A committee of one: Keith Foulke doesn't mind coming into a game in the eighth inning and getting six outs for a save. AP

Six more weeks of winter? Obviously, nobody gave Punxsutawney Phil the reporting dates for pitchers and catchers.

No sport is as compelling in its preseason and its offseason as baseball. As equipment trucks are being loaded for journeys to Arizona and Florida camps, it's time to rate how teams have fared since Josh Beckett and the Marlins whipped the Yankees in Game 6 of the World Series, an event baseball managed to pull off without any women being forcibly undressed in public. (More on that stupidity later.)

Let's remove from consideration teams such as the Reds, Pirates and Brewers. You have to at least be trying to be included. Here are report cards on the best and worst offseasons.

The Best

1. BOSTON RED SOX -- The two most important items on their shopping list were a starting pitcher and a closer. So how did they do? They obtained only the best starting pitcher (Curt Schilling) and best closer (Keith Foulke) available. Schilling comes off a season in which he worked only 168 innings due to non-throwing injuries, which, at age 37, is good news for the Sox -- especially because his strikeout rate (10.4 per nine innings in 2003) shows that his stuff has not diminished. Derek Lowe is a fine pitcher in his own right, but Schilling's presence allows Pedro Martinez to take the ball without the pressure of the entire Red Sox Nation on his shoulders. (See Johnson, Randy, under listing for 2001 Diamondbacks.)

For a team that began last season with the disastrous bullpen-by-committee plan (blame the personnel, not the theory), Boston now has the perfect closer for its statistical-based thinking on how to use a pen. Foulke threw 86 2/3 innings last year and doesn't mind entering a tie game in the eighth inning. GM Theo Epstein calls the right-handed stopper "our weapon."

"We'll see how the cool weather effects him," cautioned one scout about Boston's climate. "Remember, he couldn't pitch in [one game in] the playoffs there because his back tightened up on him."

Perhaps Boston won't outslug the 1927 Yankees again (five Red Sox regulars set new highs in home runs in '03), but New York, Toronto (Ted Lilly) and Baltimore (Matt Riley, Eric Dubose) are almost entirely without strong left-handed pitching. That's an important break for Boston, which was just 26-27 against southpaws last year. And with Schilling and Foulke, the Red Sox are a more dangerous postseason team than they were last year.

2. ANAHEIM ANGELS -- Hey, it's only money. With almost $150 million shelled out for Vladimir Guerrero, Bartolo Colon, Jose Guillen and Kelvim Escobar, the Angels strengthened their team considerably without taking away from their core. Guerrero, when healthy, is one of the five best players in the game. That's a big improvement in itself, though asking Garret Anderson to run down balls in center field and having Darin Erstad, the Angels' best outfielder, anchored to first base could hurt the team defensively. It will be fun, though, to see Guillen and Guerrero show off two of the best throwing arms in the game from the same outfield.

Colon is the key to Anaheim's turnaround. The Angels had the league's best bullpen last year, but their starters ranked 11th in ERA (4.90), lost more games than any other team's starters except Detroit and gave up more homers than any rotation except Texas'. Colon is a proven winner and, more important, an innings-eater.

3. HOUSTON ASTROS -- The Astros added two starters who combined for 38 wins and 420 innings last year for about $15 million (average annual value). Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte also bring a winning pedigree to Houston. Now let's see what manager Jimy Williams does with this staff. His starters threw the fewest innings of any team in baseball last year with the exception of Texas. With closer Billy Wagner gone, Williams should re-evaluate his tendency to underuse his starters and overuse his bullpen.

Honorable Mentions: The Royals, assuming that Juan Gonzalez has a Pudge Rodriguez-type bounce-back year; the Yankees, who look great on paper except for birth certificates and medical records; the Blue Jays, who can expect a breakout year from Miguel Batista; the Phillies, who will have to deal with playing under the pressure of being favorites; the Orioles, who are finally interesting again; and the Cubs, who might rise to the top of the list if they sign free-agent Greg Maddux.

