll have to be shipped in from out of state, which means this could actually trigger the long-hoped-for Michigan economic revival. I suppose that would be a positive on the whole; in any case, though, the window is closing on seeing the team at a reasonable price.

So get in while the gettin' hasn't been "arbitraged"! The time is obviously now for this team anyway. The only things people are really worried about are the bullpen and the possibility that pre-season hubris tempts the gods to inflict a horrible catastrophic punishment. (And I guess Pudge Rodriguez's decline. But I gave up on that guy three years ago when he bailed on the season to spend time on his huge boat, and then selfishly failed to spend that time apprehending Somali pirates. To those whom much is given, much is required, Pudge.) As far as the bullpen goes, whatever. Being able to be critically discuss the weaknesses of your favorite teams is important. It lends a needed element of rationality to the act of rooting for strangers. So if that is the only weakness we have to discuss, I am all about spending July and August writing 2,000-word e-mails about Yorman Bazardo's BABIP. And on the matter of tempting fate.... I regret to say I'm NOT doing my part; in fact, I'm thinking of getting a Tigers Old English 'D' tattoo. Now, you might say, well, what if the Tigers go on another 20-year ass-sucking binge? To which I say, did I attend multiple Tigers games during a season when Randall Simon was named team MVP? I did.

So I can't see any way I won't continue to like the Tigers indefinitely except a scenario involving the following things: flying railroad spike, brain damage, altered personality, appearance in Oliver Sacks New Yorker story. Anyways, I'm either getting an Old English 'D' or a rendering of Nalfgar, the mythical Viking ship made from the fingernails of the dead. So isn't a 'D' the prudent choice here?

In summary, there is no way the Tigers won't sweep the World Series this year. But there is one bad thing that will certainly happen: Zumaya will hurt himself. So let's end with a poll: what's it going to be this time?

Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.

Readers, let your voice be heard!

Every weekday until the start of the season, a different writer will preview his/her team. We asked a gaggle of writers, from the Web, from print, from books, to tell us, in as many or as little words as they need, Where Their Team Stands. This is not meant to be factual, or dispassionate, or even logical: We just asked them to riff on why they love their team so much, or what their team means to them, or whatever.

Today: The Minnesota Twins. Your author is Aaron Gleeman.

Aaron Gleeman is a Senior Editor at Rotoworld.com, appears regularly on NBCSports.com's "Fantasy Fix" show and has been blogging about the Twins at AaronGleeman.com since 2002. His words are after the jump.

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In 2006 the Twins used an amazing second-half run to claim their fourth division title in five years, winning more than 95 games for the first time since Harmon Killebrew, Tony Oliva, Rod Carew, Jim Perry, Jim Kaat, and a 19-year-old, pre-"I just fucked it up" Bert Blyleven went 98-64 in 1970. Unfortunately, the 2006 Twins also followed in the 1970 version's footsteps by getting swept out of the playoffs and collapsing the next season.

In fact, being a Twins fan hasn't been a whole lot of fun since watching in amazement as they completed a historic comeback by overtaking the Tigers for the AL Central crown on the final afternoon of the 2006 season. Few changes were made to that team, but the Twins fell to 79-83 last year for their first losing season since 2000, finishing third in the division while being closer to the fifth-place Royals than the first-place Indians.

Before the season was even over general manager Terry Ryan announced his retirement after 13 years at the helm, abruptly ending an uninspired final act by turning the team over to long-time assistant Bill Smith. Supposed team leader Torii Hunter talked up his impending free agency to the media in each city, threw Joe Mauer under the bus by questioning his toughness and then signed a $90 million contract with the Angels.

Despite Johan Santana being under contract through 2008, trade rumors began to pick up steam in the second half, became impossible to ignore down the stretch, dragged on while dominating the first several months of the offseason, and then became a reality when the best pitcher in baseball was dealt to the Mets for a package of prospects and signed a $150 million extension.

Within the span of about 18 months the Twins went from improbably extending their reign atop the AL Central to being also-rans facing a dim outlook, capping off an 83-loss season by losing arguably the three men most responsible for the team's recent success in Ryan, Santana, and Hunter. Certainly by now Twins fans are used to losing key players over money and small-payroll teams are never very far away from rebuilding mode.

Still, this latest wave of misery seemed to sneak up and hit harder than usual. With the Indians and Tigers looking likely to duke it out at the top of the division and the Twins not even bothering to spend $25 million in unused payroll following the departures of Santana, Hunter, and Carlos Silva, the franchise has seemingly turned an eye toward becoming a contender again in time for the new outdoor ballpark opening in 2010.

In the meantime, let's get up to speed on some of the key players from a completely overlooked team that has a legitimate chance to surprise everyone by at least finishing above .500 (so says the guy who might kill himself if he has to blog about another 79-win season) ...

* Justin Morneau, First Baseman - Signed an $80 million contract extension this winter despite seeing his OPS drop 100 points from his MVP-winning 2006 campaign, and then celebrated by getting engaged to a "Minnesota girl."

* Joe Mauer, Catcher - Went from hitting an MLB-leading .347 in 2006 to batting just .293 last year, missed one-third of the season with injuries, and ceased dating former Miss USA Chelsea Cooley.

