• Cincinnati Reds: Next year, impatient ones. Next year, when Joey Votto(notes) has blossomed into a superstar and Jay Bruce(notes) finally has played a full and effective season and the Reds can open with a rotation featuring Aroldis Chapman(notes), Johnny Cueto(notes), Edinson Volquez(notes), Homer Bailey(notes) and Mike Leake(notes) or Travis Wood(notes) – that’s when this team can embrace the whole darkhorse thing. Until then, pop a Xanax, please. There are things to like – Chapman’s fastball being Nos. 1, 2 and 3, worthy of multiple places – but holes, too. Dusty Baker is not the proper manager to nurture a stable of young arms. The Reds haven’t fielded a legitimate shortstop since Barry Larkin. Their bullpen runs thin. So, please, don’t crown them yet. These are not the 2008 Rays, not by a long shot.

Lindstrom
 

• Houston Astros: Years of skinflint draft-day bonuses – thanks, Drayton McLane, for being the only owner in all of baseball to adhere to Bud Selig’s non-mandated slotting rules – have led to this. It’s not a brutal team; just a bad one. And no matter what sort of attitude new manager Brad Mills(notes) brings from the Red Sox, he can’t make chicken salad here. The Astros come with no demonstrable strength and a bevy of weaknesses, chief among them a bullpen that brought in failed Florida closer Matt Lindstrom(notes) to upgrade the corps. Even if Roy Oswalt(notes) and Lance Berkman(notes) are healthy – and right now, neither is a lock for opening day – Houston is a leaning tower of bad contracts and grim prospects. And timber it shall go.

• Milwaukee Brewers: There is plenty to like here, and there will be as long as Ryan Braun, Yovani Gallardo(notes) and Prince Fielder(notes) are in Beeropolis. Braun is locked in until 2015, so checkmark there, and Gallardo isn’t arbitration eligible until next year. Fielder’s post-2011 free agency will linger over the Brewers all season and perhaps overshadow a nice bunch constructed by Doug Melvin. The lineup is potentially potent, particularly if rookie shortstop Alcides Escobar(notes) hits, and a Latroy Hawkins(notes)-Todd Coffey-Trevor Hoffman(notes) seventh-eighth-ninth, with Mitch Stetter(notes) providing lefty-specialist innings, is potent. Then there’s the rotation, the sticking-point yin to Fielder’s contract yang. Gallardo is great. Randy Wolf(notes) should be good. The Doug Davis(notes)-Dave Bush-Jeff Suppan(notes)-Manny Parra grab bag – well, there’s a reason they’re not picked to finish first.

• Pittsburgh Pirates: Two years into the Neal Huntington regime, the Pirates have indeed changed. They are a new variation on an old kind of suck, of course, but at least fans get a whole new set of players to boo. The Pirates will almost certainly spend their record 18th consecutive season under .500, as no long-term fix exists from within and no short-term fix is available for the dollars given to Huntington. So goes his handicap: general manager of a franchise whose greatest ally is hope. Sure, the Pirates could rock a particularly good draft – though going safe with catcher Tony Sanchez fourth overall last year is the sort of low-risk maneuver that doomed past Pittsburgh regimes – but come on. These are the Pirates, futile as ever, and down here is where they belong.