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The start of spring training is still a few weeks away, but it’s never too soon to start planning for this year’s fantasy baseball draft.

Hitting on your early-round picks and anchoring your roster with superstar talent is important, but more times than not, it’s the late-round sleeper picks that prove to be the difference when it comes to contending for a league title.

What follows is a look at 10 fantasy sleepers to target in your draft—five hitters and five pitchers—based on positive regression factors, strong second-half performances and potential upside.

None of these guys are going to be targeted early, but rounding out your draft with a few of them could push your team over the top in 2016.

Note: Sleeper picks based on a 10- or 12-team mixed league with standard five-by-five rotisserie scoring (BA, HR, RBI, R and SB for hitters; W, SV, ERA, WHIP and K for pitchers).

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With spring training drawing near, we’re all mainly excited for the baseball. It’s our dear friend, and it’s been too long since we last hung out.

But don’t forget about the business, folks. Spring training always brings us a few last-minute deals, and we’re here to take a whack at predicting some of the big ones that will go down this spring.

We don’t have many to get to. Only four. Two involve predicting new homes for a couple big-name free agents. Another involves predicting the spring’s biggest trade. Lastly, there’s no time for contract extensions like spring training, and there’s one in particular on our radar.

Let’s get going with…

Yovani Gallardo Signs with the Baltimore Orioles

Major league clubs have already dropped about $2.5 billion on free agents. If they were to pool all their money together, Forbes says they could afford to buy the Los Angeles Dodgers. 

And there are three big-name free agents still waiting to get theirs: outfielder Dexter Fowler, shortstop Ian Desmond and starting pitcher Yovani Gallardo. How much longer, oh glorious free-agent gods, must they wait?

In the case of Fowler, probably not long. There seems to be more interest in him than there is in Gallardo and Desmond, making it easier to predict that their strolls through the open market will last into spring training.

But eventually, Gallardo should get picked up by the Baltimore Orioles.

Admittedly, Orioles general manager Dan Duquette would advise everyone not to hold their breath. Gallardo is still on the market largely because he’s tied to draft-pick compensation. And for the Orioles, signing him would mean giving up the No. 14 pick in next year’s draft. No small sacrifice, that.

As the man himself recently told his cousin, Jim Duquette of MLB Network Radio:

However, Eduardo A. Encina of the Baltimore Sun is of the mind that Gallardo remains a possibility for the Orioles. And as Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports wrote, Gallardo’s price could drop to a point that would simply be too good for the Orioles to pass up, lost draft pick be damned.

There’s a good chance of that happening. All the other top arms on what was once a crowded starting pitching market have already signed, putting a dent in the demand for starters. And knowing how they scored Ubaldo Jimenez and Nelson Cruz a couple springs ago, the Orioles are just the team to take advantage of Gallardo slashing his ticket price.

There’s also the kinda-sorta important note that the Orioles really need Gallardo. They’ve lost ground in the AL East, and a good way for them to make it up would be to repair a starting pitching staff that FanGraphs currently projects as the worst in the American League.

With a 3.46 ERA over the last two seasons, Gallardo could help fix that. And here’s thinking the Orioles could have him on a cheap three-year deal they could potentially make cheaper with an opt-out.

Ian Desmond Signs with the Arizona Diamondbacks

With Gallardo safe and sound in a new home, now we have to find shelter for Ian Desmond. Let’s do that by sending him to the Arizona Diamondbacks.

If you’re thinking this is us going way off the board, well, you’re not wrong. Desmond has been linked to the Tampa Bay Rays, as reported by MLB Daily Dish’s Chris Cotillo, and many believe the Chicago White Sox would be a likely landing spot. Not so much the Diamondbacks, though. And after their trade for Jean Segura, they don’t have an obvious home at shortstop.

But if the Diamondbacks want to overcome the Dodgers and San Francisco Giants in the NL West, they need as much firepower as they can get. They also have two apparent advantages over suitors such as the Rays and White Sox.

The Diamondbacks don’t have to worry as much about losing a draft pick to sign Desmond. Where the Rays would lose the No. 13 pick and the White Sox would lose the No. 28 pick, the Diamondbacks would only lose the No. 39 pick. That thing is not like the previous two things.

The Diamondbacks would also seem to have more money to spend. Baseball-Reference.com puts their projected 2016 payroll at about $95 million, which is well short of the franchise’s all-time high of $112 million in 2014. That gives them plenty of room to dip into their new $1.5 billion TV deal.