* Boof Bonser, Starter - Dropped 30 pounds during the offseason at the team's request after a disappointing year, yet still has a gut that hangs over his belt.

* Francisco Liriano, Starter - Missed the entire season following Tommy John elbow surgery and reportedly found the 30 pounds that Bonser lost (in muscle, of course), but could do a lot to ease the pain of losing Santana if healthy after going 12-3 with a 2.16 ERA as a rookie.

* Livan Hernandez, Starter - Signed to a one-year deal worth up to $7 million because the Twins love overpaying for veteran mediocrity and needed someone to make Bonser feel good about his body now that Matthew LeCroy is gone.

* Michael Cuddyer, Right Fielder - Like Morneau, he turned a big drop in OPS into a multi-year contract extension and then made a fan in me during the offseason by subtlety mocking Hunter's supposed leadership skills.

* Nick Punto, Utility Infielder - Turned back into a pumpkin last year, if pumpkins had a .562 OPS and refused to stop sliding head-long into first base unnecessarily. Despite being arguably the worst hitter in all of baseball last season, he'll make $2.4 million in 2008 while almost certainly getting far too many at-bats.

* Joe Nathan, Closer - An impending free agent and the next star to potentially exit Minnesota, he's quietly been one of baseball's elite closers since coming to the Twins along with Liriano and Bonser in the heist that sent A.J. Pierzynski to the Giants, going 19-8 with 160 saves and a 1.94 ERA in four seasons.

* Pat Neshek, Reliever - "Sideshow Pat" has turned a whacky delivery into a 2.68 career ERA, making him the best blogging relief pitcher of all time.

* Delmon Young, Left Fielder - Already has optimistic fans convinced that he's the next Frank Robinson despite a measly .408 slugging percentage last season, already has the local media convinced that he's a changed man despite the infamous bat-throwing incident and a season full of "issues" in Tampa Bay, and shouldn't be expecting any Christmas cards from Carl Crawford.

* Kevin Slowey, Starter - Scored a 1420 on his SAT, uses words like "grievous" when being interviewed by bloggers, and posted insanely good numbers in the minors (1.93 ERA, 342-to-48 strikeout-to-walk ratio), but still has to prove that he can thrive in the majors with a high-80s fastball.

* Jason Kubel, Designated Hitter - Rarely speaks and grows odd facial hair to go along with the constant presence of thousand-yard stare, but batted .303 with an .891 OPS in the second half and is perhaps the team's best bet for a breakout season.

* Mike Redmond, Catcher - Still one of the league's best backup catchers and still getting naked way too much.

* Carlos Gomez, Center Fielder - Chosen by the Twins as the centerpiece of the Santana trade, he has world-class speed, a questionable bat, and insanely high expectations.

* Scott Baker, Starter - A year ago the Twins demoted him to Triple-A and continuously spread the notion that he couldn't "keep the ball down," but he could be this season's Opening Day starter.

* Craig Monroe, Outfielder - Batted .219 with a .638 OPS last season and then somehow convinced the Twins to give him $3.8 million to be a fourth outfielder.

* Denard Span, Center Fielder - Several thousand quotes regarding his being "confident" about replacing Hunter in center field have already made their way into newspapers, but someone with a .678 OPS at Triple-A thinking that they're capable of replacing anyone in the majors is more like "delusional" than "confident."

* Glen Perkins, Starter - Has the league's lowest pounds-to-chins ratio and spent most of last season on the disabled list with an arm injury.

* Bill Smith, General Manager - Faced with making the biggest move of his career just a few months into his job, Smith overplayed his hand with Santana and got less than a full return, took a big gamble to acquire Young, and then showed the same love for veteran mediocrity that Ryan was famous for.

* Ron Gardenhire, Manager - Loves bowling, banjo-hitting utility infielders, relying on conventional wisdom, and using clichés, but it's tough to argue with a .550 career winning percentage despite some pretty sizable flaws.

* Keeley Hazell, Woman - Has absolutely nothing to do with the Twins (the Minnesota, baseball-playing type, anyway), but looks like this, could probably out-hit Punto, and seems like a good note to end on. Go ahead, complain.

Every weekday until the start of the season, a different writer will preview his/her team. We asked a gaggle of writers, from the Web, from print, from books, to tell us, in as many or as little words as they need, Where Their Team Stands. This is not meant to be factual, or dispassionate, or even logical: We just asked them to riff on why they love their team so much, or what their team means to them, or whatever.

Today: The Cincinnati Reds. Your author is Clay Travis.

Clay Travis writes the ClayNation column for CBS Sportsline. His words are after the jump.

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Let's be honest, the Cincinnati Reds are not going to win anything this year. They're going to lose. Probably by late July you'll realize that you have no real reason to go to the games. The last time the Reds were in the postseason was 1995. Yep, 13 long years ago. That was back when finding pictures of naked women required real work and cyber sex was still just two fat men from Troy, Michigan's wildest dream.

So if you go to Cincinnati you're going to need something to do to keep yourself occupied when the Reds aren't trying to scrape together their first winning reason since 2000. With that in mind I've alternated a painstaking analysis of the 2008 season with things you can do in Cincinnati when you're lamenting another losing season.

