With Prince Fielder gone and Ryan Braun likely to be suspended for the first 50 games of the regular season, the Brewers need to get creative to squeeze maximum value out of their remaining position players. Fortunately, manager Ron Roenicke is showing a willingness to do so.

On Tuesday, Roenicke confirmed that he intends to have right fielder Corey Hart work out at first base this spring. If Hart is capable of handling occasional starts at Fielder’s old position, his newfound versatility would allow Roenicke to tweak the lineup from day to day, optimizing matchups both offensively and in the field.

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He’s a friend of a friend of a relative that I see at family gatherings sometimes, an ex-teacher who is excessively bitter about what seem to me to be his own failings. On holidays, he plays vulture at the table. With dirt caked under his nails, he digs at the serving bowls with his fingers. If he’s before you in the serving order, you will wind up going hungry because he’s fouled the horn of plenty.

When he’s not picking at the food, he picks at his former students. In the greatest statistical anomaly in the history of man, every student he ever had was a total moron. I don’t know where he was teaching—perhaps it was the Secret Kingdom Where Everyone is the Seventh-Generation Product of Inbreeding Between Siblings, in which case maybe he had a point. Otherwise, it seems to me that he suffers from a case of blaming one’s limitations on the supposed limitations of others. It’s not that you can’t teach, but that your students are too dumb to learn.

Knowing this guy, I’m willing to give the students the benefit of the doubt.

1) After a disappointing sophomore campaign, what can we expect of Jason Heyward going forward?
MJ: Jason Heyward had an injury-riddled sophomore season in Atlanta, but there is a lot to like about his chances at a rebound campaign in 2012. His offensive line was deflated by a .260 BABIP, but his peripherals were once again stellar. His 11.6 percent walk rate represented a regression from 2010 but cannot be considered poor, and his .162 ISO likewise dropped from the previous year but did not experience a precipitous fall.

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Spring is here! Birds are singing, bees are buzzing, flowers are in bloom, and soon, ever so soon, horsehide will give leather a resounding smack. The long winter is over, Starks be damned, the frost retreats a little more every day, and soon, ever so soon, the crack of the bats will be heard all over America. Winter coats are going into storage, bears are stretching and yawning in their caves, and soon, ever so soon, my dears, baseball will be played again.

And I feel sour about the whole thing.

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It was screenwriting guru Syd Field who introduced, to the best of my knowledge, the notion of the cinematic “plot point.” Hollywood movies have two of these, the first coming roughly a third of the way in, the second two thirds through. Watch any mainstream cinema product, and you can practically set your watch by them.

Dirk Hayhurst’s second memoir, Out of My League (Citadel Press, 406 pp.), the follow-up to his best-selling debut, The Bullpen Gospels, is expertly constructed just like a movie. The plot points are easy to spot. We arrive at the first on page 126, when Hayhurst finds out, after much suspense in 2008 spring training, that he has made the San Diego Padres’ Triple-A club in Portland, Ore.

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It's a cliché, but it's true. Everyone needs pitching. Even the richest of the rich need pitching.  The Yankees added Hiroki Kuroda and Michael Pineda this off-season, while the Red Sox have scrambled to improve their rotation and will try reliever Daniel Bard there this spring. In the prospect world, there is nothing more valuable—and therefore nothing more rare—than a self-grown elite starter, with those who are merely good quickly entering untouchable territory in trade talks. Which teams are most likely to develop these valuable commodities? To find out, I generated a five-prospect rotation for each team based solely on prospect status (as opposed to closest to the big leagues) and found nine collections that stood out.

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Barry Zito is going through deliveries like frat houses go through 30-racks of beer. The latest version is supposed to add drop and drive to his delivery, giving him more momentum toward the plate, and perhaps putting some extra gas on his mediocre fastball.

Unfortunately for the Giants, their $126 million man is not an old dog up to new tricks. Zito has been using this trick—claiming he has altered his mechanics—for five years, giving fans futile hope that he might finally reinvent himself. It has not worked to date, and it probably will not work in 2012.

