Al Rosen was born on a Leap Year. (AP)On occasion, Big League Stew honors a birthday boy per week by taking a longer look at his career. Please join us in lighting the candles.

Al Rosen played only seven full years in the big leagues before a finger injury forced his early retirement at age 32. But in his day, the Cleveland Indians star was an MVP — he came within a single of winning the Triple Crown in 1953 — and he was arguably the best third baseman in the American League. He was also very likely the best Jewish baseball player between Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax, and if he had played a few more years, his name might be as much of a household name as theirs.

But circumstance conspired against him.

As Joe Posnanski writes:

He didn't really get started in pro baseball until after he served in the Navy for World War II. Then from age 22 to 25 he utterly dominated in the minor leagues. He was probably ready to be a star, but the Indians already had Ken Keltner at third base.

Keltner is one of the best third basemen not in the Hall of Fame — Bill James even named a tool for determining whether someone was Hall-Worthy after him, the Keltner List. So Rosen wasn't blocked by a scrub. But when he finally got his opportunity, he made the most of it.

Mike Napoli made the Angels regret trading him in 2011. (Getty)We all have questions about the 2012 season and Alex Remington luckily has some answers. The Stew's resident stats guru will address some of the big ones as the year progresses.

The Situation: It's not totally clear why the first full season of Mike Napoli's career came in 2010, when he was 28. It's not like he was Paul Lo Duca, who was just buried in the minors until his late 20s. Napoli was the Angels' primary catcher from 2006 to 2010, but from 2006 to 2009, the team never let him get more than 432 plate appearances, because they were determined to play Jeff Mathis. Mathis was a good defensive catcher, but he totally couldn't hit, with a career .194 batting average in 426 games and 1,360 plate appearances. Napoli was apparently not a great defensive catcher, but he really could hit: He cranked 20 homers in 2008 in just 78 games. (That season was shortened by a shoulder injury that landed him on the DL.)

But all that production wasn't enough for the Angels to give him the job outright, which would have meant cutting Mathis loose. In January of 2011, the Angels included Napoli in their ill-fated trade to get Vernon Wells from the Blue Jays, and a few days later, the Jays turned around and flipped Napoli to the Rangers for closer Frank Francisco. After all of that, Napoli busted out the whooping stick on the entire league, though his great success really irked Angels fans who wished for his offense.

The Question: Can Mike Napoli top the career year he posted in 2011?

Jayson Werth is looking to rebound after a disappointing 2011. (AP)We all have questions about the 2012 season and Alex Remington luckily has some answers. The Stew's resident stats guru will address some of the big ones as the year progresses.

The Situation: Both of the players who signed massive seven-year free agent deals last offseason disappointed their teams. But Boston Red Sox fans loudly gnashed their teeth over Carl Crawford's disappointing 2011, because they are accustomed to playing in October and narrowly missed the playoffs. Meanwhile, Jayson Werth's mediocre 2011 received slightly less attention. Werth was better than Crawford and the Nats were far worse than the Sox, so while Werth significantly underachieved his expectations, he wasn't particularly holding the team back.

However, he still owes the team six more seasons, and they'll be hoping that the 32-year-old Werth (he turns 33 in May) has a few more All-Star caliber seasons left in the tank. With Bryce Harper waiting in the wings and Anthony Rendon not far behind, the Nationals have a bright future. Pretty soon, Werth will be on a potential contender. When that happens, his performance will receive a lot more scrutiny.

The Question: Will Jayson Werth hit over .240 this year?

Bobby Bonilla turns 49 on Thursday. (Getty)On occasion, Big League Stew honors a birthday boy per week by taking a longer look at his career. Please join us in lighting the candles.

Roberto Martin Antonio Bonilla was born in the Bronx in 1963 and he later became one of the biggest stars in the league when he played for Pittsburgh in the early '90s. Bonilla and his alliterative teammate Barry Bonds were known as the "Killer B's," but their futures could not have turned out more different. Bonds became the best player in baseball while Bonilla became best known for a never-ending contract that he signed with his hometown New York Mets.

The Mets first signed Bonilla in 1992, but injuries reduced his effectiveness. They brought him back in 1999, but quickly realized their mistake and worked out a deal to defer the majority of his salary so they could afford to bring in other players to bolster the team. He agreed to defer $5.9 million of his contract and they agreed to pay him $1.2 million a year for 25 years, from 2011 to 2035. That plan, it later emerged, was predicated on Mets owner Fred Wilpon's investments with Bernie Madoff, which he regarded as a financial guarantee. Now, the Mets are teetering on the financial brink, and Bobby Bonilla will be collecting more than a million dollars a year from the Wilpons (or whoever buys the team from them) for the next quarter-century.

