While everybody is focusing on the NCAA Tournament, the 2013 Major League Baseball season is shaping up to be one of the most intriguing in recent memory.
The first official regular season game is Sunday, when the Texas Rangers travel to Houston to take on the Astros. The Astros just made the jump to the American league this year.
There are plenty of questions coming into this season.
Who is going to emerge as the front-runner early from the beast that is the AL East? Can the Los Angeles Dodgers or "The New York Yankees of the West," as people are calling them now win with their star-studded roster?
No doubt the Dodgers have the talent to compete for the NL title and maybe even a World Series, but will they be able to mesh? The San Francisco Giants showed last year that team chemistry is important to make a high-paid roster work.
Yet at the same time, the compensation isn’t everything.
Tell me that having a payroll like the Giants is necessary to make the playoffs, and then I’ll show you the 2012 Oakland Athletics. Oakland won 94 games with the second lowest payroll in baseball.
Part of the fun of baseball is the unpredictability, which is very similar to that basketball tournament that gets all the attention this time of year.
Reach the columnist at ross.dunham@asu.edu
