Okay, so this is just a little post to let you guys know about a series of posts that will be coming up over the next few days. But first, let me just give you guys a little programming note. I'm hitting Italy next week, and while I'm pretty sure I'll have WiFi at various points during the trip, it may inhibit my ability to write as much as I'd like over the next couple weeks. But lucky for me, I should be able to spend a good deal of my 13-hour flight working on these posts, rather than ponder whether I want to watch the little digital map of the plate's trajectory or "Little Fockers" for two hours.
Baseball always has those conversations that we love to have, but they don't quite mean that much in the big picture of things. You know, we care about who's batting lead-off an awful lot, but realistically it's probably not going to significantly alter the course of the game. We go crazy about figuring out the top prospect in each system, but that distinction is so fluid, ambiguous and flat-out subjective at times that we should probably put a stronger focus on simply establishing prospect tiers (rant for another day).
But today, I'm going to take a unique route to pondering the question, "Which division is baseball's best?"
It's a question that we love to ask. And we usually get the same answer: "AL East. Red Sox and Yankees. Duh, jackass." But what about if we're only limiting ourselves to the tip of the iceberg? What if we're only looking to ask, "Which teams have the most premium talent?"
And so I've decided to take that question to task, and in a form that we've all come to adore: the all-_______ team. Rather than simply pull out a calculator and add up WAR figures from the top-5 players on each team, which you could totally do, why not beg the question, "If we wanted to pit an AL East Dream Team against an NL East Dream Team, what would that look like?"
We're not talking about homicides and other atrocities. We're talking about baseball. Let's make this fun. The first post, on the National League East, will be up later today. Expect Dream Team Posts for the other divisions over the course of the next few days, and eventually I'll throw up a post looking at who would win a magical tournament of the Division Dream Teams.
Until then, I bid you all a good day.