The Worst

1. LOS ANGELES DODGERS -- What, you thought Juan Encarnacion (.299 OBP after the All-Star break) was the remedy for the worst offense in baseball? The delay to approve Frank McCourt as owner hamstrung Los Angeles' offseason plans, but the heavily leveraged deal does not bode well for future big-ticket investments (Nomar Garciaparra?). The Dodgers did have a chance to get Kaz Matsui, but blew it when they refused to guarantee him the shortstop job, instead inviting him to compete with Cesar Izturis, who looks like the second coming of Ray Oyler. The Dodgers are such a mess now that Billy Beane must rethink his aspirations to run the team, perhaps leaving the door open for his former boss in Oakland, Sandy Alderson to take the job with L.A.

2. CHICAGO WHITE SOX -- Things are likely to get worse for the Sox when they trade Magglio Ordonez. Don't count on Robert Person to become the next Esteban Loiaza. The team remains strangely unsettled up the middle and doesn't have the athleticism that new manager Ozzie Guillen prefers. Hiring Guillen was the team's best offseason move, though his relationship with slugger Frank Thomas won't lack fireworks. The White Sox have not drawn two million fans since 1993, and this isn't the kind of team to end the streak.

3. ATLANTA BRAVES -- They have replaced Gary Sheffield, Maddux and Javy Lopez with J.D. Drew, John Thomson and Johnny Estrada. Enough said. I've always considered the Braves to be the undisputed heavyweight champ -- the NL East title is theirs until somebody knocks them out decisively -- but they could be a third-place team thanks to an $80 million payroll, a $15 million cut from last year.

Dishonorable Mentions: The Expos, for losing their best pitcher (Javier Vazquez) and hitter (Guerrero) with Nick Johnson and Carl Everett to show for it; the Mariners, for yet another winter of thinking small; and the Twins, for losing Eric Milton, Latroy Hawkins and Eddie Guardado.

It's a smaller world

Now that steroid testing with penalties (albeit soft ones) is here, be prepared to hear more than a few spring training stories about players who "took yoga," "lost weight," "changed diets," "cut back on weightlifting," "came in lighter," "wanted to be more flexible," and other code words for cutting down on steroids and other illegal supplements. Some such anecdotal evidence existed last year, when the testing was anonymous and for survey purposes only, but now the incidence of slimmed-down players probably will grow. One star NL pitcher, for instance, shrunk so noticeably this winter that another player remarked, "I swear to you when I saw him I didn't even recognize him."

A league of their own

The next time somebody wants to praise the NFL for being run by marketing geniuses, tell them the league owes its broad-based appeal to the twin vices of violence and gambling, not superior thinking. Just remind them of Super Bowl 38 (this is a Roman numeral-free zone). Imagine if baseball shut down its postseason for two weeks, then held a championship game that lasted four hours and five minutes, and, as if the sport's ultimate contest wasn't enough, gave the night's most uninterrupted stretch of televised action over to an insulting, degrading halftime show in which one guy couldn't keep his hand off his own crotch and another ripped clothing off a woman so as to expose her breast. Talk about the boob tube. Great family entertainment, folks.

And the NFL pretends it's shocked that this is what it gets when it hops into bed with MTV? And with "shows'' like this the league is shocked when selfish players try to one-up each other with even more outlandish, self-promoting end-zone celebrations? Please. It's become chic to slam baseball for any little reason -- as if Barry Bonds admiring a home run as it flies out of the park is even close to Joe I'm-Bigger-Than-The-Team Horn planting a cell phone in a goal post and using it as a prop -- but baseball has never insulted its audience the way the NFL did on Sunday. Hey, but as long as bodies keep crashing into each other and you can lay some money down in your office pool, those NFL guys are so much smarter than the baseball people, aren't they?

Sports Illustrated senior writer Tom Verducci covers baseball for the magazine and is a regular contributor to SI.com.