At the opening panel of the Astros’ FanFest on Saturday, I had a pretty jarring realization. New Houston general manager Jeff Luhnow looks almost exactly like ESPN.com and Grantland.com sportswriter Bill Simmons.

Really, it’s uncanny. I couldn’t stop thinking about it as he gave reasoned answers about how Houston is attempting to make itself relevant again. So, I thought I’d steal a page from Simmon’s book and sum up the FanFest event with a running diary. Enjoy…

9:30 a.m. – Because Port Arthur is not Houston, I had to get on the road pretty early. Luckily, the rain that has poured on the area for the past week decided to take a day off. Saturday’s weather was the first time I’ve worn sunglasses in a month.

10:45 a.m. – First time I haven’t had to pay for parking at Minute Maid Park. It’s a nice feeling.

10:48 a.m. – It’s cold both inside and outside MMP on this day. And guess who didn’t bring a jacket? The lesson, as always, is I’m an idiot.

10:50 a.m. – I get inside with my freshly minted press credentials for just that day and meet the other writers who are covering the event. The Astros, through social media director Alyson Footer, invited a number of bloggers and writers to attend in an official capacity with an opportunity to interview Brad Mills, Bud Norris and J.D. Martinez. Which is why I spent my Saturday in Houston hanging out with a big chunk of the Houston Astros blogosphere.

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Next month my things to do list include:

• Sleep
• Plant the seeds of baseball obsession in my daughter
• Prepare for my trip to Kissimmee, Florida.
• Beat Mass Effect 3

Baseball season tends to get a bit chaotic for me. I watch 150+ games via MLB.TV and try to get to Atlanta for a live game or two when the Astros are in town. I tend to schedule stuff around my baseball obsession, especially day games, so typically my nights are shot and the grass will grow a little bit longer than I'd like. That doesn't mean I don't attend family functions or even go out anymore, it just means all my friends have gotten married and typically decline any sort of male interaction.

I consider myself lucky that I found one who has supported my baseball obsession and put up with my gaming addiction (see: Mass Effect 3). She also doesn't boss me around or guilty me into staying put at the house. Which really isn't a bad thing considering she's the one that wanted to get the pool table, but I digress.

I live on the East Coast which means a majority of the games I watch typically start at 8:05PM EST and end some where around 11:00 PM EST. If the game goes into extra's or I have game recap duties that night I'm pushing midnight before I get to bed. With a 6 AM wake up call in my future, doing that four nights a week tends to wear on me. Sure I could catch up on the weekends but my toddler typically has other ideas.

But it's all good, because we make sacrifices for the things we love.

Speaking of my daughter I found this wonderful game on the internet. She turns three next month and is starting to pick up more and more things. Meaning it's the time in every kids life when their parents begin to push their own obsessions on them. I'd like to think I'm better than this, but I'm not.

My final "to do" in preparing for the season is making a trip down to Florida to see the Astros play. Due to the schedule we'll actually be in Kissimmee for one game, but we picked a weekend in which they'd be playing no more than two hours away from the ball park. I'm excited as it would be the first time I've ever gone to Spring Training. If anyone has any suggested dinning venues and/or regular tips I'd love to hear them.

What are some of the things you're doing to prepare for the season? For college students are you trying to get ahead of your school work? Are you trying to build up some good rapport with your significant other so that you can stay up way past your bed time? Are you trying to get more rest like me? Or going to Spring Training?

Or am I flying solo on this one.

Yesterday, Baseball Prospectus released the first 2012 iteration of their annual stat projection system, PECOTA. Please note that this is a projection system, not a prediction system. It's a fine line and sometimes BP writers get huffy when PECOTA is incorrectly labeled.

As the release of the inaugural PECOTAs are always, for me, a momentous occasion on par with Christmas, Halloween, Guy Fawkes Day, and International Talk Like A Pirate Day, I gleefully neglected work and family to fire up Microsoft Excel to wade through the prognostications.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with PECOTA, it's a baseball stat projection system named after Bill Pecota, as average a player as there ever was. The projections are based on quantum mechanics, chaos theory, and super string theory, where the end result is a collection of stats that represents the weighted average of the different calculation iterations.

For the type of people who fight Saber Boy for a living, what this means is that the projections represent the most likely performance of a player. I'm done trying to explain it. If you want to know more, Google is available.

Anyway, I dove into the Astros' PECOTA projections, starting with the hitters, and my comments are below.

NOTE: The article image has nothing to do with the Astros or with this article. I just thought it looked funny.

