With minor league invitees fighting for positions, players trying to overcome injuries, managers debating roster moves and general managers busily discussing myriad trade possibilities, this marks the most crucial deadline of spring training.

NCAA brackets are due.

Walk into clubhouses during spring training and you can find NCAA brackets and pools posted as prominently as the day's lineup while players sit around tables studiously filling out their sheets.

"It's one of the thing I look forward to in spring training. March Madness and spring training are kind of like peanut and jelly -- they go together," Colorado Rockies shortstop Troy Tulowitzki said from Scottsdale, Arizona. "I'm always pumped up for this time of the month. For one, you get to play baseball games again and the other thing is, the brackets start."

Oakland Athletics outfielder Sam Fuld said the clubhouse brackets are "a must" while manager Bob Melvin said they often are "the highlight of the spring."

"The only issue," Melvin said from Mesa, Arizona, "is when it's over, sometimes you have guys that aren't here anymore and you're potentially mailing them their money -- not that we have money involved. We're mailing them their prizes."

Oh, of course. Prizes. Like red ribbons.

"Correct. We do go into the ribbon routine around here."

Just about everyone everywhere takes part in NCAA pools, so why should baseball players be any different, other than that their pools might pay off a little more than yours. Jeff Francoeur told me a couple springs ago that he won $6,400 in a 2010 clubhouse pool. He also assured me he reported it on his income tax as would all winners that spring. "We report it to everybody. Major League Baseball. The IRS. We want to pay taxes. We want to do the right thing."

Longtime Oakland equipment manager Steve Vucinich joked he always loved hearing the stories about another team's meeting with security people to go over gambling rules being delayed "because they had to make their picks on the NCAA pools."

Vucinich said the Athletics drew teams from a hat for their clubhouse pools in the 1970s, started filling out brackets in the 1980s -- "Ever since they began printing them in the paper" -- and added a point-spread pool in the 1990s. In that pool, whoever has the team that beats the point-spread advances to the next round (where they get the team that won the game but lost the spread). They now also have a 100-square pool where players win if the last digits in each team's final score corresponds with the numbers in their square.

Tulowitzki's pool in the Rockies clubhouse allows participants to pick four teams, with points for a win determined by seeding. A No. 1 team gets only one point per victory but a No. 8 or 9 seed with get eight or nine points.

"I think the [standard] bracket becomes a long thing," Tulowitzki said. "This way, you can concentrate on four teams. I think it takes the luck out of it. It's more strategic. People who know college basketball tend to do better in this one. The bracket is 'flip a coin.' I don't think the guy who wins the standard bracket is necessarily the smartest guy on college basketball."

Melvin said that with so many brackets and pools, "You have to have the right guys in charge of these things."

One of those was Tony Gwynn. When he still was playing, he was the commissioner of the Padres clubhouse pool, meticulously scoring as many as 200 brackets every night and then arriving at 6:30 the next morning so he could post them before his teammates arrived.

"That sounds like me," Tulowitzki said.

"Some of the guys who are a little younger might say, 'I don't want to do it, I don't know anything about college basketball,'" Tulowitzki said. "My thing to them is that you can watch some games with your teammates. It makes it fun so that we're not always talking about baseball. I might come in the next day and talk to one of the young pitchers about college basketball and that just makes it a good thing."

Rockies reliever John Axford -- who was 17-for-17 with his Oscar bracket last year -- said this spring he is only taking part in a joint Canada pool with fellow Canadian Justin Morneau.

"I've never been big into college basketball but it's something good to get into and enjoy a good laugh and the clubhouse guys like to get on each other," he said. "It's good to bring some team chemistry together right before the season."

Colorado reliever LaTroy Hawkins, the oldest player in the majors this season, said that he doesn't enjoy the brackets as much as he did in his early days when he was with the Twins and Kirby Puckett would get the clubhouse pool highly energized. Then again, he acknowledges, maybe the difference is he was just a unique situation with Puckett around.

Either way, he says, he's only taking part in one clubhouse pool this spring.

"I'm saving all my money for Mayweather-Pacquiao."