(When our friends over at FanDuel.com asked me if they could do quick a guest post on the upcoming fantasy baseball season, it was an opportunity I just couldn't pass up. No one knows the sport of baseball and the fantasy implications of it all, quite like they do.

Enjoy, and when you get a moment, hop over to their site, and definitely check out the good work they're doing.

Each year, there always seems to be a mild debate over who should be the No. 1 pick in a fantasy baseball draft. Most of the time it does not get too heated, because one guy tends to stand out. In 2013, there seems to be three legitimate options that are all very close: Miguel Cabrera, Ryan Braun and Mike Trout. So with the No. 1 pick, who should you end up taking?

By now, every baseball fan is well aware of Cabrera’ historic season in 2012. The American League went without a Triple Crown winner since the 1960s, but Detroit’s third baseman had a hot bat nearly the entire season. His only weakness as a baseball player does not matter in fantasy baseball, as most leagues do nothing as far as defense is concerned.

Although it seems like only yesterday, incredibly it was three long years when I made my first trip to the most underrated park in baseball, Camden Yards, to watch the Baltimore Orioles. For some of you long-time readers of this site you may even remember my write-up following the trip, and for those who don’t, just know that the stadium exceeded my expectations in every way possible. Camden Yards is the perfect blend of old-school charm with new school amenities, with plenty of good food, good sightlines and an overall good vibe to go along with it.

Unfortunately, with all that good has come a lot of bad as well, mostly in the baseball played on the field at Camden Yards. Most Orioles fans don’t need me to tell them it’s been 15 long years since their team last made the playoffs, and the same amount of time since they had a winning record or anything better than a third place finish in the AL East standings.

But in a lot of ways, my biggest takeaway from Camden Yards wasn’t the lousy baseball or appealing sightlines, but how passionate the fans remained through the bad times. When I visited Baltimore the organization wasn’t giving anyone much reason for hope; they didn’t have the cold, hard cash of the Yankees, the front office savvy of the Rays, or the minor league system teeming with talent like the Rangers, just a whole lot of excuses, and not nearly enough talent.

Still, the fans did show up, and did care, probably more than they should’ve. They still cheered when their team did something good, booed when the umps made a call against them, and sat a little too close to the edge of their seats in the late innings of a tight game. Again, all in support of a team that was headed nowhere, except in a nosedive toward the basement of the AL East standings. We always hear what great “baseball towns” Boston and New York are, yet fans in Baltimore are every bit as passionate, loyal and dedicated to their team.

To give you a little background on the column I’m about to write, it only seems appropriate I give you a little background on how my weekend began. It was Friday afternoon, I was in Southern California and driving down to a high school basketball All-American game in Venice Beach (a game I plan on writing about much more later this week, by the way). I was listening to the radio, and it was at that time that news first started to break that Adrian Gonzalez had cleared waivers and that the Dodgers were working to acquire him. Just another day in the ever-evolving amoeba that is the LA sports scene, huh?

At the time, the catch of any potential move was that the Dodgers would have to take on some money to acquire Gonzalez. Most of the conversation centered on the dollars and cents owed to Carl Crawford and Josh Beckett, two contracts that were so bloated they could compete as separate contestants on The Biggest Loser TV show. On my entire drive down to Venice, the conversation fluctuated between one key question: If you had to take on a contract, whose would it be? Beckett or Crawford’s? At the time, no one considered the possibility that the Dodgers would be forced to take on both.

Fast-forward a few hours later, after I’d just finished up at the basketball event. As I hopped in the car and put on the radio I was expecting to hear Gonzalez discussion, but what I got instead was sheer pandemonium. Anyone who has ever listened to sports talk radio can tell the difference between a day when the hosts are discussing the usual myopic, boring topics, and when something has actually happened. And it was clear by the tone in the host’s voices that something had indeed happened. Two seconds after flipping on the radio, it was pretty clear that a code-red, voices-raised, hide the women and children kind of story had just broken.

That story? Well, Adrian Gonzalez was coming to Los Angeles. That much was clear. But to get him, the Dodgers had elected (to use an awful baseball pun) to swing for the fences, taking on the contracts of both Josh Beckett AND Carl Crawford.

Wait, what?

No seriously…. WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATTTTTT??

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To quote the Dos Equis, Most Interesting Man In the World: “I don’t often write Major League Baseball Stadium reviews here at Aaron Torres Sports. But when I do… they almost always become legendary.”

No seriously, it’s true.

To this day I still get e-mails about my Idiot’s Guide to Camden Yards, mostly from people attending the stadium for the first time and looking for advice (as if I’ve been there more than once). And after I did my recap of a semi-inebriated, half-forgotten day at Marlins Park, more questions, comments and tweets centered around the theme of “Wait, did you hook up at the stadium??” than anything to do with baseball. And for those wondering the answer to that question, sadly, it’s no. Still, it was a legendary day none the less.