1. 2008 will be the first season since 1944 that the recently deceased Joe Nuxhall has not been associated with the Cincinnati Reds. Before I start taking shots at everyone, Joe Nuxhall was the reason I ended up a Reds fan. The Reds games were broadcast on our local Fox affiliate in Nashville and on my first trip to Cincinnati at the age of 8, I met Nuxhall in the lobby of the downtown Hyatt (where the Reds gift shop was.) Nuxhall was sitting a table wearing a polo shirt, plaid shorts and white socks up to his knees. After much prodding from my dad I shook Nuxhall's hand and said we enjoyed watching the Reds games he and Marty Brennaman called. Nuxhall looked at me and said, "Hell, son I didn't know we were on in Nashville." He'll be missed.

2. Visit Kentucky. At some point you'll be wondering around in downtown Cincinnati at 8 at night and think you're in Pyongyang and Kim Jong-Il has just been assassinated. Every cab driver you meet will sing the praises of night life in Kentucky. You'll go to Kentucky. This says volumes about Cincinnati.

3. Dusty Baker is now the Reds manager. Hooray. I've always felt what every major league city needs is an old man who still wears batting gloves and wristbands. Fortunately for Baker he'll likely have five right-handed starting pitchers to run into the ground by the All-Star break. Seriously, five starting right handers?

4. Take a riverboat cruise on the Ohio River. Because, trust me, there's much more to the Ohio River than the murky brown water you can see from the shores of Ohio and Kentucky. For instance you might get lucky and see Joe Morgan on the bow of the boat and get to hear him say, "Clay, did you know that Pete Rose told me that rivers such as the Ohio used to be really important to our nation's commerce? Because, you see, there were no interstates back in the 1800's. People couldn't even drive their cars anywhere. They kept them in barns...or sometimes large silos."

5. Franciso Cordero is the latest Reds savior having been recently signed as a closer to a 4 year, $46 million dollar deal. Using the same math that brought Ken Griffey, Jr. such big money success on the banks of the Ohio, this roughly equates to $4 million dollars per save. Or to make the analogy clearer, what Rob Dibble spent on transvestite hookers each year in the Nasty Boys era. Cordero is also listed at 32 and from the Dominican Republic. This means he's actually older than Jack Armstrong.

6. Pretend you are a native Cincinnatian and participate in a race riot.

7. Brandon Phillips, Ken Griffey, Jr. and Adam Dunn each hit 30 home runs last year. Phillips and Dunn are 26 and 28, respectively. This is very promising. And Philips at four years for $27 million is either going to turn out to be a tremendous steal for the Reds or one of those deals that other teams in the NL Central laugh about for the next half-decade. There will be no middle ground.

8. Go to the Underground Railroad Museum next door to the Reds Stadium. Just for fun keep asking Joe Morgan where to buy your ticket.

9. Joey Votto is rumored to be the next great thing at first base for the Reds. Formerly rumored great Reds first baseman Hal Morris thinks Joey Votto isn't smart enough to play basketball for the Bearcats. This is an ominous sign.

10. Head to the zoo. I hate to say it's an indictment of a city when the zoo is a top tourist attraction. But...it's an indictment of a city when the zoo is a top tourist attraction.

11. Ryan Freel has an imaginary voice in his head he calls Farney. This is the man who replaced Ken Griffey, Jr. in center field because "it gives us a stronger defense up the middle." Baseball stars die slow and cruel deaths.

12. Eat Skyline Chili. Or just stick your finger in your asshole and rub it on ramen noodles. Bingo, you've experienced Cincinnati's finest cuisine.

Every weekday until the start of the season, a different writer will preview his/her team. We asked a gaggle of writers, from the Web, from print, from books, to tell us, in as many or as little words as they need, Where Their Team Stands. This is not meant to be factual, or dispassionate, or even logical: We just asked them to riff on why they love their team so much, or what their team means to them, or whatever.

Today: The Houston Astros. Your author is Whitney Pastorek.

Whitney Pastorek is a senior writer for Entertainment Weekly magazine. Her words are after the jump.

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A brief anecdote, if you'll permit it:

On May 22 of last year, I drove to San Francisco to see the Astros play the Giants. The game itself was nothing to remember — my scorecard says it was a 4-2 loss, a three-run Giants rally in the 6th nailing our offense-averse coffin shut — but the dude sitting five rows in front of me on that sunny, cool day will be forever burned on my brain. He'd taken notice of my Biggio jersey, and his taunting started with something light and predictable: The Astros sucked, and could I please show him my tits.

I politely ate my garlic fries, and tried not to encourage him. But by the middle innings, the hundred or so patrons seated in our narrow, isolated splashdown gallery were paying more attention to that dude's hollering than to the game itself, because he was unrelenting. At some point in the 7th — or maybe the 8th, I was too irritated to write it down — Dude tired of insulting the current Astros lineup/my anatomy, and moved on to an impressive historical soliloquy involving Houston icons from eras past. "Mike Scott scuffs balls!" he yelled, over and over. "He's a ball-scuffer! Mike Scott scuffs balls!" Against my better judgment, I lashed out to defend my childhood in the only way I know how: "Your mom scuffs balls," I said. The gallery exploded. "Ooooooooooooh!" they cried. Dude sat down and shut up, finally, finally, finally. Somewhere in Texas, I like to think Mike Scott smiled.