Signing Desmond would be a good excuse to do so. After averaging roughly 20 home runs per year over the last four seasons, swapping out Nationals Park for the typically homer-friendly Chase Field could allow him to do even better. For the Diamondbacks, the result would be one of the National League’s most dangerous offenses.

Where to play Desmond is more of a hurdle, but not too big of one. The Diamondbacks could sign him as a third base upgrade over Jake Lamb, or as a second base upgrade over Chris Owings. Or, they could sign Desmond to play his natural shortstop, leaving Owings, Segura and Nick Ahmed to battle for playing time at second and third base.

At the rate he’s going, the Diamondbacks might be able to get Desmond on a three- or four-year deal with an early opt-out. If they do, an NL West title wouldn’t sound too crazy.

Milwaukee Brewers Trade Jonathan Lucroy to the Washington Nationals

After going off the board with that last one, let us now return to the board to concoct a trade that would send Jonathan Lucroy from the Milwaukee Brewers to the Washington Nationals.

As Tom Haudricourt of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported, Brewers general manager David Stearns said this week there’s nothing brewing on Lucroy. But something could start brewing during the spring, when clubs lacking in impact talent behind the dish are more likely to get antsy.

The Nationals could be one of those. Rosenthal and Nick Cafardo of the Boston Globe have reported they’ve kicked the tires on Lucroy as a possible upgrade over Wilson Ramos. They’re also one of the few teams in the league that can probably afford Lucroy’s price tag.

That’s if Lucroy were to allow a deal to be done, of course. His incredibly team-friendly contract only guarantees him about $4 million more, but it comes with a limited no-trade clause. The Nationals are on his list, according to Rosenthal, so he would have to approve a trade to Washington.

But that’s not necessarily a roadblock. As Rosenthal notes, the Nationals could sway Lucroy by offering him more money:

The Nationals have done this sort of thing before, as they worked something out with Jonathan Papelbon when they traded for him last summer. It’s not hard to imagine them doing the same with Lucroy.

After all, he would be quite a nice upgrade for them behind the dish. Ramos is fine defensively, but not so much offensively. Lucroy owns a .770 career OPS, and yours truly believes his bat didn’t decline as much in 2015 as his final numbers let on. 

To get Lucroy, the Nationals certainly wouldn’t give up either of their top two prospects, Lucas Giolito and Trea Turner. But Victor Robles or Erick Fedde could be in play. Michael A. Taylor is another possibility. He’s only a fourth outfielder on the Nationals and could be appealing to a Brewers club that could very much use a high-upside center fielder.

If the Nats were to get Lucroy, they’d have another weapon for their quest to dethrone the New York Mets in the NL East. And after the Metropolitans re-signed Yoenis Cespedes, such a weapon is arguably necessary.

Baltimore Orioles Extend Manny Machado

Spring training isn’t all about last-minute signings and trades. As Mike Trout, Miguel Cabrera, Buster Posey and Justin Verlander can vouch, it’s a great time to sign extensions worth roughly all of the dollars.

Who’s the best bet for a big-money extension this spring? We’re looking at you, Manny Machado.

Machado has all the trappings of a perfect extension candidate. He’s young but just now entering his prime years. He’s close to free agency but not too close to free agency, with his first foray into the open market set for after 2018. He plays for a club that’s not poor but still needs to worry about controlling costs. And perhaps most important of all, Machado is not a Scott Boras client.

The star third baseman told Roch Kubatko of MASN Sports in October he would love to stay in Baltimore long term, and Duquette has indicated the interest is mutual.

“We’ve already looked at that and we can look at that again,” Duquette said, per Encina. “Manny’s a great player, we’d love to have him long term.”

Coming off an .861 OPS, 35 home runs and a Gold Glove in what was only his age-22 season in 2015, now is a good time for Machado to seek a huge payday. And lest they risk losing him to the pull of free agency by waiting, now is also a good time for the Orioles to oblige him.

To do that, they could take a page out of the Los Angeles Angels’ book.

When the Angels signed Trout to his six-year, $144.5 million extension in 2014, they bought out three arbitration years at reasonable prices and three free-agent years for fair market value at over $34 million per year.

The Orioles could do basically the same thing with a five-year deal for Machado. With the two sides having already settled at $5 million for 2016, the deal could cover his final two arbitration years and three free-agent years. A good amount would be something like $130 million and would allow Machado to hit the open market after his age-28 season.