Today though, my ball park review of my first trip to Dodgers Stadium Monday night will be nothing like those last two. If you’re looking for me to discuss every little nuance like I did at Camden Yards two years ago, that isn’t happening here. And if you’re hoping for me to detail a crazy night of alcohol-infused madness like I did with Marlins Park, well sadly you have again come to the wrong place.

Nope, I won’t be doing any of that, for one simple reason: In my first trip to Dodgers Stadium, I really didn’t have the opportunity to take in the full ballpark experience. I didn’t get to walk around the concourse for an hour before the game like I generally prefer to do when visiting a new stadium, and didn’t get a chance to check out Dodgers Way behind the outfield walls either. That stuff just can’t happen when your buddy randomly calls you at 5:15 and says “Hey I got an extra ticket for tonight, want to come?” And it definitely doesn’t happen when you don’t leave the house until 6 p.m. for a 7 p.m. game. Not in LA, not on a Monday night, and not in rush hour traffic. Not unless you have access to Kobe Bryant’s private helicopter anyway.

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So seriously, who would ever complain about having nothing to do on a Monday night? Me, that’s who.

While most of you would love the downtime, love go see a movie with your wife, play with your kids, take one of your 11 cats to the vet, whatever, I’m not that kinda guy. For one, I have no wife and am fundamentally opposed to both kids and cats (in that order), which certainly doesn’t help the process. And even when I do get a little downtime, I usually just end up pacing around, freaking out and asking myself asinine questions like, What am I going to do? How am I going to spend this time? Why doesn’t anyone ever respond to my texts? Is it something I said? I can change, I swear!! I’ll tell ya one thing: No one ever said it’s glamorous to be a sports blogger.

And sadly, by late afternoon Monday, it appeared to be one of those nights. By about 6:30 I was done with all kinds of real responsibility for the day, and had two hours to burn before the start of Thunder-Spurs at 9pm. Please excuse me while I commence my freak out.

Well thankfully, just as I was settling in for a miserable two hours of Jeopardy and Two and a Half Men reruns, a miracle happened: I stumbled across the MLB Draft; an event which I barely knew existed, let alone was ever televised. After all, everything I know about baseball scouting and drafting I learned from the movie “Moneyball,” and even then it was mostly just fat guys in stained shirts, sitting around in a dim room and swearing at each other. So when I found out the MLB Draft was on TV, I flipped the channel faster than a 14-year-old boy after finding out he’s got free Cinemax for a month. The MLB Draft is on TV? What an event!

Oh, it certainly was. And I kept a running diary to commemorate it all…

It took all of one inning to realize what a giant mistake I’d made. Here it was, Sunday night, and after I’d spent the last week pimping Bryce Harper to my Twitter followers, telling them to watch him play any chance they got, here Harper was on national TV, and I was nowhere to be found. I was plenty busy doing other stuff, sure. But still, there are no excuses. Shame on me for not heeding my own advice.

As we now know, not tuning in right away turned out to be a big mistake. Within one inning Harper quite literally got the baseball world buzzing when, on a whim, he decided to, umm, steal home. Yes, you read that correctly. In the first inning, of the eighth game of his career, Bryce Harper stole home. It wasn’t pre-planned and no one told him to do it. He did it because he’s Bryce Harper, and when you’re Bryce Harper, you decide to do things like “steal home on a whim.” The play itself was totally awesome, and more importantly, totally out of the ordinary. At the same time, there is nothing ordinary about the way Bryce Harper plays the game of baseball.

Like most of you, I’ve known about Harper since long before his Major League debut two weeks ago. I read the Sports Illustrated profile back on him in 2009, the one that called him the “LeBron James of baseball. I watched as he got his GED, skipped his junior year of high school to play junior college ball, then went on to be the No. 1 overall draft pick in the 2010 draft, at a time he was supposed to be getting ready for his last year of high school ball.

Prior to my vacation to Miami last week, I was chatting with my buddy Matt, when he innocently asked me a simple question: “So, what do you guys have planned for the trip?”

Frankly, I had no idea. I mean, I knew we’d hit the beach, eat some good food, and sip on a bunch of overpriced drinks, since after all, that’s what dudes in their late ‘20’s do on vacation. Otherwise, there wasn’t anything special on the docket, except for a random trip to the new Marlins Stadium. At the time I wasn’t even certain we’d go, although I gave it stronger consideration when Matt described it as a place that “Looked like Disneyland for Adults.”

Well, Matt, you were pretty much correct my friend. Although if you’ll allow me to, I’d like to take that last sentence one step further.

