In a big-picture sense, spring training doesn’t mean anything. In fact, here’s a helpful analogy: Spring training is to meaningful baseball what Adam Dunn’s career ERA is to meaningful pitching.
But on an individual level…OK, fine. That’s where spring training can actually matter. Though most players come into spring training simply looking to get ready for the upcoming season, others come needing to prove something.
When spring training for 2015 starts up next month, there will be plenty of those types of players worth monitoring. Even when you get past all the young players and career part-timers vying for jobs, you have the guys locked in position battles and guys coming off injury-wrecked and/or horribly unproductive years.
But we’re going to focus on just 10 guys who, for a variety of reasons, have the most to prove in spring training. And because they must be ranked, we’ll rank them in order of how big the spotlight on them is going to be.
Note: Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs unless otherwise noted/linked.