By James Walker and Robert Bellamy/The Conversation

For Major League Baseball teams, spring brings the promise of a better year. For the baseball media, it means putting their expertise to the test and forecasting player and team performances.
Most of these forays into the future will be quickly forgotten, and for baseball’s prognosticators, the public’s amnesia is fortunate: they’re prone to swing and miss with great frequency.
In fact, last season featured some of the most surprising final regular season standings in the last 60 years – at least, when compared to how the media experts envisioned things panning out.

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Posted on March 31, 2016

By Dan O’Shea

The White Sox have invested in a 37-year-old shortstop coming of the worst year of his career. Should you do the same?
Jimmy Rollins held virtually no fantasy value in 2015, and sat on the free-agent sidelines most of the winter until the Sox signed him in February. In his prime, he surpassed 20 HRs and 30 SBs in the same season four different times, making him an annual resident in overall top 20 fantasy rankings. Even as recently as 2014, he hit 17 HRs and had 28 SBs, delivering near-top-tier fantasy value at the shallow position of SS.
Yet, he has shown his age in recent years via a plummeting BA and OPS (.224 and .643, respectively, last year were both career-lows) and games missed due to injuries. When the Sox signed him, it seemed like a decent investment in veteran help and a hedge bet while they waited for younger talents like Tim Anderson, Carlos Sanchez and Tyler Saladino to fully develop and claim infield jobs.

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Posted on March 30, 2016

Another Beachwood Special Report

The local fanboy press corps went gaga when Joe Maddon arrived at spring training one morning in a hippie van, but that’s nothing compared to what the Cubs skipper has planned for the regular season, the Beachwood has learned. On tap:
* On the home opener against the Reds, Maddon will parachute out of Air Trump One onto home plate to meet the umpires with his lineup card.
* Maddon will make his first trip to the mound at Wrigley to change pitchers on a hoverboard that explodes into flames.
* Maddon will arrive for the April series against the visiting Brewers through a tunnel dug from the Murphy’s Bleachers, dressed as El Chapo.
* Maddon won’t even show up when the Padres come to town in May, managing the game via Skype from Harry Caray’s.

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Posted on March 29, 2016

By Jim Coffman

First, a quick women’s basketball note (we will begin today’s regularly scheduled Blackhawks column shortly): DePaul bowed out of the NCAA tournament with an 83-71 loss to Oregon State at a regional semifinal in Dallas on Saturday.
The Blue Demons did a good job limiting the scoring of Oregon State’s powerful 6-6 center Ruth Hamblin, but she was still a force in the middle with nine rebounds and three blocked shots to go with her 13 points. And while DePaul was busy doubling Hamblin down low, Beaver guard Jamie Weisner was going off from the outside, totaling a career-high 38 points.
Every time it looked like DePaul might mount a rally, Weisner drained one of her career-high seven three-pointers to make sure her team stayed comfortably in front. The Blue Demons finished the season with 27 victories against nine defeats and are looking forward to next season, when they lose only two seniors from a talented roster led by junior guard Jessica January.

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Posted on March 28, 2016

By DePaul Athletics

DALLAS – DePaul battled back, but time ran out on the Blue Demons’ comeback as they fell 83-71 to second-seeded Oregon State on Saturday in the NCAA regional semifinal.
For the third straight game, Jessica January led DePaul’s offensive effort with 20 points with seven coming in the final 10 minutes. The junior eclipsed the 20-point mark for the fifth time in her career including in DePaul’s final two games of the season.
Jacqui Grant tied a season-high with 15 points, Mart’e Grays added 14 and Chanise Jenkins added 10 points.

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Posted on March 28, 2016

By Thomas Chambers

If you think TrackNotes has been in hibernation, you’d be about right.
But real bears are never totally unaware of the goings-on around the den. So as Spring sprungs, we can declare that the new Thoroughbred horse racing season has just now taken on a personality of its own, with some interesting and even exciting races so far.

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Posted on March 26, 2016

By Jim Coffman and Steve Rhodes

United Center curse. Plus: Reminder: Ricky Renteria Is The White Sox Bench Coach; The Joe Maddon Show Has Jumped The Shark; Illinois Team Secretly Makes Sweet 16; Triton Lays An Egg; Finding Value In Vegas, Baby; The Everton Minute; and The New York Times Smokes Out The NFL.

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Posted on March 24, 2016

It takes months – okay, weeks – to compile a fantasy baseball draft guide, and between the end of January and the opening of the regular season, I often start to re-evaluate some of my rankings. Some of this is based on spring training performance of various players and some of the more detailed news and analysis you start hearing once spring training starts (though I don’t need to tell you it’s never advisable to build a draft strategy entirely around spring training performance, right?).
Overall, the rethinking is more a reflection of ongoing thought about what I’ve compiled. With that in mind, here are some players whose draft rankings I’ve been thinking about a lot lately:

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Posted on March 24, 2016

Another Beachwood Thought Experiment

“Donald Trump has threatened to run attack ads against the Ricketts family after the Cubs owners contributed money to a super PAC opposing the GOP candidate,” Sports Illustrated notes.
“In an interview with the Washington Post, Trump laid out exactly what he meant last month when he said the Ricketts ‘better watch out‘ when spending against him.

“Well, it means that I’ll start spending on them,” Trump said. “I’ll start taking ads telling them all what a rotten job they’re doing with the Chicago Cubs.

As many have pointed out, it’s an odd thing to say at a time when the Cubs are the darlings of Major League Baseball and the favorites to win the World Series.
But it got us to thinking: What if Trump ran the Cubs?

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Posted on March 23, 2016

By Triton Athletics

The resurgence of the Triton College women’s basketball team was a great source of pride for the school and the community this season. The Trojans finished with a 23-10 record, their first 20-plus win season since 2003. The team’s great play earned them a berth in the Region IV District D championship game at Waubonsee Community College in Sugar Grove earlier this month.
One of the driving forces behind the Trojans’ turnaround season was the presence of first-year head coach Kellee Robertson. Under her watch, the program improved by 18 wins from the previous season. Robertson was unanimously named North Central Community College Conference (N4C) Coach of the Year.

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Posted on March 22, 2016