It was an early Christmas for a baseball fan at the minor league complex on Saturday.  On one field the AAA team were playing the AA team.  On another the Dunedin team were playing the Yankees.  On a third field the Lansing team were also playing the Yankees.  And on a fourth field the extended spring team were playing the Phillies.  Four games, five teams, playing at the same time.  You could develop a sore neck from swivelling around to check out something on another field.

The Jays have signed Adam Lind to a four year $18 million contract with three club options that could keep him in Toronto through the 2016 season.

Link

Guy Spurrier of the National Post kindly invited us to take part in a Blue Jays preview roundtable thing for many of the Blue Jays bloggers, and some of us took him up on it. The article is in today's Post, and can also be viewed online at http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/postedsports/default.aspx (spread over several posts). Go check it out!

Friday at minor league camp saw Henderson Alvarez starting for Dunedin and Gustavo Pierre hitting a home run.  The Jays also started laying out their rosters and Chad Jenkins goes to Lansing and Zach Stewart to New Hampshire.

Yesterday we probed into very specific Blue Jay questions.  Today we look at the big picture, wins, expectations and attendance.

As many of you have doubtless noticed, our old chum and Bauxite Emeritus Craig Burley posted a piece on the Jays over at The Hardball Times that might be described - well, that can only be described - as a venomous screed:

Thursday saw the AAA and AA teams playing at home again.  There was a Jesse Litsch sighting.  And Tim Collins looked good.

Now that we have covered all the divisions and the other four teams in the AL East it is time to turn our attention to the home team, the Blue Jays.  Our roundtable of prognosticators have opined on many topics.  Feel free to add your two cents.

I am in Dunedin and I spent the day at the minor league complex.  The teams for the regular season have not yet been selected but I did see two games at the same time.  In the morning all four diamonds were busy with workouts and batting practice.  In the afternoon the AAA and AA teams played the Phillies.

Let's be clear. The Yankees are going to win a lot of baseball games this year. Why? Because the Yankees always win a lot of games, whether they're winning the World Series (as they did last year and have done five times since 1996) or even when they're not making the playoffs (as they didn't in 2008, for the first time since 1993 -- years in which they won 89 and 88 games, respectively).

So they'll win a lot of games. Will they win the franchise's 28th (twenty-eighth!) ring? Let's examine the makeup of Bronx Zoo '10 from a slightly different historical angle ...

Bluejays.com's Jordan Bastian says Jays lefty Marc Rzepczynski suffered a injury to his pitching hand thanks to a comebacker off the bat of Yankees second baseman Ramiro Pena Monday night.  Even though the injury does not appear to be serious, the 24 year-old hurler may have seen his chance to make the big club out of spring training go down the drain as he surrendered five runs in 4 2/3 innings during a 5-3 loss to the Bronx Bombers in Tampa.

Between 1910 and 1919, Boston played .579 ball, only finished under .500 once, and went 4/4 in their World Series appearances. A century later, are the Red Sox poised for another "Boston Teen Party"?

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Carpe Diem.

This is my third year penning previews at Batter's Box and my third year musing about the Orioles.  It hasn't been fun, folks- but I feel as though I'm growing up with this team- one crappy season after another.  But there may be hope yet.