On this opening week of Spring Training, all 30 Major League teams have one thing in common: optimism. Here's an optimism cheat sheet for each of them.

Taking reps behind Chris Davis at first base, Orioles prospect Ryan Mountcastle became the most high-profile participant yet in the club's grand spring experiment.

Fans and analysts spend the entire offseason speculating where the top free agents could go, but sometimes an under-the-radar pickup can end up making a world of difference. As positional competitions begin to heat up at Spring Training camps this month, MLB.com's beat writers were asked to identify one potentially overlooked acquisition for each of the 30 clubs. Here's who they came up with.

With Dallas Keuchel and Charlie Morton leaving in free agency and Lance McCullers Jr. on the mend following Tommy John surgery, Collin McHugh is returning to his roots this year and is back in the Houston rotation. He said his experience as a reliever will only help him evolve as a starter.

Gerrit Cole and Justin Verlander are not fans of the "opener" and explained why it's not a long-term option.

On this opening week of Spring Training, all 30 Major League teams have one thing in common: optimism. Here's an optimism cheat sheet for each of them.

The first live bullpen sessions of the spring typically draw a crowd, and that certainly was the case when Justin Verlander, Gerrit Cole and Brady Rodgers faced hitters for the first time Sunday afternoon on the back fields at Ballpark of the Palm Beaches.

JERUSALEM (AP): Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu formally received the support of a majority of lawmakers to lead a new government yesterday, paving the way for a controversial power-sharing deal with rival-turned-partner Benny Gantz....

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — A virtual meeting of South African lawmakers has been disrupted by hackers who flooded the video call with pornographic images. In the incident on Thursday, the hackers also hurled racial and sexual insults at the meeting...

Supreme Ventures Racing and Entertainment Limited, operators of Caymanas Track, has announced the re-opening of the main track, effective tomorrow. The company said in a press release on Thursday evening that the track will be opened for two days...

OTTAWA, Canada (CMC): The Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football’s (Concacaf) hexagonal round of qualifying for the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar may have to be scrapped because of the disruption the COVID-19...

MADRID, Spain (AP): Rafael Nadal says Novak Djokovic will need to be vaccinated to keep playing if the governing bodies of tennis make coronavirus shots obligatory once they become available. Nadal told the Spanish newspaper La Voz de Galicia this...

BRIDGETOWN, Barbados (CMC): Former Windies fast bowler Kenny Benjamin says that cricket in the Caribbean is suffering from players’ lack of loyalty and commitment and that intervention is required to save the sport. The Antiguan called for coaches...

The UK’s austerity programme has disproportionately affected children and people with disabilities, says David Taylor-Robinson, a senior clinical lecturer in public health at the University of Liverpool. He joins us to discuss why the evidence shows the vulnerable are hit hardest by the cuts to public services, despite the UN conventions on...

Jackie Applebee is a GP in Tower Hamlets in London, and is concerned that the way the GP funding formula is working doesn't take account of the earlier health needs of people in deprived areas. For more about the Tower Hamlets Save Our Surgery campaign, visit their facebook page https://www.facebook.com/SaveOurGPsurgeries BMJ Voices is a...

Katherine Henderson is the clinical lead of the emergency department at St Thomas's hospital in London. She worries that lack of ward space is having a domino effect throughout A and E and is the cause of increased waiting time for both patients and ambulances. If you would like to contribute to this collection, please email a brief audio...

In the US the licence, or marketing authorisation, for alteplase is limited to 0-3 hours after onset of stroke, but some other countries - including the UK and Australia - have extended the licence to 4.5 hours. In an analysis article on thebmj.com Brian Alper, vice president of evidence based medicine research and development at Dynamed, and...

Some apps have the potential to encourage healthier habits and are accessible to most people, argues Iltifat Husain, but Des Spence notes the lack of any evidence of effectiveness and the potential for encouraging unnecessary anxiety. Read more about in our head to head "Can healthy people benefit from health apps?" -...

For decades research has shown that discrimination, harassment, and exclusion are pervasive experiences for staff from black and minority ethnic (BME) backgrounds in the National Health Service. In this podcast, the authors of a recent analysis article in The BMJ talk about the evidence for discrimination, what the NHS has done and is doing, and...

