Yasiel Puig should be an All-Star this year.

Please do not mistake this for some grand troll job. On the contrary, it is a rational plea to Major League Baseball to bring legitimate incentive to watch the game instead of manufactured nonsense. Nobody tunes in to the All-Star game to see what league will get home-field advantage in the World Series. People want to see the best players – and, even more, the most intriguing ones.

Puig is not one of the best players in baseball. He has been in the major leagues all of two weeks. During those two weeks nobody has been better, of course, but still: It's two weeks, and an 0-for-20 skid would do some serious damage to his gaudy numbers. One of Yasiel Puig's four homers this season includes a grand slam. (USA Today Sports)

What it wouldn't do is quell the excitement over a player who has moved Vin Scully to sing paeans. Puig is different than Mike Trout and Bryce Harper and Stephen Strasburg, his phenom predecessors who demanded large audiences. The hype for each bubbled long before his debut. Puig's was fast-tracked from a crazy

Read More »from 10 Degrees: There's a need for Yasiel Puig at this summer's All-Star game

The recipe for a draft disaster is there. Mark Appel was the No. 1 overall pick by Houston a week ago, and as a senior at Stanford he is not bound to the July 12 signing deadline, which means he could take a hard-line stance, leave the Astros in budgetary limbo and wreck their entire draft plan.

Thankfully for the Astros, that's not going to happen.

Mark Appel will be sitting pretty after he signs with the Astros, which is expected to be next week. (AP Photo)The Astros and Appel are nearing a deal for the 6-foot-5 right-hander, sources told Yahoo! Sports. One club source expects Appel to be signed by the middle of next week.

It will amount to a big win for both sides. The Astros add a polished power pitcher to a growing cache of huge arms, with 101-mph-flame-throwing starter Mike Foltynewicz and Jarred Cosart atop the list. And Appel, a Houston native, not only gets to play at home but ensures that his big risk pays off. After turning down a $3 million-plus contract as the No. 8 overall pick in the 2012 draft, he parlayed 106 1/3 innings into a degree in management science and engineering as well

Read More »from Sources: No. 1 overall pick Mark Appel nearing deal with the Astros

Jim Leyland walks to the mound to relieve relief pitcher Jose Valverde in the ninth inning. (USA Today)

KANSAS CITY, Mo. – There is no greater metaphor for Jose Valverde than the soul patch on his chin, the tiny square of hair that embodies his duality. He is a closer, the sort who treats everything as binary, and so to dye half of his facial hair white while keeping the other half black only makes sense. The two sides of Valverde are that stark.

When the ugly one shows – and it has shown with great frequency of late – it serves as a bellwether for the Detroit Tigers, who should, by all accounts, be the best team in the American League. They've got the best hitter in the game (Miguel Cabrera) and the best starting rotation in the league (3.40 ERA with an absurd 435 strikeouts in 407 1/3 innings). They get on base more than any team but Boston, run reasonably well for having a number of troublesome BMIs and aren't nearly the defensive butchers many assume.

They also rely on Valverde, who spent his entire offseason in the unemployment line only to be thrust back into the role he mangled

Read More »from Bullpen continues to hold back talented Tigers

While major league players implicated in the Biogenesis scandal have yet to provide substantive information to Major League Baseball, multiple minor leaguers have discussed in detail their transactions with Anthony Bosch's clinic that allegedly provided performance-enhancing drugs to dozens of players, sources with knowledge of the interviews told Yahoo! Sports. Alex Rodriguez is one of several MLB stars that could be done in by minor leaguer testimonies. (AP)

Under threat of suspension, the minor league players gave testimony that Major League Baseball plans to use to confirm the veracity of Bosch's story, the sources said. The league last week cut a deal with Bosch, the proprietor of the so-called wellness clinic, to drop a lawsuit against him, provide him with protection and try to sway the government from prosecuting him in exchange for his detailing players' involvement with Biogenesis.

