Pitching and defense might win championships, but a roster full of Cy Young Award winners and Gold Glove defenders isn’t going to find much success if its players can’t put a few runs on the board.

Outscoring your competition is how the game is ultimately won, after all.

While offense continues to trend downward, as Jonathan Judge of The Hardball Times noted last year, baseball still has plenty of formidable lineups for opposing pitchers to worry about.

Much has been written during the offseason and as spring training has gotten underway about the potential of lineups like those found in Baltimore, Boston, Colorado, Detroit, Los Angeles (both teams), Oakland, San Diego, Seattle and Toronto, among others.

But in highlighting what many consider to be the best of the best, a handful of clubs get lost in the shuffle. That’s a shame, for these clubs have some pretty formidable lineups of their own that, for one reason or another, nobody’s really talking about. Not yet, at least.

But come season’s end, these five teams will have given baseball fans plenty to discuss.

 

Note: These rankings are subjective and based entirely on this writer’s opinion. Lineups are ranked in order of least underrated to most underrated.

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