• PECOTA lists Carlos Lee at 200 pounds. I've heard of people being in the best shape of their life at Spring Training, but dang. If PECOTA is right, Carlos Lee now only weighs 30 pounds more than Jose Altuve and makes Chris Snyder look like Goliath at 220 lbs. Maybe all of the misplaced mockery from the Astros.com message boards finally got to him? Carlos, man, it's time to pick up the hamburgers again or we'll have to change your nickname to El Caballito.
• Chris Johnson is projected for 54 plate appearances. We spent last week discussing if Johnson is primed for a breakout and should get the majority of the starts at third base. If PECOTA is correct, then Johnson is headed back to AAA. I'm going against PECOTA on this one. CJ will get at least 55 plate appearances.
• Catchers are only projected for 307 plate appearances. This projection implies that the Astros will be playing catcher-less for about half of the season. While of dubious legality, this is certainly a strategy that has never been tried before, and it should be interesting to see if the ploy is successful. Perhaps the Astros will play Downs and Paredes at third simultaneously in lieu of a catcher, in order to negate infield defensive problems.

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It appears that several members of my twitter feed feel that with the Super Bowl now over baseball season has begun. The NBA, NHL and March Madness might have something to say about that, but I'll play along.

While baseball still does have two months until it engulfs our lives, pitchers and catchers report in less than two weeks and a week or so after that Florida and Arizona will again be filled with the crack of the bat and the whizzing of fastballs. With that in mind here are the Astros Spring Training story lines to keep an eye on during the month designated March Madness.

Who Wins the Third Base Job

It seems that the battle is between Jimmy Paredes and Chris Johnson despite my best efforts to get Matt Downs thrown in the conversation. Paredes has the defensive upside while Johnson has the power upside and Downs apparently has the pine upside.

Clack has already discussed in-depth Johnson's upside and ability to bounce back from his sophomore slump. I'll add that when Johnson went down to AAA last year he posted a BB% of 10.6 which is encouraging. With a .383 batting average on balls in play (BABIP) Paredes has got some serious regression coming his way. Whats interesting about his case is that he also struck out at a 26.3% of the time which is high, even for someone like Johnson. Paredes strikeout number had never been above 20% in the minors until the 2011 season (20.7% at AA).

Paredes strikeout rate could be a case of being rushed to the majors; spending more time in the minors could help his development. Let's also not forget that he only recently started playing third base on a full-time basis and still needs some work at the hot corner. In the minors he's played 112 games at third base and 197 at second base.

In limited playing time the pine rider posted a .276/.347/.518 line accompanied by a .315 BABIP. At the third base position that's an above average offensive player. Defensively he's closer to Johnson than he is to Paredes. Thing is Downs has been shifted around quite a bit in the infield as well and has even found a little time in the outfield, so given some solid time at one position we could see some improvements. Downs is probably better suited for second base but you can't ignore that offensive production at the third base position, even if it regresses a bit this season.

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We have an early winner for the most obvious headline of 2012, right? After seeing that the Astros invited a unique mix of prospects to spring training on Monday, my thoughts turned to how likely it was that George Springer broke camp with Houston as a starting outfielder.

It was crazy. It was silly. It was ill-advised, but it was what popped into my head all the same. I decided to go home and trot out Baseball Reference to see how many games certain Astro first-round picks had in the minors before reaching the majors. I thought I remembered Craig Biggio getting up to the majors quickly, and Lance Berkman did too, but I wasn't sure how quick.

Turns out both had over 100 games, with Berkman topping 200 minor league games before making his MLB debut. Springer has 8 career games.

That alone is the biggest reason why he won't break camp with the team.

What surprised me is I did find some precedent for a first-round pick not playing very much in the minors. It just so happened to be one of the Astros two former No. 1 overall picks. Floyd Bannister, who was selected out of Arizona State, only needed 7 games in the minors after he was drafted in 1976 before breaking camp with the big league club in 1977.

Bannister went on to post a sub-4.00 ERA and win 16 games in a season, but he did not do either with the Astros. Oh, and he is not a position player. Both of those things bode poorly for Springer.

So, if we're just talking about position players, is there any precedent with other teams? Not really. Mark Teixeira was a pretty sure-fire prospect back in the day, but he spent 86 games in the minors the year after being drafted.

Rickie Weeks actually debuted in the majors the same year he was drafted in 2003, but only spent 7 games in the majors in September and was in the minors for the entire next season. Troy Tulwotzki spent 122 games in the minors before making his debut. Buster Posey spent 125 games in the minors.

Ryan Zimmerman is the closest we came, but even he spent 67 games in the minors the same year he was drafted No. 4 overall and spent 20 games in the majors that same September. He opened the next season as the starting third baseman, but he's got 59 more minor league games than Springer...

