Doesn't "Stocks, Cactus, Grapefruit & Jones" sound like the name of a band that released one semi-well-received album in 1968 and then faded into the vast desert of obscurity? It's not, though; it's just a roundup of the various topics I'll be covering today.

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Americans are a transient lot. On average, we move 13 times in a lifetime (note: number exaggerated to enhance premise). Our ballplayers are no different; they are often found switching teams. Because of this, it became necessary for me to create the Transient All-Star Team back in 2005. In order to be eligible for this esteemed body, a player must simply be with a different franchise in 2008 than he was at the conclusion of the 2007 season. In the past, I named a player at each position for each league. This year, I'm doing something a little different: presenting the best candidates at each position, discussing their qualifications, and naming just one player overall. As we shall see, the word "best" is relative at some of the positions, while at others, the field is so crowded it is quite difficult to pick a top contender.

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Each year around this time, we take a look at the young players with no major league experience who have the highest PECOTA on a position-by-position basis. Some of these players are ready enough to pop, while others are still a few years away. Others still are non-prospects who just happen to be the most big-league friendly at their position, but who may never even see the majors owing to age and other factors. We're also going to look at how the players discussed in 2006 and 2007 fared. To be eligible for inclusion here, a player must have no major league experience, although I reserve the right to waive that restriction if a particular position runs thin. Even with that, it can be no more than a handful of plate appearances or batters faced.

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The Atlanta Braves in 1990…the Kansas City A's in 1967…the New York Mets in 1968…these were all teams on the verge of breaking out. Was it known at the time? Were people cognizant that these teams were about to put aside their former losing ways and ascend to a new level? To some extent, yes, it was apparent that pieces were falling into place before the great leap forward came.

<> Can we now, on the brink of this new season, put the 2007 Tampa Bay Devil Rays on that list? Was 2007 the last bit of calm before the Rays storm that is bound to come, or will it be 2008?

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I've been diligently checking the papers and, for some time now, have not been able to find any major league ballgames scheduled. When one does a column with "Matchups" in the title, this can be problematic. So, in order to stay thematically relevant, I've hit the record books and come up with some of the more extreme matchup results of all time. These records involve extant teams only, and all references to them encompass their entire history, including the time they were in other cities. So, for example, a reference to the Braves includes their time in Boston and Milwaukee.

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A two-time Cy Young Award winner traded before the age of 30-where have we seen that before? It's only happened twice prior to this week's Johan Santana trade to the New York Mets by the Minnesota Twins.

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A couple of years back, I devoted a column to randomly selecting baseball books from my collection and commenting on passages found therein. I have about as many non-baseball books as I have baseball books, so today I decided to do something different: I would go to non-baseball books and try to find baseball references in them. This proved to be a lot more difficult than I imagined. In fact, given the time constraint between coming up with the idea and my filing deadline and the fact that I have a finite number of books, I only came across four such references. Here they are:

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What was life like before Baseball-Reference-com? Not quite as sweet. Of course, we didn't know any better. We thought the Baseball Encyclopedia was the pinnacle of human achievement. One thing that was cool about it, though, was how well it lent itself to flipping around. Knowledge could be come by in a patternless meander through the pages. B-R has the next-best thing: a random page finder. Click it and you never know what's going to come up. Today, because it's a cold day in January and it's the perfect time of year for this sort of thing, I'm going to use that device and write about whatever or whoever comes up on it. I guarantee you that I will not skip anybody or anything that the finder generates, no matter how obscure they may be. I will slavishly riff on whatever pops up on the screen. Here goes:

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I've decided to give up. Thinking, that is. Especially when it comes to baseball. I've given it a lot of a thought--and I promise you, it's the last I will generate in this direction once I commence the full thinking stoppage--and have decided it's much easier to live without thinking things through. From now on, I'm going to follow the Five Principles of Thought-Free Living:

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Dead Horses Beaten While-U-Wait

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A year ago, I looked at the best seasons ever for position players according to WARP3. The time has come to swing the pendulum the other way and find the worst seasons ever. Actually, we're not going to include "ever" in this discussion. I'm going to focus mostly on the years since 1961. Also, I'm going to make a plate appearance minimum of 400 requirement so that we only discuss players who were present enough to do some real damage to their own teams.

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With the 14-0 New England Patriots hosting the 1-13 Miami Dolphins on Sunday in one of the greatest mismatchups in modern NFL history, I got to wondering about similarly lopsided late-season meetings in our own discipline, baseball. While baseball can never produce the disparity football can (a disparity albeit somewhat reduced from true polarized success after the Dolphins took out the Ravens last week), there have been some very large gaps between opponents. In order to qualify, the games had to take place in the final one-eighth of the season, just like the Miami-New England contest is. As you will see, most of these mismatchups are from the old days when there was often a stunning difference between the very best and very worst teams in each league.

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