Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages…I’m going to have a hard time concentrating today. As you can see in the byline below this article, I am a shameless pro wrestling fan — with WrestleMania XXX coming up this Sunday, I’ll do my best to prevent my subconscious from letting this turn into an endless stream of irrelevant wrasslin’ references. Let’s take a swig of beer for the workin’ man and get this show on the road, shall we?

Roenis Elias is making his first major-league start tonight, and he’s a pretty interesting guy to talk about. The 25-year-old Cuban has lively raw stuff and a decent track record in the minors over the last couple seasons, but no one went into Spring Training expecting him to crack the major-league rotation. However, with Hisashi Iwakuma and Taijuan Walker on the shelf to open the season, and veteran reclamation project Scott Baker pitching so poorly in March that the Mariners released him, the left-handed Elias finds himself making the jump from Double-A to the big leagues.

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Every auction is different, but the one constant in any given auction is that things can go careening off the rails in an instant. Last night, I participated in an experts’ auction along with a group of writers from Yahoo, RotoWire, Razzball and more. It is a 14-team rotisserie league with 27-man rosters, an innings cap of 1,450 and a standard $260 auction budget, with on-base percentage instead of batting average, and saves plus holds instead of saves. You can check the league out for yourself right here.

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One of the most pleasant surprises of the spring, and a very welcome sight for the Yankees, is the impressive performance of Michael Pineda. Acquired before the 2012 season in exchange for Jesus Montero and Hector Noesi in a trade that has (so far) been incredibly disappointing for both teams, Pineda has yet to pitch an inning for the Yankees after tearing his shoulder labrum in spring training shortly after being traded.

Now, a full two-and-a-half years since he last pitched a major-league inning, the 25-year-old is opening plenty of eyes with his stellar spring performance. In his nine innings, he has allowed zero runs on eight hits, with a 14/1 strikeout-to-walk ratio that jumps off the page. It’s obviously a tiny sample, but his production so far has been very encouraging for a guy who hasn’t taken the mound in a major-league game since 2011.

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This being my first year here at RotoGraphs, this is my first foray into the insanity that is Bold Predictions season. This was a highly enjoyable piece for me to research and write, so I hope that shows through in the predictions. Without any further adieu, I humbly present to you my bold predictions for 2014.

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Ordinarily, I like to focus on prospects, or at least relatively young major-leaguers. However, Eno recently suggested that everyone take a look at the RotoGraphs Consensus Rankings to find players we think are underrated/overrated, and I was surprised to see how low our experts have Shane Victorino in the outfield rankings, way down at No. 52, in between Chris Carter and Ben Revere.

Last year, despite playing in just 122 games, Victorino finished the season as the No. 21 outfielder in standard formats, between Mark Trumbo and Allen Craig. He put up a .294/.351/.451 slash line while hitting 15 homers and stealing 21 bases, and his weighted offense was 19% higher than league average. So why do our experts have him ranked so low?

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Abraham Almonte has overcome a veritable minefield of obstacles on his way to the majors, the most obvious of which being his height. Originally signed by the Yankees as a 17-year-old, the diminutive Dominican stands just 5’9″. Upon acquiring him, the Yankees tried Almonte as a second baseman in rookie ball before quickly shifting him to the outfield.

For the next seven years, he worked his way slowly through the organization, finally reaching Double-A in 2012. By that point, Almonte was generally viewed as a quick, switch-hitting outfielder who lacked the power to play in a corner spot at the major-league level and had never hit .300 in the minors. He was still more than just organizational depth, but not enough of a prospect to land on any top prospect lists.

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The Marlins, as bad as they are, have an entertainingly wanton disregard of service time considerations for their top prospects. Marcell Ozuna is one example of this philosophy (or lack thereof). In late April of last year, despite having no chance of either contending or selling tickets, Miami called up Ozuna, who had logged a grand total of 47 career plate appearances above A-ball. For those of you wondering, Ozuna will now very likely get the Super Two tag on him, making him arbitration-eligible in 2016.

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With the proliferation of analysis available to fantasy players, the gap between the worst and best owners has shrunk. It’s much more rare to see an owner put together a truly awful draft or auction today than it was even ten years ago, simply because it’s seemingly impossible to use the internet without stumbling across some scrap of fantasy analysis. Even Jimmy from accounting, who knows next-to-nothing about fantasy baseball, can print off a few cheat sheets and put together a team that isn’t a total abomination.

Much like its real-life counterpart, fantasy baseball is a game in which one must constantly be searching for new market inefficiencies. One theory that I’m a big proponent of is capitalizing on reactions to small samples, specifically bad ones. As it turns out, Travis d’Arnaud is just the example I was looking for.

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Last week, I wrote about Eddie Butler and how Colorado’s volatile starting rotation could open the door for Butler, and fellow prospect Jonathan Gray, to contribute earlier than expected. That got me thinking about how Matthew Wisler is in a similar situation with the Padres, especially following the news that Cory Luebke will miss all of 2014.

Ian Kennedy, one of baseball’s most durable pitchers over the last several years, is assured a spot in the rotation, as are Andrew Cashner and Josh Johnson. Cashner finally managed to stay healthy for a full season last year, and was quite good in his 175 innings, finishing the season with a 3.09 earned run average and 1.13 walks plus hits per inning. The problem with Cashner is that he had thrown a total of 316.2 innings in his five previous professional seasons.

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The top four spots in the Rockies’ rotation, barring injury, seem pretty much set for the start of the 2014 season, but most of them carry significant risk. The exception is Jhoulys Chacin; other than a pectoral injury that cost him 3 1/2 months in 2012, he has been an effective, durable pitcher over the bulk of his seven professional seasons.

But then you’ve got Jorge de la Rosa, who has pitched more than 130 innings in just two of seven seasons since he transitioned to a starter full-time in the majors. Brett Anderson hasn’t thrown more than 83.1 frames since 2010. Tyler Chatwood is a decent, if thoroughly unspectacular, back-of-the-rotation starter.

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