A lot has happened in Major League Baseball since the last Hanging Curve, including an injury to a future Hall of Famer (Mariano Rivera), the benching of another (Albert Pujols) and a career-week for a slugger (Josh Hamilton) on a path that could lead to Cooperstown.
If the Jays front office thinks they can form a starting rotation worthy of contending in the East in the next couple seasons, there is no reason to believe that they will not make a run at Prince Fielder.
Ryan Braun and Troy Tulowitzki talked to RealGM about LeBron James and starting their own big three.
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Over the next few weeks as the NCAA Tournament and Spring Training dominate the month of March, we have combined the two for our own March Madness, which will determine who the readers of RealGM will select in the second edition of our 'Be The GM' series.
Though there are many different potential answers, the question is simple; If you were to start a MLB franchise from scratch and had the option to pick any player in the world, who would you pick?
These two players continue a long and sometimes overhyped tradition of mutual hate and dislike, but they've also won the previous two MVP awards in the American League.
Dustin Pedroia, 2B, Boston Red Sox
Other players considered from the Red Sox: Jon Lester, Josh Beckett, Kevin Youkilis
Why he's a franchise player: Pedroia became a ROY and MVP by the age of 25, which you don't just luck into. He hit 17 homers, 54 doubles while stealing 20 bases in 2008 to beat out Justin Morneau for the award. Pedroia, along with Ichiro, Barry Larkin and Kirk Gibson are the only MVP winners to have a sub-.500 slugging percentage since Thurman Munson in the 1976 season.
He's become the post-Manny/Nomar/Pedro face of the Red Sox and it's impossible to say that he's not up for it. Pedroia plays hard everyday and though he isn't what either of those three players were in terms of talent, he is capable of some very special things at second base.
He has a lifetime postseason OPS of .841 and was one of the only Boston hitters to show up at all against Tampa Bay, as he hit three homers and had an OPS of 1.200 for the series.
Pedroia is already his generation's Derek Jeter and I don't expect that to change anytime soon and like Jeter, he may end up being under-appreciated to a certain extent on a pure talent level.
Alex Rodriguez, 3B, New York Yankees
Other players considered from: Mark Teixeira, CC Sabathia, Joba Chamberlain
Why he's a franchise player: It has only been a week since I decided Rodriguez, PEDs and all, should be the Yankees' franchise player for this competition and I regret it. We're assuming contracts are thrown aside here, so I think I would feel more comfortable with Teixeira or Sabathia over A-Rod because of how that hip looks. A few weeks ago when Nate Silver wrote a piece predicting A-Rod wouldn't break the HR record , I thought no way would his homer totals dip so dramatically, but he's now a long ways away from 762.
I thought A-Rod would coast until 40 as an OPS of 1.000, but his body looks like its on a Jay-Z/Linkin Park type of collision course with the proverbial wall and won't have the same goodies available to him to defy the aging process as Clemens and Bonds.
I've left A-Rod in the slot to give him the benefit of the doubt and more interestingly, to see if he can get past the 5'9" Pedroia.
Let's leave that aside and look what he's done strictly since he joined the Yankees and presumably was clean. Since 2004, Rodriguez is seventh in OPS behind Bonds, Pujols, Papi, Manny, Chipper and Berkman and has won two MVPs.
My biggest concern beyond the injuries is how long his bat speed will remain at its current level. Unlike Bonds and Pujols, A-Rod has always been strikeout prone and has never really developed that impeccable eye for reading pitches the way the true great have and relies heavily on that bat speed to be advantageous with mistakes.
