From where he eats, sleeps and plays with his kids, an easy drive from Chase Field in downtown Phoenix, free agent Howie Kendrick sees “a really good fit for what I’m looking for in a team.”

Long before becoming manager of the Mets, Terry Collins was a baseball man. Over five decades, Collins rode countless Minor League buses, accepted whatever jobs he could find, learned from some of the game’s living legends and, in 2015, nearly reached the pinnacle of his sport.

Major League Baseball released the first workout dates for every club in advance of Spring Training 2016. They are as follows:

The Cardinals announced a one-year deal with South Korean reliever Seung-Hwan Oh in a news conference on Monday. The deal includes a club option for 2017.

Outfielder Gerardo Parra and the Rockies reached agreement on a three-year contract on Tuesday.

Remember: Last year, the 2015 AL MVP was traded.

It’s been quiet for the Twins recently, as they’ve yet to make any major moves after trading for catcher John Ryan Murphy and signing Korean slugger Byung Ho Park early in the offseason.

Some will tell you it’s bad luck to win the offseason. Sets a club up to fail. Burdens it with expectations. On the other hand, what’s the alternative? As one of baseball’s wise men, Jim Leyland, once said, “It means someone thinks you’ve probably got a pretty good team.”

Reliever Tanner Scheppers is still alive and with the Rangers. He is not retired, he has not been cut and he has not been traded. Scheppers may be the forgotten man in the Rangers’ overstocked bullpen, but the right-hander — one of Texas’ Opening Day relievers from 2014 — is still on the 40-man roster.

One of Major League Baseball’s youth initiatives is about to break through to a new level. The Breakthrough Series, established in 2008 to diversify the pool of baseball prospects in college and beyond, will undergo a major expansion this season. This year, instead of being held at one site and featuring 60 to 80 players, the Breakthrough Series will be held at five sites for 300 prospects.

Jake Arrieta showed promise during the 2014 season before fully breaking out with a record-setting ’15 campaign en route to winning the National League Cy Young Award. This came one year after Indians ace Corey Kluber went from a relatively unknown starter in ’13 to a 269-strikeout pitcher who won the ’14 American League Cy Young Award.

A trio of former Boston players — Jason Varitek, Tim Wakefield and Ira Flagstead — along with former team president/CEO Larry Lucchino have been elected as the 2016 Red Sox Hall of Fame inductees.

What does pitch spin “look” like? With a year of Statcast data now available, we can match spin vs velocity for individual pitch types and show where on the spectrum each pitch type lives.

Rhys Hoskins might not rank among the Phillies’ Top 30 Prospects, but a case can be made that he’s the club top power hitter on the farm heading into 2016. Hoskins hasn’t skipped a beat this offseason in the Australian Baseball League, where he has a .948 OPS, eight home runs, 15 doubles and 38 RBIs in 43 games for the Sydney Blue Sox.

It’s never too early to dream about how great it will be in just over four weeks when baseball is officially back, so with that in mind, here’s one reason for each of the 30 fan bases of the Major Leagues to get excited about what’s coming in just one month’s time on the fields of the Cactus and Grapefruit Leagues.

There’s a long list of situations where players need fresh starts or face logjams that complicate the outlook for them and their teams. In honor of Ben Revere’s new manager, here are a Dusty Baker’s dozen of them.

Will the Marlins and Deeg Gordon come to an agreement on a contract extension for beyond 2016? Beat reporter Joe Frisaro opens up the Marlins Inbox.