I've never had a particularly good experience in San Francisco, honestly — the next day, I returned to the former PacBell to see the Astros lose again, this time by eight runs in front of an entire stadium full of asshats, the kinds of dudes who taunt Morgan Ensberg for kicks; I mean, who taunts Morgan Ensberg?? — but I tell this story to illustrate an important point w/r/t this season's Houston Astros. You see, for the first time, I think I understand the root of the Bay Area's hostility, and I'd like to personally apologize to all Giants fans for judging them without fully comprehending their angst. I now know just how hard it must have been to find your joy with that Barry Bonds guy running around, and I forgive you for lashing out. Because the exact same thing is happening to my Astros, and I think it's making me into a not-so-nice person.

In fact, I'd argue that hacking through the choking media jungle of an ongoing steroids investigation is worse for us Astros fans, because for so many seasons we've been able to happily mind our own business, situated both metaphorically and geographically below the radar. We spent a decade or so accumulating one of the best records in baseball, but still got treated like some mid-market franchise followed by trailer-dwelling methnecks. We drew over three million fans a year, but all anyone saw was the Bush family behind home plate. We made it to our first World Series after a miraculous late-season comeback, and all anyone cared to point out was the slightly racialist lack of African-Americans on the team. Our Hall of Famer second baseman retired, and all anyone knew about him was that he got plunked a lot. But the more I think about it, this debased existence was actually preferable to what's happening now. Now, I log on to my hometown newspaper's sports page, and the only pertinent information about the 2008 Houston Astros' baseball-playing roster is relegated to a side column entitled "Astros Notes." Astros NOTES??

So I'm not going to specifically address the hubris-riddled pitcher who's hanging around like Wooderson with a national press corps in tow. I'm going to save my rant about our too-loyal owner and his tendency to reject common sense for the next time I'm in a Texas sports bar. I shall not address the trade that brought a Mitchell Report-named shortstop to our city a suspiciously short 24 hours before said naming. And I will certainly not go off on a long tangent about congressmen who would rather poke about the checking accounts of athletes than worry about this little war project they started a while back, or sports columnists who waste valuable inches debating who did what to whom in the Billiard Room with Colonel Mustard and a syringe when there are 53 men in Kissimmee, Florida, warming up to play a new season of a wonderful sport that we all love, despite its faults.

Twenty-eight of the 53 players who reported to the Astros' spring training facility this year are new. If you are good at math, you will see that this is more than 50 percent of the roster. I don't know if that's a normal thing for other teams, but it is not often in the modern Astros era that we fans have been asked to throw ourselves behind a group of total strangers. For the majority of my adult life, Biggio and Bagwell have been there to keep us anchored, and it is really—I cannot emphasize this enough—REALLY bizarre to think that the Killer B's will no longer buzz at the Juice Box. The phrase "end of an era" was invented for times like these.

Add to my growing hostility a tremendous sense of confusion, for plenty of other, more recent constants are gone as well: our rotating bench of weak-hitting utility men with four-letter last names; our fragile, broken closer; the entire left side of our infield. Brad Ausmus is hanging in there, but not for long. Roy Oswalt and Lance Berkman are, I suspect, pretty damn lonely. Geoff Blum came back, so that's something. It never hurts to have a Jose Cruz on your team. But our starting rotation looks like it was cobbled together in the final round of a very drunken and not-particularly-astute fantasy draft, and, like, Darin Erstad? Where the hell did he come from? Am I looking at the Angels roster by mistake? Who are these people?

Here's the weird thing, though. If I put my optimism hat on for a second — and it ain't easy, but I'll do it for you, Deadspin readers — I can see a decent lineup. Roll with me now: Michael Bourn is an unproven entity, but he's got exciting potential and blazing speed. Kaz Matsui is coming off a strong season in Colorado, having at last shaken off the ghosts of his frustrating Mets career. Speaking of former Mets now using their powers for good, Ty Wigginton turned in a decent second half after joining us last July. Carlos Lee is solid as a (giant, lumbering) rock, and Berkman should bounce back if he can stop pulling weird muscles. Hunter Pence should continue along his superstar trajectory if he can stop walking into sliding glass doors. J.R. Towles shows promise behind the plate, and I've got faith that Ausmus will be a terrific mentor for both him and the awesomely-named Humberto Quintero in the months to come. (Just don't let Brad near batting practice.)

Finally, Miguel Tejada is, my god, MIGUEL TEJADA. I don't care if he's eating babies to keep his stats up, so long as they stay up.

Another important factor to consider: We had the best pitching in the league for a couple years there, but we couldn't hit our way out of a T-ball tournament. We've now flipped that equation. If Oswalt stays in character, and Backe comes back strong, and Wandy learns to pitch in cities other than Houston, and Woody Williams sells his soul to the devil, and Paulino continues to mature, and Shawn Chacon—well, never mind so much about him—I think they can maybe hold down the fort long enough for our offense to do some damage. And then they can hand things off to our shiny new bullpen, a bullpen that is guaranteed to work better than last year, when it wasn't so much "closer by committee" as it was "a bunch of pitchers whose reliability hovered somewhere between a drunk Lindsay Lohan and a 1962 Chevy Corvair." Now we've got an exciting setup guy, Oscar Villarreal, and an even more exciting (if totally batshit insane) closer, José Valverde, to bring us home. I don't know if they're Pujols-proof, per se, but I think the days of wanting to shoot myself in the 7th inning are over for the time being.

