Since I was a kid I’ve always looked forward to picking up The Sporting News baseball preview magazine. There’s a lot wrong with it, of course, it’s written way too early in the offseason to catch all of the transactions, their predictions suffer as a result, and well, it’s The Sporting News.
But it’s always been–along with finding out if Yosh Kawano saw his shadow on February 2–one of the first real signs of spring.
I picked up the 2010 preview a couple of days ago. And it’s chock full o’ the stuff you expect it to be.
There’s a feature about all of the big offseason changes and how they expect the Phillies and Yankees to play in the World Series again. Scot Gregor of the Daily Herald has a feature in there about how Japan does not appear to be producing that many really good players. What, So Taguchi and Kosuke Fukudome aren’t doing it for you, Scot?
They have an article about how the money the top pick in the draft gets is seldom worth it. And the fossilizing corpse of Joe Strauss of the St. Louis Dispatch has a feature about how this is the golden age of managers. He includes Dusty Baker in the golden age. Let’s just move on.
After features on Joe Mauer explaining that catching is hard and Augie Garrido tells about the joys of driving while shitfaced, you actually get to the baseball preview part of the magazine.
