There’s less than two weeks to go before spring training is a distant memory, replaced by Opening Day and the start of the 2014 MLB season.
While fans, players, writers, prognosticators, hot dog vendors and everyone else associated with the game loves to say that spring training statistics and numbers are largely meaningless, they do provide a way to analyze how individual players are performing—just like they do during the regular season.
Sure, the games and stats don’t actually count, but they go a long way toward helping managers decide on the 25 players that will break camp with their respective teams and head into the grind of the regular season, hoping to be the last team standing in October.
As is the case with anything in life, those results are full of disappointments and pleasant surprises. In some cases, the surprise and the disappointment are one and the same.
The possibilities are endless. It could be a veteran returning to relevance, a youngster making his mark or an injured star returning to action. Perhaps it’s a group of players that are overperforming—or underperforming—this spring. Or, in some cases, maybe it’s something that happens away from the field of play.
With that said, let’s take a stroll around each of the 30 spring training camps and see what each team’s biggest surprise and its biggest disappointment have been during spring training in 2014.
*All spring training statistics courtesy of MLB.com.
*All other statistics courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com.