The 2008 Houston Astros, in other words and despite all the chaos it took to get us here, do not look that bad on paper. Of course, no one can get hurt — and I swear to god, Berkman, if you even think about playing flag football this summer, I will come down to Second Baptist and lock you in the bowling alley myself. But if everyone plays at the top of their potential, I see no reason why we can't put together a winning record with the tools at hand. Most prognosticators have us ranked third or fourth in the division, but if there's one word you can use to describe the NL Central, it's "sucky," and so as far as I'm concerned, anything is possible. I think we've got a real shot at pulling this off. Maybe. I called a couple of my sources. They do not think I am completely off the mark with this assessment. I think they're just as confused as I am.

So, um, let's go 'Stros! You may be getting decimated in Spring Training, but I'll still see you in San Diego for Opening Day. Hopefully by that time, the Steroidal Eye of Sauron will have turned its gaze elsewhere, and we can get back to the simple pleasures of hitting and catching and running and spitting and scratching. I'll be there every step of the way, even if I don't know the first thing about most of you guys. I like meeting new people! And when I make my annual pilgrimage to San Francisco this summer, Giants fans, garlic fries are on me. I will not show you my tits, but garlic fries are on me.

Every weekday until the start of the season, a different writer will preview his/her team. We asked a gaggle of writers, from the Web, from print, from books, to tell us, in as many or as little words as they need, Where Their Team Stands. This is not meant to be factual, or dispassionate, or even logical: We just asked them to riff on why they love their team so much, or what their team means to them, or whatever.

Today: The Seattle Mariners. Your author is Seth Kolloen.

Seth Kolloen is Executive Editor of Sports Northwest Magazine and blogs at EnjoyTheEnjoyment.com. As a boy he slept with a poster of Jim Presley above his bed, which may explain his eventual inability to hit curveballs.

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Put away your Goonies lunchbox and your Trapper Keeper. It's algebra time.

Review this equation:

2008 Mariners = 2007 Mariners - (Jeff Weaver) - (Horacio Ramirez) + (Erik Bedard) + (Carlos Silva).

Notice that on the right side of the equation, we have four constants. Jeff Weaver and Horacio Ramirez constantly suck. They get subtracted from the Mariner roster. Cy-Young candidate Erik Bedard and innings-chomper Carlos Silva take their places.

This is not Fermat's Last Theorem, people. The 2008 Mariners, who replace two shitty starting pitchers with two good ones, will be better than the 2007 Mariners.

Question is — and it's a question Mariner fans have been arguing all offseason — were the 2007 Mariners any good?

Last year's standings show that the 2007 M's won 88 games and finished six games back of the Angels. Measuring by wins and losses, the 2007 M's were pennant contenders.

But the raw numbers tell a different story: The 2007 Mariners allowed more runs (813) than they scored (794). The data says the M's were a sub-.500 team.

Hence the argument. You can probably already envision the battle lines.

On one side, the traditional baseball men (a.k.a. stuffed shirts, a.k.a. troglodytes, a.k.a. Joe Morgan), in whose minds the W/L record reigns preeminent.

On the other, the statheads (a.k.a. stat nerds, a.k.a. Moneyball types, a.k.a. my cousin Levi), who believe their calculators.

It's an important question. If the '07 Mariners stunk, you wouldn't want to, say, trade four of your best prospects to Baltimore for a starting pitcher who's 19 months away from free agency. Such a deal only makes sense if you think you've got a contending team that needs a nudge to put them over the top.

The Mariner front office, being traditional baseball men, looked at those 88 wins and made the deal.

Erik Bedard, comes to the Mariners in exchange for stud CF prospect Adam Jones, who falls somewhere between Jim Edmonds and Preston Wilson on the career possibilities chart, bullpen stalwart George Sherrill, and three minor league pitchers who are supposedly hot shit.

Bedard, who was 3-0 with a 2.07 ERA in five starts against the Yankees and Red Sox last year, will pair with Felix Hernandez to give the M's the best one-two punch in the American League.

Silva, Jarrod Washburn and Miguel Batista round out the rotation. (Each of them, in one of the great economic injustices of our time, will make more than Bedard and Hernandez combined. I think John Edwards may have used this in a campaign speech. "Yesterday, while eating corned beef hash at a local diner, I met Felix Hernandez, a legal immigrant from Venezuela, who makes 1/20th the salary of his less-qualified co-worker.")

Along with the solid rotation, the M's have 6-foot-6 J.J. Putz and his hellacious splitter in the bullpen. You probably only know Putz from his shaky appearance in last year's All-Star Game (though he would've had a 1-2-3 inning if Baltimore's rangeless Brian Roberts could've managed to field a routine groundball in time to throw out noted speed merchant Dmitri Young. Sorry, I digress. But still, fuck you Brian Roberts). F-Rod bailed Putz out in that game, but the goateed Michiganiteian needed no help in the regular season, saving 40 games and blowing only two. Let's leave it at this: Putz had a 1.38 ERA last year.

