TUCSON, Ariz. – Inside a room at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, five college students sat rapt in front of a big projection screen. San Diego State's basketball team takes one on the road in case it needs an impromptu film session, and while this qualified, it was a far different sort of film than the team usually watches.

Earlier in the day, San Diego State coach Steve Fisher made an off-handed comment about how he secured an advance copy of the new documentary on the "Fab Five," the transcendent group of Michigan players whom he'd recruited and coached nearly 20 years ago. Immediately, the Aztecs asked to watch it, and since none wanted to crowd around a laptop, they begged video coordinator Dave Velazquez to borrow the big screen.

Velazquez told the players they were supposed to be in study hall. Forget study hall. They needed to see this. Now.

They knew the boilerplate Fab Five facts – the baggy shorts, the black socks, the hype before hype was currency. They wanted

TEMPE, Ariz. – The autograph hounds aren't foaming quite as frightfully for Mike Trout(notes) as they are for Bryce Harper(notes), and the adjectives from prospectphiles are a smidgen less fawning, and even the praise from his teammates is tamped down comparatively. Harper is name brand, Trout store brand – almost the same product, only one with a fancier label and costlier price tag.

Outside of Los Angeles Angels camp, where the veterans are doing their best to bite their tongues about Trout, his profile isn't quite the same. And yet Trout is only a year older than Harper, dominated both levels of Class A last season and is doing his best to convince the Angels that summoning him later this year as a teenager wouldn't be nearly as silly as it sounds.

"I'd love to be here," Trout said.

He stopped himself.

"I'm not one of them guys who's going to be too cocky," Trout said. "I just go out there and play. Signing bonus, all that – I mean, you don't make your money until you get to the big

PEORIA, Ariz. – He's still just 24. Think about that. Felix Hernandez(notes) has permeated baseball's conscious for a decade now. He threw 90 mph at 14 years old, fetched nearly $1 million to sign 16, slayed the minor leagues through the rest of his teenage years, wore a Seattle Mariners uniform at 19, got fat at 21, fit at 22, dominated at 23 and won the American League Cy Young at 24. And only now is he entering his supposed prime, the time when the mental and physical coalesce into 6-foot-3 and 230 pounds of right-handed unfairness.

"Ten years?" Hernandez said Saturday afternoon. "It feels like I've been around for 20."

This thought often enters Hernandez's head. He has accomplished so much in his first decade in baseball – hit his profession's individual peak, got married, had kids, mastered English, moved from Venezuela to Seattle – that when he asks himself what's next, he struggles to answer. There are the obvious. Stay healthy. Win a World Series. Hit free agency in four years

SURPRISE, Ariz. – Six springs ago, a first baseman named Calvin Pickering rolled into Kansas City Royals camp on the wave of a movement. Every year or two, the sabermetric community picks a new cause célèbre to champion as someone wronged by the longtime baseball men who dislike him for all the wrong reasons. Calvin Pickering, all 300 pounds of him, was their latest exemplar.

The biggest support of the Free Calvin Pickering movement came from neither a Royals fan nor a number cruncher. A computer program named PECOTA, which stands for Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm, made googly eyes at Pickering. It couldn't see the gut hanging over his belt. It didn't realize that Pickering's bat, which hit 35 home runs at Triple-A the previous year, turned impotent against major league fastballs and breaking balls. PECOTA's abject objectivity – predicting a season's statistics based strictly on numbers, and how similar players with similar stats had done at that age – led

SURPRISE, Ariz. – For someone who wants to close, Neftali Feliz(notes) is doing an awfully good impression of a starting pitcher.

Over three scoreless innings Wednesday, Feliz throttled the Oakland Athletics with a fastball that kissed 98 mph, embarrassed two batters with backward-K curveballs, dropped in changeups at 90 mph and, for good measure, unleashed a new pitch.

The cut fastball Feliz is learning is, in the words of one scout sitting behind home plate, "unfair. Not Mo [Rivera] in his prime, but it's a hell of a fourth pitch. He's got the best stuff I've seen all spring."

The only reason the Texas Rangers are even considering keeping the 22-year-old in the bullpen to start the season is that Feliz is comfortable as closer. And yet after this 53-pitch outing, even Feliz is beginning to come around to the simple reality: If the Rangers know what's best – and from general manager Jon Daniels through manager Ron Washington and pitching coach Mike Maddux, they usually do – Feliz will

GLENDALE, Ariz. – His mouth opened Tuesday. For the longest time, it emitted the most glorious things. There might be five people in history who could go word for word with Muhammad Ali. He spoke in song. Ali without a voice is like B.B. King without Lucille.

Ali spent Tuesday morning inside the Chicago White Sox's clubhouse. He was there with Athletes For Hope, an organization that urges players to find a cause and donate time and money. His wife, Lonnie, and his sister-in-law Marilyn Williams helped him into his chair. His weight hunched him over. A blank expression froze his face. Parkinson's Disease is unfair and unflinching.

And watching his mouth open was especially cruel, because it wasn't doing so to talk, to bless the room anew with witticisms. It did because Ali couldn't control it. When Lonnie noticed his jaw slack, she pushed it back up.

Standing on the other side of Ali was Ozzie Guillen, the White Sox manager and, like it or not, his oratory heir. Blasphemy? Hardly. The

TUCSON, Ariz. – Some day, maybe soon, maybe not for a long while, Christina-Taylor Green’s family will forget the sound of her voice, the smell of her hair, the strength of her hug. Details fade over time. They want those parts for themselves. The rest, though? The spirit and the ideals and the energy and the innocence? Those are for the world to share.

Christina has been gone for two months. She was born on 9/11 and died after being shot in the chest during the massacre that wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, whom Christina wanted to meet. She was a chatty 9-year-old, a good student, a baseball player, a friend, a little sister, a daughter, nobody’s and everybody’s. Now she’s gone, and they’re all trying to figure out life without her.

“How to handle it, how we handle it as a family, we’re just learning,” John Green said.

John is Christina’s father. He is also a scout for the Los Angeles Dodgers, and if not for his connections with Major League Baseball, the Chicago White Sox and

GLENDALE, Ariz. – The stowaway in Clayton Kershaw’s(notes) luggage was big and blue and two-dimensional. It didn’t have a name, unless you wanted to use the one printed above its head, and let’s be honest: Not even the cruelest parents would name their kid Canvas Catcher.

Halfway around the world, surrounded by poverty and disease, trying to do the Lord’s work, Kershaw still couldn’t escape baseball. At 22 and on the cusp of stardom, the Los Angeles Dodgers left-hander refused to miss even a week of offseason workouts. Nor could he go another year without joining his wife, Ellen, on her life’s work: helping children in Zambia orphaned by AIDS. So he married his pursuit with his new bride’s, and off they went on their journey, one extra bag in tow.

Kershaw’s luggage included the Canvas Catcher, a thick sheet embossed with the outline of a batter whose stance resembles one of Cal Ripken’s. Underneath his elbow, and down to mid-calf, is an oversized strike zone that serves as a repository