The revelation that multiple minor league players used Biogenesis products confirms a long-held belief that immunity could be an option for major leaguers and that the list of players who sought

Read More »from MLB using testimony from minor leaguers to condemn players with Biogenesis ties

Teams looking to throw out big money this fall may want to consider Carlos Silva's career. (Getty)

The last time baseball offered a class of free agent pitchers as mediocre as the one November will unleash, the biggest contract went to Carlos Silva. It is that grim.

OK, maybe not that grim. Silva didn't even make it halfway through his four-year, $48 million deal with Seattle. He went 5-18 with a 6.81 ERA, couldn't muster a strikeout every two innings and proved true the old baseball adage: Do not give $48 million to Carlos Silva, you moron.

Executives across the game are going to face similar desperation this offseason, because goodness is the landscape ugly for pitching. At least in 2012 there was Zack Greinke, in 2011 Yu Darvish, in 2010 Cliff Lee. John Lackey in 2009 beats any of the best from this upcoming class, as does CC Sabathia in 2008. Even though locking pitching up through prime years is an almost universal strategy and one that tends to neuter the free agent pitching market, a class this barren is rare.

More than that, it's not a function of teams preventing players

Read More »from 10 Degrees: A cautionary tale for teams looking to splash cash in fall free agency this year

Arizona Diamondbacks starter Daniel Hudson re-tore the ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow and will require a second surgery, a devastating injury sustained as he was on the cusp of rejoining the team's rotation.

The 26-year-old Hudson left his first rehabilitation start Tuesday with Double-A Jacksonville after his arm tightened up during the second inning. An MRI on Thursday afternoon revealed the tear.

Hudson is expected to undergo a second Tommy John surgery in the near future, a little more than 11 months after his first. The late Dr. Lewis Yocum performed the first operation. A source said Hudson likely would use Dr. James Andrews for the next surgery. 

Arizona starter Daniel Hudson faces another surgery on his pitching elbow. (USA Today Sports) The injury shocked Hudson as well as Diamondbacks officials. Aside from a few minor setbacks, his rehabilitation from the first injury was considered to be going well. In games at the Diamondbacks' spring training complex, he had worked up to 75 pitches. His progress was evident in the first inning of his rehab start in

Read More »from D-backs starter Daniel Hudson suffers major setback, re-injures ligament in elbow

Alex Rodriguez hired a new publicist recently. This was no surprise. He goes through flacks like a fat guy in a wing-eating contest, gnawing them to the bone before dumping them in the nearest receptacle, where they gladly land. The toughest jobs in spin-doctoring include the NRA, Big Tobacco and a 37-year-old megalomaniac who doesn't make a troublesome product. He simply is one.

Again and again, A-Rod finds himself in this position: prone, vulnerable and in need of someone to clean up the messes he creates because those with whom he surrounds himself get paid more to rescue him from the muck than prevent him from wading into it. Time has proven he cannot help himself. Sometimes it's innocuous bits like talking about sleepovers with Derek Jeter or commissioning a painting of a centaur with his head or macking on Z-list models during a playoff game. And others it is a whopper, like the one threatening to swallow his career whole.

Major League Baseball

Read More »from For Alex Rodriguez, Biogenesis scandal is one mess he can't clean up alone

This is worse than BALCO. That is not easy to do, seeing as the single-season and all-time home run records fell on account of Victor Conte's doping program that fed performance-enhancing drugs to baseball players of all manner and variety. But it is. It is much worse.

The Biogenesis scandal that has ensnared baseball is more painful and embarrassing and harmful because it happened in the supposed post-Steroid Era, when Major League Baseball's drug policy was supposed to eradicate PEDs from the game. That was a fanciful notion to begin with, of course, but now that ESPN is reporting Biogenesis mastermind Tony Bosch is ready to flip and tell the league about Ryan Braun and Alex Rodriguez and upward of 20 others to whom he supplied his wares, it is the greatest evidence yet that this policy has failed – and, moreover, that any policy is bound to fail.

Back when Barry Bonds was juiced to the gills, when steroids and amphetamines were every bit as

Read More »from As MLB reportedly seeks Biogenesis suspensions, scandal looms larger than BALCO