MLB spring training 2024: One player to watch on every team - ESPN

Spring training has arrived — is there anything more beautiful to a baseball lover's soul than the Grapefruit and Cactus Leagues? — and it's our first chance to check out newcomers on our favorite teams.

Do the results matter? Not as much as they used to, as organizations have learned that small sample sizes from spring training aren't necessarily predictive of future performance.

Still, there are players to watch a little more closely than others this spring. So, let's dig into one for each team, zeroing in on rehabbing veterans, promising youngsters or top prospects looking to make the club's Opening Day roster. You'll see one pattern here: Hitters who need to improve their plate discipline and/or approach. While spring training stats don't tell us the whole story, strikeout and walk rates do stabilize pretty quickly, so those are some key numbers to note once the games begin.

If you play fantasy baseball, these are some of the players you'll want to focus on as well. Let's start off with the team that has the most hype coming off a winter for the ages (teams are listed in order of our winter power rankings).

All eyes — and a large contingent of media that the Dodgers will have to learn to adapt to — will be on Shohei Ohtani and Yamamoto. The signs are already positive for Ohtani as he recovers from elbow surgery: In his first on-field batting practice session, he homered 10 times in 21 swings.

With Walker Buehler on a slow rollout and perhaps unlikely to see game action this spring, that leaves Yamamoto with a little additional pressure to live up to his advance billing right from the start of the season. His first bullpen session — take this for what that's worth — was impressive enough to send waves around Dodgers