He was quite good in his prime, but modern metrics make it appear that he wasn't quite as good as baseball writers thought at the time. He was second to Bonds in the MVP voting in 1990 (the first of Bonds' seven MVP awards), and third in the vote in 1991 behind Bonds and the Atlanta Braves' Terry Pendleton. But because he possessed an iffy glove, he may not have been one of the 10 best players in the league in either year. The Pirates could never quite figure out where to put him, shuttling him between third base and corner outfield for most of his time with the team. And injury limited him; he only played 150 games six times during his 16-year career.

He sure could hit, though.

(Getty)We all have questions about the 2012 season and Alex Remington luckily has some answers. The Stew's resident stats guru will address some of the big ones as the year progresses.

The Situation: Carl Crawford didn't just have the worst year of his career in 2011. He had one of the worst years imaginable: Right after the best season of his career, which netted him a massive $142 million contract, the eighth-largest free-agent contract of all time (it was sixth until this year, when Pujols and Fielder pushed him back), Carl Crawford had a year-long slump. He hit .255 in hitter-friendly Fenway, and even slumped to the smallest stolen base total of his career. Way back in the hazy mists of 2010, I wrote that his contract might be a good deal:

If he stays healthy, he has a good chance to be worth the money. But, over the course of seven long years, that's a big if.

Now, Crawford did go on the DL with a hand injury, so I wasn't completely off base. But it still reads as an extraordinarily naive prediction. Still, back then, after Crawford had posted back-to-back All-Star campaigns and established himself as one of the best outfielders in the league, the contract seemed high but not unreasonable. Now, the 30-year-old has to prove he isn't over the hill.

The Question: Are Carl Crawford's best years behind him?

(Getty Images)

We all have questions about the 2012 season and Alex Remington luckily has some answers. The Stew's resident stats guru will address some of the big ones as the year progresses.

The Situation: After three months of waiting, the second-best free agent on the market signed the second-biggest deal of the offseason. Everyone knew that Prince Fielder would get paid, but few guessed that he would wind up with the Detroit Tigers, where his father became the highest-paid player in baseball. Few also guessed that he'd get nine years and $214 million, which struck most outside observers as a premium the Tigers might come to regret paying.

For now, though, every other team in the AL Central is quaking in its shoes. Fielder can mash, and Cabrera is as devastating a hitter as there is in baseball. (Since 2009, Cabrera actually has a higher wOBA than Albert Pujols, .422 to .418.) Over their combined 16 years in baseball, they have combined for 507 homers.

The Question: Can Prince Fielder and Miguel Cabrera combine for 80 homers in 2012?

(Getty)On occasion, Big League Stew honors a birthday boy per week by taking a longer look at his career. Please join us in lighting the candles.

It must be a strange life, being Bill Pecota and being better known for being a statistic than as a man. When Nate Silver developed his PECOTA projection system in 2003, long before creating fivethirtyeight.com or becoming a New York Times writer, he knew he wanted to give it a silly acronym name that honored a player from when he was growing up in the 1980s. He thought of Dan Petry and Bill Pecota. The PECOTA acronym he eventually settled on was Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm.

As Silver explained to Rich Lederer:

Jose Reyes hopes he won't become the second Samson with the Marlins. (Team prez David being the other.) (AP)We all have questions about the 2012 season and Alex Remington luckily has some answers. The Stew's resident stats guru will address some of the big ones as the year progresses.

The Situation: Jose Reyes, the Miami Marlins' new shortstop, is a hard player to project.  On the one hand, the 28-year-old is coming off an amazing season, making his fourth All-Star team while leading the league in batting average. On the other hand, he only played 126 games, and he made his third and fourth trips to the DL in the past three seasons alone.

More troubling, his injuries in 2011 were hamstring-related. Hamstring problems plagued Jose for the first five years of his career: he missed games with hammie issues in his rookie 2003, as well as 2004, 2007, and 2008. For a player who makes his living with his speed, that's genuinely frightening, and it led to the validation of one of Mets owner Fred Wilpon's predictions early last year.

"He thinks he's going to get Carl Crawford money," Wilpon told The New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin. "He's had everything wrong with him. He won't get it."

Wilpon was right, but you can't feel too bad for his former player. Reyes got six years and $106 million (rather than Crawford's seven years/$142 million — although the Red Sox would probably ask for a mulligan on that one if they got the chance.)

Reyes is a great player when healthy. But even if he's fully healthy next year, will he be able to match his 2012 production? Or did he just luck his way into a career year when free agency was on the horizon?

The Question: Can Jose Reyes repeat as NL batting champ?