If that sounds like too much money for the Orioles, bear in mind that Machado’s really expensive years wouldn’t kick in until 2019. Presently, the Orioles only have about $30 million in guaranteed money on the books for that season, according to Spotrac. The deal we made for them and Gallardo wouldn’t change that.

That’s our whack at predicting this spring’s big extension. But between us, you might also want to keep an eye on Bryce Harper, A.J. Pollock, Jake Arrieta, Jacob deGrom and Gerrit Cole.

Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs unless otherwise noted/linked.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

This offseason, Major League Baseball clubs have spent roughly $2.5 billion on free agents and pulled off a handful of big-ticket trades on the side.

Well, as much as we hate to be the bearers of bad vibrations, some of this excitement is inevitably going to result in buyer’s remorse. There will be busts, and we’re here to try to sniff them out ahead of time.

Rather than spill out a random list of busts, though, we’re going to make things interesting by assembling a whole team of them. This all-bust squad will feature a catcher, players from all four infield positions, three outfielders, one starting pitcher and one relief pitcher. That’s a total of 10 players, because round numbers are always good.

In choosing this not-quite-fantasy team, we disregarded guys who were signed to small contracts or involved in largely inconsequential trades. Beyond that, players were chosen by weighing performance and health-related red flags going into 2016. We also had a bit of help from some projection systems.

Now that everyone’s clear on the ground rules, we shall commence this frown-fest behind the dish…

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We’ve reached that point in the offseason where the closer we get to spring training, the slower time seems to move. 

Most teams have their rosters set and are focused on adding organizational depth, signing fringe major league talent to minor league deals, moves that barely force the rumor mill to twitch, much less pick up speed. Thankfully, there are enough clubs still in need of a significant piece to keep things churning.

Will an injury force a big-market club to finally dip its toes into the free-agent waters? Is a part-time player destined to become an everyday player for a fringe contender? Can a team continue to ignore what it proclaimed was its biggest area of need only a few months ago?

We’ll tackle all of that and more in this week’s edition of Fact or Fiction.

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Julio Urias and Raul Adalberto Mondesi are not just two of the top prospects in the game, but also the kind of rising talents who will make fans stop this spring and say, “Whoa, who was that?”

The list that follows is flooded with players of that ilk. Many of the head-turning farmhands who made the grade are the No. 1 prospect in their respective system, but that wasn’t the case for everyone.

Some of the players who earned this distinction are here because they have a big-time, can’t-miss tool—from an electric pitch to prime-time pop to superspeed.

In some cases, difficult decisions had to be made because individual farms had such a wealth of deserving candidates. In those situations, factors like 2015 second-half performance and whether an unfamiliar player was entering his first spring with a new club were among the tiebreakers.

In a nod to all those fans of teams that start with W’s, T’s and S’s, we’ll run through the list of head-turners in reverse alphabetical order. So now, off to D.C.

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Kyle Schwarber and Mookie Betts are the kind of phenoms who just aren’t playing around.

In 2015, the Chicago Cubs’ masher and the Boston Red Sox’s sparkplug demonstrated that they’re the type of players who have the tools—and who have drawn the praise of coaches and execs—to be more than just your run-of-the-mill stars.

Schwarber and Betts are among the cavalry of young position players ready to launch directly into the superstar stratosphere—the realm occupied by the likes of Bryce Harper, Miguel Cabrera, Mike Trout, Andrew McCutchen and Josh Donaldson.

For the purpose of this exercise, players had to have accumulated less than two years of big league service time to be eligible, but there was room for one guy who narrowly eclipsed that threshold. As it turns out, that future superstar happens to be a teammate of Betts.

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We are still a few weeks from the start of spring training, and a couple of months away from Opening Day, but it’s never too early to take a crack at predicting how all 30 MLB teams’ Opening Day rosters will shake out.

Obviously, the inevitable injuries, surprise performances and whatever signings and trades that take place this spring will shake things up between now and the beginning of the regular season.

Truth be told, it will be a surprise if more than a handful of these predictions turn out to be accurate, but what they do provide is an overview of how each team looks heading into the preseason.

Ahead is a look at the projected 25-man rosters for all 30 MLB teams, as well as an overview of the notable roster battles to keep an eye on this spring.

However, let’s kick things off with a look at the notable free agents still looking for a new home that will inevitably mess up these predictions.

