Is the guy on the right the key to the season for Carlos Beltran and Rafael Furcal?

This week we highlight some players who, despite possessing interesting skill sets, have not yet found their way into regular playing time.

What if we're wrong, and the marketplace is right, about our All-Value and All-Avoid teams?

"Which pitcher do I start?" are probably the most commonly asked words during the fantasy baseball season—whether wondered silently to oneself, asked to a friend, or posted on a message board. In the never ending chase for the elusive win, we all struggle with the decision of who to start and who to bench. Fortunately, we've got an app for that.

What if we're wrong, and the marketplace is right, about our All-Value and All-Avoid teams?

Batters with very large sample sizes show the variation inherent in what we think of as "normal" production.

Each year some players have hot starts, and during the first few weeks of free agent bidding/waiver pickups we have to make decisions about how aggressively to chase these players. At Baseball HQ we consistently counsel owners to have patience and not make decisions on small sample sizes. This article focuses on potential free agents who had a "hot start" in one of the 5x5 offensive categories during the 2009-2011 seasons, and examines the results of investments in those free agents.

Is there more skill to preventing walks than simply throwing strikes?

Continuing our exercise from last week, let's finish up our predictions of 2012's top performers and award winners. This week we'll cover the MVP candidates, and the pitching leaders.

Earlier this year we reviewed historical performance (in the form of RC/G and xERA) across each division and created a strength of schedule metric at the division level (i.e. an average for all teams in a division). In this article, we tackle two refinements to that approach—one improvement is the inclusion of projections (from BaseballHQ.com) to make it a forward-looking indicator. The other is the calculation of the metric at the team level to enable more detailed analysis and better insights.

As we do every year, we close out the pre-season calendar with a look at some possible long-shot league leaders and award winners. As always, our philosophy for this exercise is that anyone can predict an Albert Pujols MVP award or a Felix Hernandez Cy Young campaign. We're not interested in that level of prognostication; we're going to stick our necks out a good bit further.