The pitching staff could be the best in baseball. But, as my late grandfather would've said, a good pitching staff and $13.76 will get you a 3 shot venti soy hazelnut vanilla cinnamon white mocha with extra white mocha and caramel at Starbucks. To win, the M's need runs.

The nine men the Mariners will rely upon to produce 2008 offense fall into three neat categories. I'll give each category a nautically themed name because I hate myself.

1) The Ironclads: CF Ichiro, C Kenji Johjima, 3B Adrian Beltre. Each has been predictably steady offensive contributors the last few years. We fans hold out hope that Beltre — who's only 28 — will repeat his mega-boffo performance of 2004. But we'll all be happy with 25 homers and his Gold Glove defense.

2) The Bathyscaphes: SS Yuniesky Betancourt, 2B Jose Lopez. You're probably as likely to have heard of a bathyscaphe (it's a deep-sea diving vessel) as you are to have heard of the M's keystone combination. That'll change if either matches their promise. Each have shown signs of superior offensive prowess — Lopez made the '06 All-Star team after posting 58 ribbies before the break, and Betancourt had only one less double than Derek Jeter last year. If either of these guys post a breakout year, the M's could win 100 games.

3) The Steamboats: 1B Richie Sexson, LF Raul Ibanez, DH Jose Vidro, RF Brad Wilkerson. The M's front office knows these players are verging on obsolescence, but they're hoping for one final run up Pennant Race River. Sexson may be the key to the M's season. After consecutive 30-homer seasons for last place Mariner teams, Sexson hit .205 last year, just when the M's actually needed him. Still, at age 33, it hardly seems likely that Sexson is finished. The M's will pay him $14 million this year; if he can earn half of that, they'll rejoice.

By the end of September, the argument will be settled. If the M's get back to the postseason, we'll know the Joe Morgans were correct. If they finish out of the race, or regress, it'll be my cousin Levi saying I told you so.

Every weekday until the start of the season, a different writer will preview his/her team. We asked a gaggle of writers, from the Web, from print, from books, to tell us, in as many or as little words as they need, Where Their Team Stands. This is not meant to be factual, or dispassionate, or even logical: We just asked them to riff on why they love their team so much, or what their team means to them, or whatever.

Today: The Los Angeles Dodgers. Your author is Lion In Oil's Fun Sheriff.

Lion In Oil is written by the Fun Sheriff, and is devoted to sports, tomfoolery and madness - with a special affinity for the absurd. His words are after the jump.

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Los Angeles is a city of image, makeovers and second chances. You can always reinvent yourself here - there are plenty of plastic surgeons to help fix whatever problems you might have, real or imagined. And while for much of the Dodgers' time in LA they have been able to defy the Los Angeles stereotypes, since Tommy Lasorda's retirement in 1996 it's been a different tale. It's been a procession of managers (6) and general managers (6), and almost too many players to count.

Each year the team has declared that this is the squad to win team's second playoff game since 1988 and that this is the team to put the team back on track where it truly belongs. This year is no different. There are fresh faces as well as familiar ones, all with something to prove. Joe Torre is the new manager and is looking to put a successful finishing touch to the third act that is his career. Andruw Jones will be patrolling center field, and he'll surely use this season as a statement to show what kind of contract he should have gotten in the off-season. And the young kids will be out to prove that they were worth holding on to.

So while we've heard it all before, perhaps this truly is the year it all comes together. It's certainly a possibility - the table is set for a potentially amazing year. They have the veteran leadership. Between Jeff Kent, Derek Lowe, Rafael Furcal, Jason Schmidt and Jones there surely isn't anything they haven't seen before. They're all playoff tested. And could there be a steadier hand to guide the team than Torre? There must be a formula to determine the number of wins won by a team just by the positive mental influence a proven, winning manager brings. Whatever that number might be, the Dodgers will gain it.

Yet complimented to the veterans are the Dodgers' young studs. When the veterans are sloshing through the dog days of summer, the youth movement can pick them up. Their youthful exuberance can be counted upon for an outfield assist, an extra base, or a steal. They've infiltrated the lineup, and they're here. Their time is now. It's time to take the reigns off of James Loney, Matt Kemp, Jonathan Broxton and Russell Martin and let them play.

So in this Dodgers season preview I can only offer a prediction as such: I don't know. Coming off a season where the Rockies won 14 out of 15, making it to the World Series and the Mets blew a 7 game lead with 17 games to go, anything is possible. So maybe this is the year it all comes together. Maybe young meshes with old, creating an unstoppable force. Maybe Jason Schmidt comes back healthy and Nomar Garciaparra regains his old form. Maybe.

I hope so, of course. But more than any one player, I love the team - the Dodgers. No matter what happens, you can find me at some point this summer up in the Reserved section, eating an All-Beef Dodger Dog, and enjoying the game amidst the beautiful surroundings. Win or lose, there's no place I'd rather be.