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The weekend-long Cubs Convention wouldn’t start until Friday, but Chicago Cubs fans were already on high alert at the Sheraton Grand Hotel in Chicago on Tuesday night.

The former fan favorite was bundled up in an attempt to counter the freezing Chicago winter, but that didn‘t stop more than a few fans from recognizing and approaching him.

Ryne Sandberg? Billy Williams? Fergie Jenkins? Nope. It was the Cubs’ newest baseball operations assistant.

“I don’t feel like I’m a recognizable person, you know. I mean, I was the backup catcher who hit .190 two years ago here,” John Baker said. “But people were coming up to me with blown-up photographs and offering me beers. I understand that they’re extra excited right now, but at the same time, I was just blown away by how nice people have been to me.”

Ask any Cubs fan to rattle off some of the team’s recent backup catchers, and he or she may have trouble coming up with names such as Henry Blanco, Koyie Hill, Steve Clevenger and Dioner Navarro.

You’d be hard-pressed to find one who doesn’t remember Baker.

Understanding why he is so well-liked involves digging a bit deeper than the .192/.273/.231 line he posted over 208 plate appearances in 2014, his lone season on the North Side.

It was his reaction to this walk against Aroldis Chapman in the ninth inning of a tie game:

It was his playing the guitar for teammates in the dugout during a rain delay:

The one highlight that sticks out in the minds of many Cubs fans, though, was his extra-inning performance against the Colorado Rockies on July 29.

Baker entered that game in the top of the 16th inning not to catch, but to pitch for a Cubs team that had exhausted its bullpen.

A foul pop-up by Charlie Culberson, a walk to Drew Stubbs and a double-play ball off the bat of Cristhian Adames—just like that, Baker had thrown a scoreless inning.

He wasn‘t finished.

He led off the bottom of the 16th by drawing a walk, made his way around to third base and then raced home to score on a sacrifice fly off the bat of Starlin Castro.

With one epic slide, he had scored the winning run and made himself the winning pitcher, giving the smattering of fans who’d stuck around for the entirety of the six-hour, 27-minute marathon a reason to cheer.

Moments such as that left an indelible impression on the fanbase, and Baker was just as effective at making one on his teammates.

Current Cubs reliever Clayton Richard just missed playing with Baker in Chicago, but the two were teammates in San Diego during the 2012 season, when Richard saw firsthand the kind of impact Baker can make in a short period of time.

Baker was part of a catching trio that also included 23-year-old Yasmani Grandal, who was in his rookie season, and 28-year-old Nick Hundley, who was just starting to establish himself as an everyday backstop.

The 31-year-old Baker may not have been the primary catcher, but he found himself in the important role of mentor.

“He was a really good sounding board for Nick and Yasmani whenever they had questions or issues,” said Richard. “He was really another coach, and he was able to help those guys out quite a bit.” 

The 2012 season was the first time Richard and Baker played together, but Richard said the two had an immediate connection, and the statistics back that up.

“I think that there was a connection there at all times. There was an immediate line of communication that wasn‘t difficult at all to establish, and it didn‘t seem like there was a huge learning curve for each other,” said Richard.

“A lot of times with a new catcher, it takes a few starts or a few outings to get to know what each other likes and to make those adjustments. With him, it was very fluid and seemed very natural, and I think that’s a testament to how intelligent he is and how well he adapts to new situations.”

That adaptability will now be put to the test, as Baker’s new role in the front office is one new situation after another.

The week of the Cubs Convention was a perfect example. 

Prior to arriving in Chicago, Baker headed to the sunny Dominican Republic on a quick scouting trip to watch some of the team’s prospects in the winter league there.

That was followed by in-depth player development meetings with some of the brightest minds in the game, and then he went on to the convention, with the autograph and photo requests and offers of free beer.

Not a bad gig for Baker—or anyone, for that matter. The process of getting that gig began back in December 2014, when the Cubs let him go but gave him a glimpse into where his future may have been headed.

“When they non-tendered me in 2014, they told me on the phone, ‘Hey listen, when you feel like you’re done playing, we would like you to call us because there’s a home for you here. We’ll figure out where you fit best in our organization, but we want you around,'” Baker said.

The veteran catcher wound up landing in Seattle on a minor league deal that January, but he didn‘t break camp with the big league club and instead began the year in Triple-A Tacoma.