Gordon Beckham is another very close test case for Springer, since he signed late, spent 14 games in 2008 in the minors and played 45 more in 2009 before making his MLB debut.

If the Astros followed that timeline, that'd put them calling up mid-May to the big leagues, which could, I guess, be feasible (but not really).

Oh, and don't forget about poster child for this Pete Incaviglia. The college slugger who single-handedly made baseball outlaw draft pick trades never spent a day in the minors, moving straight to the major leagues. Unfortunately, he didn't exactly develop into a future star.

So, does the Astros invitation to Springer mean anything? No, it just gave me an excuse to dig through Baseball Reference for a couple hours. Winning!

We had some great submissions from last weeks article asking you, dear readers, to come up with a slogan for the 2012 season. I think I've managed to snag the good ones. I didn't use anyone's from the generator and I tried to go with the more positive ones because that's the point of a slogan, but a few may of slipped by the catcher.

I can't guarantee we'll have the slogan displayed, but if we have a good turn out I am going to see if I can finagle David into displaying the slogan somewhere on this site.

The vote will be up for a little over a week, ending Sunday the 12th at 6PM CST. We'll announce the winning slogan on the next podcast which will be recorded on the 12th.

Without further ado here are the five slogans you can vote on. Feel free to vote as often as you want.

"I'm in the best shape of my life." Spring Training Edition No. 10,581

Maybe the sub-title comes across as too cynical. But as spring training approaches, the ritual of players telling us about their excellent athletic condition is upon us. While Chris Johnson's general theme as told to Brian McTaggert falls in the category of normal spring training fare, his prediction of a break out season is more bold than usual. Also, Johnson's admission that he was too comfortable, and perhaps even ill prepared, last year is more candid than the normal spring quotes.

In some ways, I think Chris Johnson is the victim of his own success in 2010. Riding on the crest of a .387 BABIP, Johnson showed off an impressive rookie offensive performance. As we continually reminded people here at TCB, his BABIP was unsustainable and made it unlikely that his performance would be repeated in 2011.. His 2010 offensive stats set expectations too high among fans, and when he struggled as a hitter in 2011, many fans soured on Johnson's future as an Astros third baseman. The 2010 numbers apparently affected Johnson's mindset and preparation in 2011, which he describes as coming in "on your high horse after a good rookie season."

The Astros have told Chris that he will be given an opportunity to compete with Jimmy Paredes in spring training for the starting 3d base job. So, let's evaluate whether Johnson can salvage his major league career this season.

First, let's examine the general positives and negatives for Chris Johnson's case for becoming the starting third baseman.

The negatives:

• Age. Johnson will turn 28 at the end of next season. That's too old to be a prospect, and "break outs" are less frequent at that age. The Astros have to wonder if Johnson's age makes him less likely than Paredes to be part of a future contending Astros' team.
• Defense. Johnson has struggled to field well in the majors. This is reflected both in errors and advanced fielding metrics. Over the past two seasons, Chris averaged -15 runs, according to DRS, and -20 runs/150 innings, according to UZR. Paredes wasn't a great fielder--he is raw and sometimes isn't fundamentally sound--but he has both youth and great athletic ability on his side.
• Plate Discipline. Johnson strikes out too much and draws walks infrequently. His 0.16 BB/K ratio in the majors is terrible, and his minor league ratios don't foretell much improvement. Jimmy Paredes suffers from the same problem, and his BB/K ratio isn't much different. However, perhaps improvement is a greater possibility, given his age. For Paredes, the question might be whether he can improve his plate discipline more readily in the minors than the majors.

The positives:

• Likely Improvement Over 2011. Chris has his positives as a hitter; he sprays line drives to all fields, which can make him a tough hitter to defend. Johnson is unlikely to repeat 2010, but he isn't as bad a hitter as his 2011 stats would indicate.
• Potential regression by competitors. Paredes' .383 BABIP in 2011 puts him in a surprisingly similar position to Chris Johnson's 2010 offensive splurge. Paredes is unlikely to sustain the BABIP, and, as a result, he may be unable to meet offensive expectations in 2013. It is unclear if Matt Downs will be given a shot at starting at 3d base or whether he will be slotted for a utility role. There are signs that Downs' 2011 BABIP is higher than expected (though by not as much as Paredes), and his offensive performance may regress somewhat in 2012.
• Power. Home run power is in short supply in the Astros' lineup. Chris Johnson is a strong hitter who can hit the ball as far as anyone. If Chris can make adjustments in areas like pitch identification and understanding how pitchers are approaching him, he might flash the 15 - 20 HR type hitter that seemed possible after 2010.

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