With improved survival and and ageing population, the number of people living with coronary heart disease in the UK has increased to an estimated 2.3 million. There is increasing evidence that cardiac rehabilitation benefits these patients, and as such it has been included in international clinical guidelines. ​In this podcast, we're joined by...

The current orthodoxy is that home is the best and preferred place of death for most people, but in this podcast, Kristian Pollock a sociologist from Nottingham University questions these assumptions and calls for greater attention to improving the experience of dying in hospital and elsewhere. Read the full...

Plan, do, study, act cycles, or PDSA cycles, are the basis of many quality improvement projects, they're a model to trial changes and feed the lessons from each test into the next. Why are they a popular method, and how do you get the best out of them? And what on earth happens when they explode? Harriet Vickers asks Julie Reed, National...

Providing information to enable informed choices about healthcare sounds immediately appealing to most of us. But Minna Johansson, GP trainee and PhD student at the University of Gothenburg, argues that preventive medicine and expanding disease definitions have changed the ethical premises of informed choice and our good intentions may...

The UK government published its report Childhood Obesity: a Plan for Action, in August 2016. A new analysis article takes them to task for the inadequacy of that response to a growing problem. Neena Modi is a professor of neonatal medicine, at Imperial College London, and president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, and joins...

It’s been called “the universal panacea” - exercise has a positive effect on almost all health measures, and governments are actively campaigning for us to do more. But at the opposite end of the scale, the realisation that some people may be addicted to exercise is gaining traction. In this podcast we're joined by Heather Hausenblas - professor...

Air pollution is a truly damaging environmental insult to the human body. The numbers of premature deaths, in the UK alone, that can be attributed to it are calculated to be 40,000 a year. Yet despite this, action to tackle the problem - as with the other huge environmental issue of our time, climate change - is distinctly lacking. Robin...

The BMJ has been campaigning for an end to “too much medicine” - the pernicious effect of marketing on the range of tests and treatments that doctors offer patients - tests and treatments which are motivated by the financial reward to the system, than the health of the individual. A new analysis on BMJ.com takes a look at what’s happening in the...

In this interview from Preventing Overdiagnosis 2017 (preventingoverdiagnosis.net) Stacy Carter, associate professor at Sydney Health Ethics - and the author of a recently written BMJ essay the ethical aspects of overdiagnosis, joins us to talk about how the cultural context of medicine seeps into our decision making processes and affects how...

The world bank was set up in 1944. In the aftermath of the second world war, the institution was there to give loans to countries rebuilding after the conflict. Their first loan went to France - but with stipulations about repayment that set a tone for future funds. A new series, authored by Devi Sridhar, and her team from the University of...

Acute respiratory distress syndrome was first described in 1967 and has become a defining condition in critical care. Around 40% of patients with ARDS will die, and survivors experience long term sequelae. No drug treatments exist for ARDS, however good supportive management reduces harm and improves outcome. In this podcast, John Laffey,...

A study published by The BMJ today reports a possible association between intake of highly processed (“ultra-processed”) food in the diet and cancer. Ultra-processed foods include packaged baked goods and snacks, fizzy drinks, sugary cereals, ready meals and reconstituted meat products - often containing high levels of sugar, fat, and salt, but...

Its now widely agreed that one of the key ways of reducing the current high level of "waste " in biomedical research is to focus it more squarely on addressing the questions that matter to patients - and the people and medical staff that care for them. In this interview, Tessa Richards - the BMJ's patient partnership editor, talks to...

Our latest debate asks, should doctors recommend acupuncture for pain? Asbjørn Hróbjartsson from the Center for Evidence-based Medicine at University of Southern Denmark argues no - evidence show's it's no worse than placebo. Mike Cummings, medical director of the British Medical Acupuncture Society argues yes - that there is evidence of efficacy,...

That’s Jo Shapiro is a surgeon and manager in Brigham and Women’s hospital, she’s also director of the Center for Professionalism and Peer Support, and has written an editorial for The BMJ on tackling unprofessional behaviour. In this discussion, she and I talked about what she thinks (beyond the illegal) are the most damaging behaviours seen...

The first digital banking in the UK was launched in 1983, Skype turns 15 this year, but 2017 finally saw panic over the impact that online consultations may have on general practices. In this podcast Martin Marshall, professor of healthcare improvement at University College London joins us to discuss whether video conference actually is a...

