Kuzul

Let me guess: The 2012 MLB season is about to begin in earnest, and you're still scrounging around for starting pitching to fill out your fantasy baseball team.First of all, what were you doing during your draft? Did you sleep through it? Did the dog eat your homework?Secondly, everything's going to be OK. Just as you missed out on selecting the best players in your draft, so too did these once-and-former studs find themselves (and their average draft position) buried by arm injuries.Luckily for you, they should all be well within reach and ready to do you proud well beyond Opening Day. Stephen StrasburgSpeaking of Opening Day, Stephen Strasburg will be back on the mound for the Washington Nationals when they start their presumably resurgent season against the Chicago Cubs, albeit to more real fanfare than that in the fantasy world.There's certainly reason for prospective fantasy owners to be concerned about ...

Picking out quality starting pitching for your fantasy baseball team can be a fickle enterprise, given how difficult it is to project how well any given MLB hurler will fare from year to year.Not to mention how few and far between aces tend to be.Now, I could easily tell you to go out and drop your auction dollars/draft picks on guys like Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, Jered Weaver and James Shields, but those guys are stuck in tough divisions amidst offenses that could blast them on any given night.Instead, stick with these four guys, who should be comfortable cranking up the heat—and racking up quality starts—against weak competition this season. Justin Verlander, Detroit TigersYeah, okay, so maybe recommending that you pick up the reigning American League Cy Young Award winner and MVP isn't much of a stretch, especially since he led the majors in quality starts with 28.And sure, there's a ...

If there's anything the New York Yankees don't need right now, it's another player like David Ortiz.And if there's one team on which Ortiz's talents would be squandered, it's the Yankees.See where I'm going with this?After a long and successful tenure with the Boston Red Sox, Big Papi may be on the way out of Beantown as a free agent, with some "baseball insiders" suggesting he may cross over to the (other) Dark Side to suit up in pinstripes.The only issues? He and the Yankees simply don't need each other. New York's roster is already loaded with old, overpaid stars of yesteryear who will need at-bats at the DH spot, where Ortiz, a career professional hitter and a mediocre fielder at best, does the bulk of his damage.The assumption around Yankee Stadium is that Jorge Posada, the longtime catcher who spent most of the 2011 season "DHing," will retire, though that ...

Detroit Tigers ace Justin Verlander has had, by all accounts, a remarkable season. With the Triple Crown of American League pitching all but sewn up, Verlander has virtually guaranteed to  himself the AL Cy Young Award in a landslide. He is, without a shadow of a doubt, the most outstanding pitcher in the American League this season. But is he the Most Valuable Player? Furthermore, should a starting pitcher even be considered for the MVP, much less find himself in position to win it? And how, if at all, would those arguments change if baseball had a more legitimate counterbalance to the Cy Young, a Most Outstanding Hitter award?  Don't Know Much About History  Verlander’s candidacy has rekindled the decades-long debate about pitchers as MVPs. As the argument for him goes, Verlander is the sort of dominant pitcher who stops losing streaks cold in their tracks.His 24 wins, or at ...

It's nearly impossible to pin down even just a few reasons for the struggles of the Los Angeles Dodgers this season, much less a single problem that has Don Mattingly's club hanging so tenuously above the cellar of the National League West.Some may point to the long-running fiasco known otherwise as the divorce proceedings between owners Frank and Jamie McCourt, with the involvement of MLB commissioner and noted administrative sloth Bud Selig taking his sweet time to do anything of consequence.Others may look to problems on the field, where the Blue Crew is average or below average in just about every important statistical category.Even with stellar everyday play from Matt Kemp and Andre Ethier coupled with the continued improvement of staff ace Clayton Kershaw, Don Mattingly's club still can't seem to come through in the clutch.All of that still leaves out consideration of injuries and the bullpen—two things that seemingly ...

More than anything else, what makes baseball America's pastime is its rich history and tradition of legendary names, all bound together across decades by a beautiful game.That same history also lends itself to all manner of debate, from whether there will ever be another 300-game winner to what the standing of alleged steroid users like Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire and Manny Ramirez should be included in the annals of Cooperstown, given how many great players in past eras got by, more or less, on their given talents alone.When it comes to determining the "best" or the "greatest" in a particular category, the debate tends to get more heated, even if the terms of the discussion are more vague. One such debate, which doesn't get as much love as that of "best hitter" or "most dominant pitcher", is that of smartest hitter.What makes a hitter smart, you ask?It's tough to define it ...

The 2010 MLB season was arguably the most surprising of any in recent memory. From the bevy of no-hitters to the San Francisco Giants and the Texas Rangers meeting in the World Series, there was no shortage of outcomes that would have left fans scratching their heads had they been told how the season would turn out beforehand.No baseball story line from 2010 garnered more intrigue, however, than that of Toronto Blue Jays third baseman Jose Bautista.The thirty-year-old journeyman from the Dominican Republic spent six years bouncing around the majors before landing a full-time gig in Toronto, which he promptly parlayed into a monstrous 54-homer, 124-RBI season.Talk about a breakout performance!Of course, with Bautista's story written into the history books, baseball fans are now left to wonder who will be the next no-name player to burst on to the scene.As such, here are 10 players who, in some way or ...

Money makes the world go 'round, even (and especially) in Major League Baseball.If nothing else, money makes baseball's off-season much more interesting, with teams handing out absurdly large contracts left and right, to the likes of Carl Crawford, Jayson Werth and Cliff Lee.The teams that contend year after year–the New York Yankees, the Boston Red Sox and the Philadelphia Phillies, among others—are among the biggest spenders, while those that always struggle or only occasionally have good seasons—the Pittsburgh Pirates, the San Diego Padres and the Oakland A's, to name a few, spend only a fraction of what the former teams do on their payrolls.Of course, more money doesn't necessarily result in more wins; just ask the New York Mets, the Chicago Cubs and the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.With that in mind, the following list is a ranking of all 30 MLB teams based on how much money each spent ...

New Year's Day is nearly upon us, and perhaps no MLB team is looking forward to a fresh start in 2011 more than the Los Angeles Dodgers.From the ugly proceedings of the McCourt divorce to the departure of Manny Ramirez to the retirement of Joe Torre, the Dodgers had their fair share of pitfalls in a year that saw them fail to capture a third consecutive NL West division title.But it wasn't all bad for the Boys in Blue. The long-awaited emergence of young stars like Andre Ethier, Clayton Kershaw and Chad Billingsley gave general manager Ned Colletti plenty of reason to hope that his team will see better days sooner rather than later.That being said, let's have a look at some of the most notable ups and downs for the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2010.Begin Slideshow

Spring training may still be two months away, but the cold winter months have had little success subduing MLB's offseason hot stove.The fall of 2010 has been an eventful one in the baseball world, even with the free agent class being as thin as it is.As always, there are some teams that have added tremendously to their chances of World Series title contention in 2011, and plenty more that have been set back further, whether by their own missteps or by the unexpected choices of those they pursued (cough...Cliff Lee...cough).With the likes of Adrian Beltre and Vladimir Guerrero still on the market, the hot stove might very well stay that way right up until Opening Day at the end of March 2011.With that in mind, here's a mid-December look at the offseason's biggest winners and losers thus far.Begin Slideshow