Every weekday until the start of the season, a different writer will preview his/her team. We asked a gaggle of writers, from the Web, from print, from books, to tell us, in as many or as little words as they need, Where Their Team Stands. This is not meant to be factual, or dispassionate, or even logical: We just asked them to riff on why they love their team so much, or what their team means to them, or whatever.

Today: The Colorado Rockies. Your author is Mark T.R. Donohue.

Mark T.R. Donohue is a freelance writer, serial blogger, and member in good standing of the Baseball Toaster cartel. He lives in Boulder, Col. His words are after the jump.

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How do you top 2007, if you're the Colorado Rockies? It can't be done! At the end of the season last year, Colorado ran off an utterly ludicrous fourteen wins in fifteen games, including a thirteen-inning 9-8 win over the Padres in a one-game wild card tiebreaker, to make the playoffs for the first time since the strike-shortened 1995 season and only the second time ever. The otherworldly hot streak continued through the National League playoffs, in which Colorado dropped nary a game to Philadelphia nor Arizona, and stopped only when the Rockies met reality — and a much, much better team — on a grand stage in the franchise's first World Series appearance. That didn't go as well.

The good news for 2008 is that the Rockies weren't a .500 team that got lucky last year. Up until mid-September they had gotten some bad breaks; we few true believers chose to view their white-hot finish as an overdue correction. Even supposing that the
Rockies' opponents down the stretch were laying over for them and the stats don't mean what they think we do, the Rockies' pitching rotation turned over 60% of its players in quick succession shortly after the All-Star break. Ubaldo Jimenez and Franklin Morales, the two call-ups that made up the bulk of those innings lost due to injuries to Rodrigo Lopez, Jason Hirsh and Aaron Cook, still have less than a year of major-league experience between them. They should be better this year.

Everyone but second baseman Kazuo Matsui returns to a lineup that's long on pre-peak players; second-year shortstop Troy Tulowitzki is poised to bring his hitting numbers up to the level of his already unparalleled defense. The one nasty storm cloud on the Rockies' horizon, the impending free agency of outfielder and offensive linchpin Matt Holliday, has been at the very least pushed further away by the two-year deal Holliday signed this winter.
Besides Holliday, there are hardly any key Rockies players that won't be around for at least three more seasons, including Tulowitzki, ace Jeff Francis, closer Manny Corpas and outfielder Brad Hawpe. One of the few positions that GM Dan O'Dowd hasn't found a solution for in the draft is catcher; the Rockies caught a break when the Mets backed away from a deal they'd worked out with incumbent Colorado catcher Yorvit Torrealba. O'Dowd managed to get Torrealba back at the right price; that was the highlight of a very quiet offseason that also brought in some bullpen help (Luis Vizcaino, Jose Capellan), a few guys to compete for the second base job (Matt Kata and Marcus Giles, though rookie Jayson Nix will get some looks too), and a bunch of veteran starters to provide insurance for the boatload of injuries the oxygen-deprived Rockies rotation seems to suffer every year (including but not limited to Josh Towers, Kip Wells and Victor Zambrano).

Colorado is probably going to be a stronger team than they were last season, and yet they will likely win fewer games. Los Angeles and Arizona have improved, and the Rockies more than likely won't have the same luck they had in interleague play '07 (10-8, the only team in the NL with double-digit wins and the only one more than a game over .500). The hope here is that even if a whole season hanging around in contention ends in disappointment, the Rockies and the city of Denver get the one thing they didn't get last year — being taken seriously. The magical September '07 run did a lot to shake Denver out of the indifferent attitude it's had towards baseball and the Rockies since the late 90's, but it takes more than one postseason to build a baseball fan. Baseball is about the long haul and until fans in the mountains are checking box scores with the same vigilance in May as they were last September, the Colorado Rockies remain just another ill-justified expansion team with ugly uniform colors.

Every weekday until the start of the season, a different writer will preview his/her team. We asked a gaggle of writers, from the Web, from print, from books, to tell us, in as many or as little words as they need, Where Their Team Stands. This is not meant to be factual, or dispassionate, or even logical: We just asked them to riff on why they love their team so much, or what their team means to them, or whatever.

Today: The Oakland A's. Your author is Tyler Bleszinski.

Tyler Bleszinski is the editor of Athletics Nation. His words are after the jump.

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I once interviewed Billy Beane and he compared the Oakland A's to the 80s Latin pop sensation Menudo. He said, "It is like Menudo, where guys reach a certain age and are kicked out of the band. And they go on to be Ricky Martins somewhere else."

That was in 2006 when he said this. Never has this been truer than the offseason in 2007-2008. Beane decided to basically jettison emerging stars in Nick Swisher and Danny Haren. But he did so in hoping that this next version of Menudo would be bigger than anything he had previously constructed.

2007 was a lost season for the Oakland Athletics, but largely because they lost more players to injury than in any season in Oakland Athletics history. In fact, the 54 players used during 2007 was the second highest number in franchise history in one season. Only the 1915 Philadelphia Athletics used more players in one season. They used 56 players.

