I wish I had posted a link to this old Baseball Prospectus column when spring training started, but better late than never. And, well, what got me thinking about it ("Injured Pitcher Throwing Well", "Bad Player Looks Good", "Manager Impressed by Minor Leaguer") are the season previews that are popping up right now.

It seems to me I could write a halfway decent preview for, say, the 2010 Dodgers right now, even though I don't know what their roster will look like. I do know the Dodgers will have the money to buy free agents (more precisely, marginal revenue associated with winning in LA means the Dodgers should spend money to make money) and they do have a decent farm system. So they'll have some good ballplayers, but like every other team, even the Evil Empires, they'll have a prominent hole or two, maybe a weak outfielder or middle infielder. They'll have a bench full of players their fans will lament, like Jose Macias, Dave McCarty and Einar Diaz -- OK, they'll probably have somebody a bit better than Einar Diaz. Most importantly they'll have some talented pitchers, but there will be a number of question marks. Some pitchers will be coming off injuries, or they'll be unproven or aging or coming off up or down years that they're not likely to repeat.

All this is to say that when I look at the 2005 Cardinals I see three things that differentiate them from a generic baseball team: Albert Pujols, Scott Rolen and Jim Edmonds. I'll have a lot of fun seeing whether Larry Walker can stay healthy, whether David Eckstein's a good, a bad, or an ugly shortstop (he is blonde, he had a decent batting eye with the Angels, and he throws like his right arm's chained to a fat Union soldier), whether Jeff Suppan can keep rattling off mediocre seasons, whether Mark Mulder can rebound, etc. However these sidebars seem like the typical issues all teams face. Other teams' questions are in different positions, but from a value standpoint, every decent team, every business even, deals with this kind of stuff.

Or maybe I'm getting too old and all the names and faces are starting to blur.