By the end of May, Seattle had released him, and this time, the move would officially mark the end to a playing career that began back in 2002 when the Oakland Athletics selected him in the fourth round as part of the infamous Moneyball draft.

“There’s a list of hitters I want to talk about,” assistant general manager Paul DePodesta said to a group of grizzled Oakland scouts prior to the 2002 draft, as depicted in the pages of the Michael Lewis bestseller. “All of these guys share certain qualities. They are the eight guys we definitely want. And we want all eight of these guys.”

Baker was one of those eight guys, and that shared quality was on-base ability. He had hit .383 with an impressive .516 on-base percentage during his junior season at the University of California.

However, it was as a member of the Florida Marlins that he made his big league debut on July 9, 2008, having been traded by Oakland prior to the 2007 season for prospect Jason Stokes.

He spent four seasons with the Marlins, two with the Padres and one with the Cubs before capping off his career with that brief pit stop in the Seattle organization.

It was only after his release from the Mariners that Baker finally began to think about what his next career move would be.

“When I was playing, I didn’t think about anything else,” he said. “I don’t believe in living any way other than moment to moment if you’re trying to be competitive in a sport. It was nice that I had five or six months at home with my family to talk to as many people as possible and go through what my future is going to look like.”

So what kind of job opportunities await a recently retired baseball player who didn‘t bank tens of millions of dollars over the course of his career and can’t simply retire altogether?

“I got offers to work for some tech-sales companies. I had offers in the medical supplies industry—a lot of athletes I think tend to go into that,” Baker said. “But I’m somebody that can’t sit on my hands; I have to be doing something.

“Everybody wants to be more financially successful, but that wasn’t at the top of the reasons why I was looking for another job. It was to find the best fit for me, and everybody I talked to outside of baseball and inside of baseball both said the longer you stay away, the harder it is to get back in.”

And that led him back to that standing offer from the Cubs. The organization hired him in December.

Officially, Baker holds the title of baseball operations assistant, but he’ll be exposed to a number of different aspects within the front office in his first year on the job.

“I get to do everything, and it’s exciting,” Baker said.

“I’ll be doing amateur scouting in the Bay Area and going on an international trip to Japan, Korea and Taiwan,” he said. “I’ll also be doing some targeted roving with some of the catching and working pretty closely with our mental skills department about coming up with strategies to communicate better with players.”

Baker provides a unique perspective for the front office as someone who has only recently stepped away from the game, and his ability to connect with the millennial generation should serve him well.

“I’ve always gotten along well with people much younger than me, and I have an ability to communicate that I think is similar to—and I don’t want to compare myself to this person—but I think that’s one of the greatest strengths of Joe Maddon is that he can relate to everybody on his team and guys still think that he’s cool,” Baker said.

“It’s important to have people like that that can communicate to both groups. To communicate to the field staff, the front office staff and have open lines of communication with your players.”

One of Baker’s 15,000 Twitter followers asked him how it felt to be back with the Cubs organization.

His response was simple:

For a professional athlete, no longer playing the game you love is never easy.

For John Baker, it simply means the start of an exciting new chapter in his career and a chance to rejoin an organization that feels like home.

All quotes obtained firsthand unless otherwise noted.

Follow @JoelReuterBR

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

Dexter Fowler, Ian Desmond, Yovani Gallardo and Howie Kendrick have a lot in common.

They’re all quality big leaguers, and they’re all unemployed. That second similarity is a product of that nasty draft-pick compensation they’re lugging around after declining qualifying offers from their old employers.

With MLB spring training just a couple of weeks away, the murky futures of that forgotten foursome stand out as the biggest question mark of the offseason.

As we tackle the latest round of questions and answers, there’s also time to explore the most recent speculation surrounding one of the game’s most polarizing players.

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With MLB spring training still two weeks away, now is not the time for big league skippers to be writing in their lineups with a Sharpie.

But it’s also not too soon to break out the No. 2 pencils and sketch out the batting orders for all 30 major league squads.

In order to project how all these lineups will shake out, we took a look back at the iterations that each manager chose in 2015 and also considered how the new free-agent and trade acquisitions fit into the mix.

For a variety of teams around the game, the biggest question with spring training looming is trying to figure out who will be leading off. That’s true for a club like the Toronto Blue Jays, who own the scariest lineup in the majors. It’s also true for the Chicago Cubs, who might just have the scariest lineup in the National League.

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