That issue, and the fact that many of the players coming back to the A's this year had injury histories, prompted Billy Beane to accelerate a rebuilding plan for the green and gold. Three key components to the A's are coming off major surgeries. And one has been a nonentity for the A's for two seasons now. Eric Chavez had surgery on his back and shoulder this offseason. Justin Duchscherer and Chad Gaudin both had hip surgery. And Rich Harden is, well, he resides in the Guinness Book of World Records under "World's Largest Question Mark."

That led to Beane selling some of the teams' best assets in favor of prospects who replenished the A's system but won't necessarily make an appearance in 2008. Nick Swisher, Danny Haren and super-sub Marco Scutaro were all traded to the White Sox, Diamondbacks and Blue Jays respectively. Mark Kotsay was also moved as well in a deal to Atlanta.

The A's got back a bunch of players who are thought to be very high-upside prospects. In 2008, they will probably mix a few of the players they acquired. Dana Eveland is likely to be with the team and possibly Ryan Sweeney. Carlos Gonzalez has a chance to be a part of the team as soon as opening day if he can make a splash in spring training. And Brett Anderson could also see some time with the team this year.

But for the most part, the A's will be going with basically what's left over on their roster in 2008. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, because Beane kick started the extreme makeover mid-season last year. Gone was light-hitting and expensive catcher Jason Kendall in favor of youngster Kurt Suzuki. Gone was oft-injured Milton Bradley in favor of Travis Buck. Dan Johnson wound up essentially being pushed aside for phenom Daric Barton. Mike Piazza got injured and wound up being replaced at DH by Jack Cust. Cust, Suzuki, Buck and Barton are going to be the foundation of an offense that has the potential to be significantly better than 2007. If Steve Austin, ahem, I mean Eric Chavez finally got what has ailed him for several seasons fixed, he could also be a key to the offense actually having some life this season after several years of a sludge-like offense. If Gonzalez lives up to expectations and becomes a regular, then the A's should have the makings of a pretty damn good offense over the next few seasons. They also picked up some experience in Mike Sweeney recently so he should be a good right-handed stick if he can manage to somehow avoid the DL.

The biggest question marks with the A's this season will be with the rotation.

Joe Blanton may or may not start the year with the team. His name is making the rounds on the rumor circuit right now, and it wouldn't be surprising to see him dealt for a package similar to what the A's got for Swisher. Beane doesn't really do rebuilding in a half-assed fashion, so seeing Blanton traded for a package of young players wouldn't shock anyone.

The aforementioned Justin Duchscherer will be making the transition from bullpen to starter, which shouldn't be a big transition for him because he was an excellent starter in the minors before becoming one of baseball's best set-up men. The question becomes, can he stay healthy pitching all those innings after hip surgery in the offseason? He's also had a myriad of back issues.

Chad Gaudin was a huge surprise last season making a similar transition. He was dominant in the first couple of months in the season only to fall off a cliff later in the year which was likely the result of his injury. Beane once told me that he felt like Gaudin had the best arm in the organization behind Rich Harden. And he's still young. He'll turn 25 the day before the season opens in Japan against the Red Sox.

Harden is the eternal question mark. He recently went on the record saying that he felt as though his injury issues were exacerbated by someone in the A's organization that basically encouraging him to try and pitch when he wasn't fully healthy. Of course, he didn't mention whom that person was. Harden allegedly followed his own rehab path this past offseason and claims that he is 100 percent healthy for the first time in several years. Whether that translates to more than 10 starts this year is anyone's guess. But obviously his presence makes the A's a much more formidable team in the scope of the AL West.

The fifth spot in the rotation is up for grabs. Dan Meyer, Lenny DiNardo, Dana Eveland, Kirk Saarloos and a bunch of other guys who've made cameos in the spot before. My bet is that Eveland will emerge as the fifth starter.

As for the bullpen, it actually shapes up pretty nicely with Andrew Brown (came over in the Bradley trade), Alan Embree, Huston Street and, believe it or not, former A's closer Keith Foulke is back in the mix. The A's have enough solid arms in the pen along with whatever pitchers don't make it as the fifth starter to be a decent collection of relief. It won't be the best pen in baseball, but it looks more solid than people think. Especially if Foulke is truly healthy and back in form the A's will essentially have three pitchers who have the ability to close games (Embree showed he is up for the task last season when Street was out for an extended time).

The 2008 A's will feature a lot of young and unproven players like Buck, Barton, Chris Denorfia (who came over in a deal and was injured for the year), Suzuki, Eveland and Gonzalez. And Beane is probably not done dealing. Street and Blanton could also be dealt to set the team up for future dominance and its move to Fremont, California.

There are so many unknown quantities for the A's. Will Harden be healthy for a full season and if he is, does that make him really attractive trade bait as well? Will Blanton and Street be dealt and if they are, do the A's get some players who could help immediately? Will the A's young guns like Buck and Barton take the leap forward most expect? Will Duchscherer, Chavez and Gaudin be fully healthy? And will the A's continue to have to use the DL more than any other team in baseball?

That's a lot of questions that need positive answers in order for the A's to be anything other than AL West cellar dwellers in 2008. But stranger things have happened. The best thing about the A's is that with all the moves that Beane has made, you just know that the team will rise to the top of the MLB again in the very near future and this time, it appears like the team will be great for a very long time. Fortunately, the same can't be said about Ricky Martin and the rest of Menudo.