Aside from those that will eventually add free agents Nelson Cruz, Stephen Drew, Ubaldo Jimenez and Ervin Santana, teams are done adding impact players, and we now have a pretty good idea of the core talent that each will head into the 162-game season with.
Based on this, we can now make a well-educated guess on which teams are the World Series favorites. If it were only that simple.
At this time last year, Bleacher Report’s Doug Mead posted his World Series odds for all 30 teams with the Toronto Blue Jays, Washington Nationals, San Francisco Giants and Los Angeles Angels the top four most likely to win it all, in that order.
While it would be hard to find much of an argument with those odds at the time, none of those four teams even made the playoffs while the team with 13th-best odds, the St. Louis Cardinals, and the team with the 16th-best odds, the Boston Red Sox, were the finalists.
This is why they play the 162-game schedule. Baseball is unpredictable, and all 30 teams have a fighting chance to make the playoffs.
It’s still fun, however, to look at the teams’ projected rosters and play out the season in our heads. When I did that, here were the four mostly likely World Series matchups I came up with.