Thought id start this off with only a few days until Spring Training begins for some teams.

Crazy offseason for us at fenway with Gonzalez and Crawford coming in, taking Ortiz up on his extra year, re-signing Beckett for four years, signing Jenks to whip Papelbon into shape, letting Beltre go amongst more.

It'll be nice to have Youk, Pedroia, Cameron and Ellsbury back aswell this season after the injuries they had last season.

Looking for a big year with the Yankees perhaps not being as strong with the signing of Andruw Jones and Russel Martin (god knows why they signed him with Montero in there) Soriano is a good pickup but Pettite retiring could cause a problem. Tampa have let quite a few players go like Crawford, Garza and Soriano whey they did rely on.

Looking forward to the new season though, and especially MLB.TV!

Oooh, where to start for the Jays?

I suppose the obvious place is the Silent Assassin (aka Alex Anthopoulos) offloading the worst contract in baseball. I mean, that right there is trade of the year, it's a no doubter. It does leave us a little short in the outfield, with Bautista likely to start at 3B. A lot will depend on how new signing Rajai Davis goes.

It's going to be a year where we wait and see what certain players do. Hill and Lind are looking to bounce back from average seasons. Arencibia is going in as starting catcher despite only making a handful of major league starts. Who knows what the Home Run king will do this year. Then there's the young starting rotation of Romero (26), Morrow (26), Cecil (24) Drabek (23) who I think are all nailed on, plus one of 3 guys in their mid 20's with little or no big league experience. I'll miss Marcum who is now a Brewer, but we have lots of talented young arms and we need to build our position prospects.

We also appear to have stacked out BP with closers. I'm hoping Jon Rauch is our main guy if only because he's a beast of a man. 6' 11" and covered in badass tats.

Anyways. I think we'll go just above 500, which in the AL East is a pretty decent finish when you're not pushing for the playoffs.

I did have the pleasure of meeting the new Jays manager John Farrell the other week. He's a dead ringer for Bruce Campbell. I had to fight the urge to say "Gimme some sugar baby" to him.

And just to make you guys a bit jealous... less than 6 weeks til I head down to Florida to catch me some Spring Training

We may miss out on playoffs this year. By far the toughest division in MLB. The Orioles lineup is scarily good, that along with the additions in Boston, it;s gonna be a long year.

I swear the O's have stacked up this season just so that they don't finish bottom. That's how scary the AL East is.

They may have added a lot of bats in Baltimore but what's their pitching like?

Not a patch on the other teams in the division.

Who fancies a fantasy league?

I was hoping someone would suggest this

That'd be awesome.

Cheers.

Set-up

check pm's

Not posting the details for anyone to join in?

ESPN for fantasy draft if you recieved PM. If you haven't registered by sunday afternoon, the league will be made public to fill it or they won't start it. Join another the keague to get the idea of how it all works. The draft is a snake draft, which means it starts at 1 to 10 then the next round is 10 to 1 and so on. I think having the tenth pick is more benificial. Sorry it's during the world club challenge but I was working on the basis that all our teams would have played. It's only an aussie friendly anyhow.

Bad news for the Cards with Carpenter being ruled out for the season. Makes it a bit easier for us to compete at the top again in the Central though. Still fancy us to repeat with Stubbs and Bruce maturing a bit more to give us more support around Votto.

All down to pitching. The Cubs look alot stronger in your division. Zambrano finished last year amazingly well and with the addition of Garza there is a lot of aggression at the top of the rotation.