MLB spring training 2024: One player to watch on every team
Spring training has arrived — is there anything more beautiful to a baseball lover’s soul than Grapefruit and Cactus League?! — and it’s our first chance to check out newcomers on our favorite teams.
Do the results matter? Not as much as they used to, as organizations have learned that small sample sizes from spring training aren’t necessarily predictive of future performance.
Still, there are players to watch a little more closely than others this spring. So, let’s dig into one for each team, zeroing in on rehabbing veterans, promising youngsters or top prospects looking to make the club’s Opening Day roster. You’ll see one pattern here: Hitters who need to improve their plate discipline and/or approach. While spring training stats don’t tell us the whole story, strikeout and walk rates do stabilize pretty quickly, so those are some key numbers to note once the games begin.
If you play fantasy baseball, these are some of the players you’ll want to focus on as well. Let’s start off with the team that has the most hype coming off a winter for the ages.
Los Angeles Dodgers: Yoshinobu Yamamoto
All eyes — and a large contingent of media that the Dodgers will have to learn to adapt to — will be on Shohei Ohtani and Yamamoto. The signs are already positive for Ohtani as he recovers from elbow surgery: In his first on-field batting practice session, he homered 10 times in 21 swings.
With Walker Buehler on a slow rollout and perhaps unlikely to see game action this spring, that leaves Yamamoto with a little additional pressure to live up to his advance billing right from the start of the season. His first bullpen session — take this for what that’s worth — was impressive enough to send waves around Dodgers camp with one coach telling ESPN’s Alden Gonzalez, “I heard he was just dotting everywhere.”
The biggest thing to watch once spring games begin is how many swings and misses Yamamoto is inducing. That will be the early signs on whether he can be a No. 1 starter.
San Diego Padres: Yuki Matsui
The Padres will have a busy spring training. They have a new manager in Mike Shildt. They have all those new pitchers acquired in the Juan Soto trade. Manny Machado had offseason elbow surgery and probably won’t play the field much (if it all). They still need a center fielder, as Shildt has indicated Fernando Tatis Jr. will remain in right field. We all know about that 2-12 record in extra-inning games, and with Josh Hader now in Houston, sorting out the bullpen pecking order will be key. The left-handed Matsui closed in Japan, where he had sub-2.00 ERAs the past three seasons, and could win the job with a nice spring.
