MESA, Ariz. -- If general managers had their way, this is the week in which players would be bubble-wrapped, carefully tied down among packing noodles in moving vans and driven slowly to the site of the season opener. This is the knock-on-wood home stretch of spring training, the somewhat needless days of the exhibition season when GMs are in constant search of some lucky surface to bang their knuckles on as they consider the relative health of their teams. It has not worked out that way for the Red Sox, who are in the ominous process of gathering information on the elbow of catcher Christian Vazquez. The Rangers lost Yu Darvish for the season earlier in the spring, and that’s an absence hard to mitigate. Some teams have developed more holes than answers this spring. But for the following five clubs, this has been a spring training in which answers have been found. So far, anyway. Knock on wood. 1. Oakland Athletics
Rival evaluators have walked away from this spring impressed by Oakland’s depth, which was restored with another round of reconstruction by general manager Billy Beane (who turned 53 Sunday).
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