so, with spring training pretty much here for the most part (can you ever really tell when it actually starts?) there are all the obvious questions: will the rotation be healthy? will the young players come around? will the veterans blah blah blah…at this point, who knows and who cares? obviously most would look at this team and conclude without much effort that the royals really don't need to worry about silly things like contending. which is probably right. but, you never know – every season there are surprises. sound predictions go down the tubes and easy predictions turn out to be incredibly wrong.

as is seemingly both sound and easy, most people are piling on the royals once again. picking them last, continuing to kick the farm system around, shaking their heads at the moves made by the organization. strangely, columnist and stat guys still aren't getting paid based on their predictions. meaning they don't really have to worry about getting just about everything wrong. which is good, cause it'd be a shame to have guys who make a living being professional bandwagon hoppers…err, "fans of the game", have to live off their belly fat for a while. you can look at the numbers all you want and tease them every which way and have no idea what you're talking about. you can be a professional baseball guy who's been around the game for 35 years and have just as much idea what's gonna happen as some average guy sitting in his office wasting time writing about his favorite team on the company's dime.

which is pretty much what happens. it's amazing how often sports guys immediately see the "talent" and "solid construction" of a team that happens to be winning. pre-season predictions are worth nothing more than their ability to fill that gap of time sports fans long to waste before their season actually starts. just don't put any stock into them.

amazing how most of the teams that won last year are being picked to win again this year, isn't it? of course there's that whole money-big market-ridiculous disparity in media coverage thing that makes it a lot easier to guess which teams will be winners. but that's something for us to boot around the rest of the season. I just can't stand to read any predictions about this year – mostly because it makes me mad there are people that actually get paid to write whatever garbage they feel like making up.

I would like one of those gigs.

what's worse is that we're only days away from spring training and this season is already dragging. I think the only thing that'll help it heat up is when the weather stops with this cold nonsense. that, or a nice Fun House pizza and a few bottles of stout..

draggingly,

Joe Blow