Yes, Alex Rodriguez admitted to using steroids last week. Yes, baseball commissioner Bud Selig followed that admission with some typically embarrassing statements. Yes, every day there&#8217;s some new bit of Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens news to depress us. Yes, the Yankees still buy the best players. Yes.</p><p>Still. Pitchers and catchers worked out at Royals camp Saturday.</p><p>Maybe it doesn&#8217;t make all that other stuff go away. But it comes pretty close. This is one of my favorite times of the sports year, when college basketball starts heating up, when there are NBA and NHL games on television every night, when NFL rumors are hopping, and when spring training gets going, when complete unknowns look good, when stars begin to shake off the winter, when baseball people sweat in the heat and tell stories, when everyone comes up with their own projections.</p><p>The projections are especially fun. They are everywhere now, baseball projection systems with scientific names like Marcel and CHONE and PECOTA, which was sort of named after former Royals infielder Bill Pecota though it is actually an acronym, &#8220;Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm.&#8221; Baseball writer Bill James has his own projection system. Well, shoot, just about everybody does.</p><p>Anyway, looking at a few Royals projections &#8212; while watching the Kansas-Kansas State game &#8212; is a fun way to spend the Saturday when pitchers and catchers report.*</p><p>*The projections I&#8217;m using are: (1) The Marcel projections listed at <a href="http://www.tangotiger.net">www.tangotiger.net</a>; (2) Those on baseballprojections.com; (3) PECOTA, which is the projection system of the good folks at baseballprospectus.com; (4) Bill James&#8217; projections from the <em>Bill James Handbook 2009</em>.</p><p>&#8226;&#8226;&#8226;</p><p><strong>First base:</strong> Mike Jacobs.</p><p><strong>Key projection:</strong> He&#8217;s projected to hit anywhere from 20 to 26 homers.</p><p><strong>Comment:</strong> You might recall that I was not especially thrilled when the Royals traded for Jacobs. He&#8217;s not very good at getting on base, he is not rated well defensively, he can&#8217;t hit lefties, and the Royals have a soon-to-be 25-year-old first baseman (Kila Ka&#8217;aihue) who destroyed the minor leagues last year. But to be fair, Jacobs can swat, and if he becomes the first Royals player to hit 30 home runs since Jermaine Dye in 2000, then he could help this team. Bill James is the most optimistic; he has Jacobs with 26 homers.</p><p><strong>Second base:</strong> Willie Bloomquist or Alberto Callaspo or Mark Teahen.</p><p><strong>Key projection:</strong> Bloomquist is projected by all to hit more than one extra-base hit.</p><p><strong>Comment:</strong> My gut feeling right now is that Bloomquist will win the starting job for the Royals. I say this because Bloomquist is one of those players that managers fall in love with. He plays hard all the time. He plays good defense. He offers some speed. He&#8217;s a leader in the clubhouse. The big problem with Bloomquist has been that he has never hit, and last year he managed one double (along with zero triples and zero homers) in 192 plate appearances. That was unprecedented.</p><p>The more I think about it, the more I hope that the Royals will seriously look at Teahen as a second baseman. When I first heard the idea, it sounded like a gimmick, and maybe it is a gimmick. It isn&#8217;t only that Teahen is awfully tall (at 6 feet 3 he would be one of the tallest second basemen ever) but it&#8217;s just hard to envision him having the quickness and agility to play the position. But, hey, he is a good athlete, he has adapted wherever the Royals tried him, and this could be a way to resuscitate his career in Kansas City. If he can&#8217;t play second, Teahen is just an extra part.