The grind of a 144-game season will usually, over time, weed out the pretenders from the contenders, often with ruthless precision.

While any baseball season is littered with peaks and valleys, some extremes being higher or lower than others, there are usually signs throughout that hint at which teams fall into which category.

We don't yet know if the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles are contenders or pretenders. The Eagles certainly entered the year with the glint of a contender, with ace Masahiro Tanaka returning to lead a talented, young rotation, and new signings Andruw Jones and Casey McGehee bolstering the offensive arsenal.