Major League Baseball will test players' blood for human growth hormone during the season starting this year, becoming the first American sport to do so and continuing the league's stand against performance-enhancing drugs following decades of abuse by players.

Ex-Giants outfielder Melky Cabrera was suspended 50 games last season for PED use. (AP)Following a rash of positive tests for testosterone last season, MLB also will implement a new testing procedure for the synthetic drug, according to sources. The league will use a "longitudinal testing program" in which its testing lab in Montreal will maintain baseline concentrations of testosterone, epitestosterone and T/E ratio. The lab will compare those values to subsequent tests. If there is a statistically significant difference, the lab will scrutinize the sample with IRMS testing to see if the result was caused by a PED.

The league and the MLB Players Association agreed to the in-season testing after blood testing for HGH last spring. While the union had long opposed the invasiveness of blood testing, executive

Anybody who suggests the Baseball Hall of Fame is irrelevant doesn't understand one prevailing truth about the sport: its history is more important than its present. Baseball treats its history as a sacred bauble, which, until recently, it hasn't tried to rinse, wash or scrub. Its darkest moments are some of its most famous. The sport is evermore human because the Black Sox succumbed to greed and threw the World Series, because the segregationists won until they could no longer bottle up social change, because the Hit King was a flawed man who couldn't overcome a gambling addiction. Baseball is all of us.

Much of its history is in the hands of writers given the imposing task of judging it, and the latest Hall election, in which not one of perhaps a dozen worthy players reached the 75 percent threshold for induction, didn't as much prove their failure as it did a reckoning. Cooperstown will be much quieter this summer compared to when Barry Larkin was inducted in 2012. (AP)

This wasn't just a referendum on steroids. It was one on the writers and their failure to recognize as long

The day after the Colorado Rockies drafted Russell Wilson, his father died. Jay Matthews, the Rockies scout who spent five years coveting Wilson and was sure he would one day play in the major leagues, happened to be driving through Wilson's hometown of Richmond, Va., and called his cell phone.

Wilson told him the bad news. Diabetes had taken Harrison Wilson III, 55, a man Matthews knew couldn't have been any prouder. His son played football at North Carolina State and was about to play baseball for the Rockies and maybe, just maybe, was the evolutionary answer to Deion Sanders and Bo Jackson and Brian Jordan: not just a football player who thrived at baseball but a quarterback who thrived in both sports. Matthews reflexively asked if there was anything he could do. 

On the path to becoming the Seahawks QB, Russell Wilson was a baseball prospect for the Rockies. (AP) "You can throw me some batting practice," Wilson said.

So around 10 p.m., about 24 hours after he said good-bye to his father, Russell Wilson ripped baseballs at a local batting cage with his brother, Harrison

2012 record: 66-96
Finish: Fifth place, AL Central
2012 final payroll: $101.2 million

Estimated 2013 opening day payroll: $80 million
Yahoo! Sports offseason rank: 26th
Hashtags: #minnesotanice #strikeoutallergy #sano #SI2 #sirocco #bigpitchers #weneedtotalkaboutkevin #marxism #holyawful2012rotation #cheapbillionaires

OFFSEASON ACTION

Somewhere on their way to dominating the American League Central, the Minnesota Twins lost their identity. Gone were the strike-throwing savants and slick fielders who buttressed them, replaced by a rotation best described as committing felonious assault on the art of pitching and a defense that could not guard a 7-Eleven.

Joe Mauer hits a single off Detroit Tigers pitcher Anibal Sanchez. (AP)

The opening of Target Field infused into the Twins the money their billionaire owner, Carl Pohlad, had refused to tap. Minnesota, subject of contraction less than

2012 record: 64-98
Finish: Fifth place, NL West
2012 final payroll: $84.2 million
Estimated 2013 opening day payroll: $73 million
Yahoo! Sports offseason rank: 27th
Hashtags: #projectfail #rudderless #applemaps #insulting #mashedpotatoelbow #waaaaaaaaalt #ughmanagement #purpleweed #humidorofbaddecisions #why75pitches

OFFSEASON ACTION

Nothing exposes a franchise floating in the ether quite like an offseason of curiosity and indecision, of maneuvers unmade and ill-fated. To call the Rockies a rudderless ship at this moment would be an insult to rudders. This is a ship with a hole the width of its bow.

Walt Weiss may turn out to be a perfectly good manager. He is, by many accounts, a good leader, and the Mike Matheny-Robin Ventura double-shot of neophyte success last season emboldened the Rockies to pluck Weiss

Editor's note: Yahoo! Sports will examine the offseason of every MLB team before spring training begins in mid-February. Our series continues with the New York Mets.

2012 record: 74-88
Finish: Fourth place, NL East
2012 final payroll: $103.7 million
Estimated 2013 opening day payroll: $90 million
Yahoo! Sports offseason rank: 28th
Hashtags: #byebay #tweetingGM #burgerSSRI #humblebrag #refi #flyingwallendas #vegasbaby #wilponfail #outfieldofdoom #mess

OFFSEASON ACTION

The masterwork that was Sandy Alderson's handling of the R.A. Dickey trade this offseason should be studied, dissected and, whenever possible, emulated. He turned a 38-year-old pitcher on a one-year contract into six years of the game's best catching prospect, six years of a frontline pitching prospect, a high-ceiling 18-year-old and a stopgap catcher. And when your owner needs a tourniquet to stop hemorrhaging money, this is the sort of deal a general manager must concoct to keep hope afloat and progress alive.At least the Mets will have David Wright for what projects to be a painful 2013. (AP)

2012 record: 69-93
Finish: Fifth place, NL East

2012 final payroll: $89.9 million

Estimated 2013 opening day payroll: $45 million
Yahoo! Sports offseason rank: 29th
Hashtags: #beavis #23rdstate #tollingoftheironbell #thirtysomething #comegetthemjacob #trademe #dumps #swindlers #totheguillotine #sadface

OFFSEASON ACTION

The naked hubris of the Miami Marlins' all-time fire sale, the sort that would satisfy a pyromaniac or, you know, Beavis, is even more appalling six weeks later. When two jesters masquerade as baseball executives and strike deals that have every right to be struck down by the commissioner, they do not belong in the sport. Send Jeffrey Loria back to the art world, David Samson back to Morgan Stanley and sanity back to a franchise that so desperately needs it.

The first Bic flick was dealing Heath

Editor’s note: Yahoo! Sports will examine the offseason of every MLB team before spring training begins in mid-February. Our series begins with the Houston Astros.

2012 record: 55-107

Finish: Sixth place, NL Central
2012 final payroll: $63.9 million

Estimated 2013 opening day payroll: $32 million
Yahoo! Sports offseason rank: 30th
Hashtags: #ifyoudonthaveanythingnicetosay #payrollhalfsies #boknows #latebloomers #operationshutdown #rekall #altuveasipad #fieldsofdreams #dunnlike #frasiernilesjim

OFFSEASON ACTION

It takes a mighty level of commitment to be as bad as the Houston Astros expect to be in 2013. It's not just halving their payroll, which already was among the five lowest in the major leagues, to what may be the most paltry. Nor is it dealing away most of their effective major league players, leaving a roster that resembles an animal carcass in vulture territory.

More than the deeds, it's the ethos that drives this franchise: If you are not going to be good, be bad. Be