Marlins Park isn’t just “Disneyland for Adults” but instead, a place I’d more accurately describe as “One of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World.” A place where baseball games are played and forgotten, drowned out by salsa music, dancing women and broken marriage vows. A place you go expecting to attend a sporting event, and instead end up at, just “an event.” A place that is truly indescribable with words from the English language.

Marlins Park is also a place that I can definitively say I had one of the five best days of my life.

Since I started this website three years ago, I can’t ever remember a crazier week in the world of sports than this past one. We had the Major League Baseball's winter meetings mixed with the opening of NBA training camps, which just so happened to be fused into a fun week of college hoops, and the college football coaching carousel nearly spinning off its axis. My only wish is that we could’ve had the WNBA playoffs as a cheery on top of this week’s sports sundae.

I’m kidding on that last one of course. But in all seriousness though, all this sports madness left me in a tough conundrum yesterday morning. At the time, there wasn’t a whole lot to write about; all was quiet on the home-front in basketball (where training camps opened today, and where- at the time- Chris Paul was still comfortably a Hornet), and in baseball things were quiet too, with no apparent player movement beyond “Mark Buehrle going to Florida.” So instead, I wrote a column about Tim Tebow. The timing was nothing, if not weird. Even I’ll admit that.

Still, the column did have some relevance. ...at least for about 30 seconds, until, just minutes after I posted it news broke that Albert Pujols had spurned the Cardinals and was headed to Anaheim (or is that Los Angeles?) to play for the Angels. Could it be true? Could the best player in baseball really be switching leagues and teams at the tail-end of his prime, and doing it in large part to spite the only organization he’d ever called home? It sounded like it couldn’t be real. Until it was.

Which brings us to today, and brings us to our eventual reality: Baseball’s power struggle has shifted out West, and done it on the big bat, and bigger contract of Albert Pujols. Ultimately, I don’t know what it means. Could it be that the Angels are guaranteed their first World Series win since 2002? AL West dominance for years to come? Or are they only guaranteed a week’s worth of headlines in April, followed by 10 years’ worth of big payments into Pujols’ direct deposit account from then on out? Only time will tell.

What I do know though, is that this is big. Like really, really big. And ultimately, it’s also the best thing that could’ve happened to the sport of baseball.

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Over the course of the summer, I’ve gotten a lot of grief from a lot of friends on one particular subject: I don’t write nearly enough about baseball. Understand it’s not that I don’t want to, just that as a columnist, I refuse to discuss subjects that I’m not totally comfortable writing about, and totally comfortable defending to those who don’t agree with me. And all summer long, as I ran this website, launched Crystal Ball Run and worked diligently on a project behind the scenes (that I’ll hopefully be able to tell everyone about within a few weeks), there just wasn’t time for baseball. Not enough time to watch it, and not enough time to write about it. Not if I wanted any semblance of a personal life anyway.

Thankfully though, over the last few weeks as things have slowed down, and as my body has slowly gotten accustomed to getting no more than four or five hours of sleep a night, my schedule opened up, and baseball has crept its way back in. I can’t sit and watch nine innings every night, but I’m glad to say that as the pennant races have heated up, I’ve caught big chunks of games over the last few weeks. Thankfully, that included Wednesday night, which was simply one of the most compelling sports nights I can ever remember.

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On Wednesday, two things happened which shaped the column you’re about to read. They were both conversations, and both centered around baseball, a subject which seems to consume less of my time by the day. Let alone by the year.

The first conversation happened when I co-hosted a radio show with my buddy Marc Ryan. Marc is the morning drive guy on 100.3 The Ticket in Florida, and when I came on with him for the 8 o’clock hour on Wednesday, the discussion began with baseball. Is it a slowly dying sport? Or just one which needs to be modernized a bit? Marc, thought the former. Quite a few of his callers agreed.

The second conversation came with my buddy Steve, who I was visiting in Boston later that afternoon (Ironically I went up to go to a Red Sox game). Understand that Steve is one my best friends in the world and one of my the nicest people you’ll ever meet, not to mention someone who loves baseball about as much as Tiger Woods loves women not named Elin Nodregren. So when he piped up and asked me why I’d been taking cheap shots at baseball in my columns the last few weeks, it got my attention. Steve wasn’t being mean, just generally intrigued: Why wasn’t I writing more about baseball? And when I did, why was I always negative?

The answers to those questions are complicated.

The first is, that as a columnist the only way for me to gain your trust and readership is to write compelling content, content that is well thought out, with strong and intelligent opinions. And the truth is that I just haven’t watched enough baseball this season to have those strong and compelling opinions. You as readers deserve better than anything but a full-formed, well thought out column. I refuse to give you anything less.

Now the next question becomes, “Well why haven’t you been watching baseball?” That’s even more complicated.