Home MLB Web pick of the week: MLB.com’s Team guides

Web pick of the week: MLB.com’s Team guides

by Matt Smith

Web-PickThe MLB Spring Training camps have opened and that’s enough to make any baseball fan dance with joy.  Players are getting to know their new teammates and managers are formulating plans for who will be on their 25-man roster for opening day.  Us fans are looking on, lapping up the photos and interviews, thinking about possible batting lineups and starting rotations while trying to work out how player ‘X’ ended up with team ‘Y’ without you realising it.

Thankfully, MLB.com has put together a series of features designed to prepare fans for the season ahead. 

In previous years they have published an ‘Around the Horn’ feature in which each team’s MLB.com beat writer has written about a different position each week.  That was useful but it didn’t provide a great overall preview of each team once Spring Training came around because rosters were liable to have changed as the series progressed.  They’ve abandoned the Around the Horn feature this year, although they’ve stuck with the overall concept of devising standard column formats and then asking each beat writer to submit pieces for their team.  The three features published so far are: ‘A look ahead’, ‘Previews’ and ‘Quick Hits’.

My favourite is the ‘Quick hits’ feature.  This poses and answers three key questions about the respective team, lists their projected starting line-up, rotation and main bullpen pitchers, and then provides a decent amount of detail on the team’s main prospects and the players who have joined, left, or are rebounding from injury or poor performances in 2009.  If you want a quick and easy way to catch up on all of the thirty MLB teams, or if you are new to the sport, they are an excellent resource.

There isn’t a decent ‘home page’ to link to (as far as I can tell), so instead I’ll direct you to the Baltimore Orioles’ ‘Quick Hits’ page from which you can then look at all of the rest using the drop-down list.

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