It’s Season Preview Time!

Hi, everybody. The 2016 major league baseball championship season is just around the corner. It’s so close you can feel it. We’ve been waiting for this ever since last October, and while the wait is always long, the rather odd events of this spring have really made the wait seem interminable. In case you need the refresher:

List of biggest Spring Training stories now includes cars, horses, a pig, a dog and a 14 year old kid. Eventually baseball will happen.

— Jeff Heckelman (@JeffHeckelman) March 19, 2016

So, yeah, we just want to talk baseball already. And talk it we shall! For the next two weeks — from now through Opening Day — we’re going to be looking ahead to the 2016 season. We start this morning, with Stacey Gotsulias’ look at 10 things to look forward to this season, and we’ll finish with Jason Linden’s annual Opening Day essay (here are Jason’s essays from Opening Day 2014 and 2015).

In between we’ll look at various topics. Not every team is getting previewed, but it’s an even year, so you know we have to put the San Francisco Giants under the microscope. We’ll also look at the continuously fascinating National League Central, and we’ll have a visual look at team dopplegangers. But not everything will be team-based. We’ll examine the schedule, fifth starters, food, what we can expect from statistics this year, Opening Day games, and of course, Vin Scully. As a bonus, we’ll have a special Season Preview episode of Doing It For Bartolo on Opening Day to help us finish with a flourish.

Also, as we’re wont to do, we had a special logo created to denote Season Preview pieces:

We’re champing at the bit to get this season started, and we hope you are too. We hope you’ll come back each day to check out our 2016 Season Preview. As always, once each story goes live, I’ll post the link to it below.

Happy Baseball!

• Mon., March 21: Stacey Gotsulias, “Ten Things to Look Forward to in 2016”
• Tue., March 22: Shane Tourtellotte, “Divergence: Two Paths Through the NL Central”
• Wed., March 23: John LaRue: “Ground Rule Doppelgangers”
• Thur., March 24: Alex Remington: “Strength of Schedule: Could the Braves Give the Tigers a Playoff Spot?”
• Fri., March 25: John Paschal, “Vin Scully, the Voice of Our Game”
• Mon., March 28: Chris Gigley, “The (Even) Year of the Giants”
• Tue., March 29: Frank Firke, “What to Expect from Public MLB Analytics and Commentary in 2016”
• Wed., March 30, Emma Baccellieri, “A Taxonomy of Fifth Starters”
• Thu., March 31, Eno Sarris, “So You Want to Eat Well at the Game…”
• Fri., April 1, Corinne Landrey, “A Guide to Opening Day”
• Mon., April 4, Jason Linden, “You Never Know”