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Not long ago, while discussing the anemic offense of last year's Mariners, we noted that 10 MLB teams scored fewer than four runs per game in 2011. Only two of those teams finished with a winning record. The San Francisco Giants represented the most extreme case; they won 86 games despite having the National League's worst offense.

That got me to thinking: How often has the team with the NL's worst offense finished with a winning record? The answer may come as a surprise.

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Prospect #1: C Gary Sanchez
Background with Player: My eyes; industry sources.
Who: Sanchez, who was signed out of the Dominican Republic for a cool $3 million, is one of the most promising offensive prospects in the minors. He has precocious in-game power, a projectable and playable hit tool, and a game plan at the plate that goes beyond “grip the bat and swing as hard as possible.” Sanchez was only 18 years old when he made his full-season debut in 2011, but he managed to slug .485 against much older competition in the prospect-heavy Sally League. His work behind the plate wasn’t as attractive, and there are already whispers of a future position switch. The arm is plenty strong and the necessary athleticism is present to handle the physical demands of the position, but his receiving ability is immature and will require years of additional development. The catch here is that Sanchez’s bat is setting an accelerated timetable that his glove development won’t be able to match strides with.

What Could Go Wrong in 2012: Sanchez is a hitter who seems to see the ball very well; he tracks and diagnoses pitches like a much more experienced player. In High-A, the young right-hander will no doubt face a more advanced secondary sequence, and despite the good pitch-recognition skills, the characteristics of his swing could limit his ability to make contact against such offerings. Like most power hitters, Sanchez has a leveraged swing with length and loft, making him susceptible to inner-half velocity and off-speed stuff that will require barrel manipulation to stay on. Sanchez has a good feel for hitting, but I don’t think the hit tool can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the power, which should end up as an easy 70 on the 20/80 scale, and possibly a legit 80 at the top of his developmental arc. The explosion that occurs on contact is loud and violent and sexy and people will pay money to see it and the skies will turn red with the blood of his enemies, but the hitchy trigger and the lengthy path to the ball make exploitation possible. However, it should be noted that Sanchez’s offensive game doesn’t have the glaring weaknesses that scar the faces of most prospects his age. This is a minor nitpick. Sanchez could be very special at the plate. I want to have a son and name him Gary.

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Believe it or not, most of our writers didn't enter the world sporting an @baseballprospectus.com address; with a few exceptions, they started out somewhere else. In an effort to up your reading pleasure while tipping our caps to some of the most illuminating work being done elsewhere on the internet, we'll be yielding the stage once a week to the best and brightest baseball writers, researchers and thinkers from outside of the BP umbrella. If you'd like to nominate a guest contributor (including yourself), please drop us a line.

Howard Megdal is the Lead Writer for the LoHud Mets Blog and Writer At Large for Capital New York. He covers baseball, basketball, and soccer for these and numerous other publications. His new book, Wilpon's Folly, from which much of the following text was drawn, is available as an e-book at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. Follow the LoHud Mets Blog on Twitter @lohudmets. Follow Howard on Twitter @HowardMegdal.
 

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As Draft Day approaches, many owners must make last-minute keeper decisions, which are often more complex than the binary, keep-him-or-dump-him variety of decision-making. In many leagues, owners can’t keep players for free; instead, a keeper’s cost depends on his Draft Day acquisition price or his 2011 performance. For these decisions, it’s helpful to identify rebound players—those who PECOTA projects will increase in value in 2012—although owners in redraft leagues will also find it helpful to identify Draft Day bargains. When your competitors are short-sighted, as is often the case, they will undervalue these rebound candidates, and owners in snake drafts can see who might slip to later rounds as a result.

Continuing last week’s theme, I’m looking at those players whose value is projected to rebound the most in 2012, leaving out players who lost most of the season due to injury or who should return less than $5 in 2012. Because PECOTA tends to project players conservatively, it’s notable when it expects top-shelf players to increase in value for 2012. I was surprised to find some of the names below, and I expect that BP Fantasy readers will be too.

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How do we arrive at an estimation of what a ballplayer is worth? It’s easy to say that we gather all the historical evidence, project our best estimate of what’s to come, and then sort. But obviously, it’s more complicated than that.

Time for a blind taste test. Here are two pitchers and PECOTA’s 2012 projection for each:

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