Young Arms Define 2010

The upcoming season in Major League Baseball will be headlined by dazzling, young pitchers.

After an unprecedented 2009, Zack Greinke turned heads while pitching for the consistently cellar-dwelling Royals, and breezed his way to a Cy Young award.

Fire-balling righty Tim Lincecum managed to grab a second straight Cy Young in a somewhat strange voting in ’09. He walked away from the three-man battle with Chris Carpenter and Adam Wainwright splitting votes between them, which allowed Lincecum to sneak in and snag it away from the Cards’ hurlers.

All eyes will be on that pair, who claimed the two top ranks of fantasy pitchers, according to Yahoo Fantasy Baseball, but will share the spotlight with a plethora of other extremely talented starters the MLB possesses: Felix Hernandez, Justin Verlander, Clayton Kershaw, Jon Lester, Matt Cain, Josh Johnson, Ubaldo Jiminez and J.A. Happ, just to name a few. All age 27 or younger.

All of these are considered the aces of their staff, with exception of Cain and Happ, who play second fiddle to Lincecum and Roy Halladay. Not a bad tandem to pitch behind.

Each considered a power-pitcher, other than Happ and possibly Cain, will use their mid-90s fastballs to turn hitters circles and pile up strikeouts. Cain and Happ will rely on location and off-speed pitches to be effective.

Coincidentally enough, all of the teams other than Greinke’s are looked upon to be competitive in the 2010 campaign.

A widely known fact, pitching dominates hitting early in the year, will undoubtedly give these young men, if I may say that, some early success.

So, make sure to set your DV-Rs and TiVos to record every episode of ESPN’s Baseball Tonight, and I’d be willing to take it to Vegas that you’ll see one of those faces on its’ “That’s Nasty” segment any given night.