15s30m is a social movement to reduce frustration & increase joy - the idea is to spend 15 seconds of your time now, and save someone else 30 minutes down the line. To talk about their movement we're joined by the founders, Rachel Pilling, consultant ophthalmologist, and Dan Wadsworth, transformation manager - both from Bradford Teaching...

If you’re of a scientific persuasion, watching policy debates around Brexit, or climate change, or drug prohibition are likely to cause feelings of intense frustration about the dearth of evidence in those discussions. In this podcast we're joined by Chris Bonell, professor of public health sociology - in this podcast he airs those frustrations,...

Ted Kaptchuk, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical school - and leading placebo researcher, has just published an analysis on bmj.com describing the effect of open label placebo - placebos that patient's know are placebos, but still seem to have some clinical effect. Ted joins us to speculate about what's going on in the body, what this means...

Clinical trials for regulatory approval are designed to test efficacy, but new drugs might have adverse reactions - reactions those trials aren’t designed to spot. To talk about those adverse reactions - how to spot them, how to report them and what to do about them, we're joined by Robin Ferner, from the West Midlands Centre for Adverse Drug...

You’ll have read in a clinical trial “Most patients had an acceptable adverse-event profile.” Or that a drug “has a manageable and mostly reversible safety profile.” And that “the tolerability was good overall.” In this podcast, Bishal Gyawali (@oncology_bg) joins us to describe what events those terms were actually describing in cancer drug...

In the second of our EBM round-ups, Carl Heneghan, Helen Macdonald and Duncan Jarvies are joined by Deborah Cohen, investigative journalist and scourge of device manufacturers. We're giving our verdict on the sensitivity and specificity of ketone testing for hyperemesis, and the advice to drinking more water to prevent recurrent UTIs in...

Terence Stephenson is a consultant paediatrician who became been chair of the General Medical Council in 2015. His 4 year tenure has now come to an end, but during his time with the regulator the medical profession faced a number of challenges - the case of Hadiza Bawa Garba and a growing recruitment crisis in the NHS - the GMC is the...

It can be difficult to know what to do when a person in severe psychological distress presents to a general practice or community clinic, particularly if they are behaving aggressively, or if they are refusing help. Most patients who are acutely disturbed present no danger to others, however situations can evolve rapidly. Frontline staff need to...

An “author pays” publishing model is the only fair way to make biomedical research findings accessible to all, say David Sanders, professor of gastroenterology at Sheffield University, but James Ashton and worries that it can lead to bias in the evidence base towards commercially driven results - as those are the researchers who can pay for open...

In the UK we have a complex relationship with gambling, the government licences the national lottery, and uses profit from that to fund our art and museum sector - horse racing is a national TV event, and we've seen a proliferation of betting shops on our high streets. At the same time, there's increasing acceptance that gambling causes problems...

Nicole Stott is an engineer, aquanaut and one of the 220 astronauts to have lived and worked on the International Space Station. In a confined space, under huge pressure, with no way out, it's important that teams maintain healthy dynamics, and individuals can manage their stress adequately, and in this podcast Nicole explains a little about...

WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros recently said “Since it came into force 13 years ago, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control remains one of the world’s most powerful tools for promoting public health,”. But is it? That’s what a to studies just published on bmj.com try and investigate - one of which pulls together all the data we have on...

We know that exercise is good for you - the WHO recommends at least 150 minutes of moderate intensity or 75 minutes of vigorous intensity aerobic physical activity each week. That recommendation is built on evidence that relied on self reporting that may underestimate the amount of lower intensity exercise those people were doing, and at the...

We heard a few podcasts ago about burnout - what it is, and why it should be thought of as a systems issue. Now a project in the Netherlands is trying to investigate who it is that is particularly at risk of burnout, and hopes to test whether individually tailored coaching and counselling can help those who are experiencing the symptoms change the...

Brexit. Who knows what’s going to happen in the next few weeks, months, years - the uncertainty is high. In the face of that, you’d hope that the government was doing all it could to plan for any eventuality - let alone for a massive, country altering one like suddenly crashing out without a deal - but Martin McKee, professor of public health at...