The annual winter train of prospect rankings continued on Wednesday night as MLB.com released its list of top 100 prospects in the game.

Center fielder Bubba Starling, the Royals’ first-round pick in 2011, came in at No. 17, leading a group of four Royals prospects in the top 50.  

The latest American League salvo came on Tuesday afternoon, the Detroit Tigers signing Prince Fielder to a reported deal worth $214 million over nine years.

This, of course, after Albert Pujols and Pineda for Montero and the Darvish Experience. The American League is officially loaded, and the AL Central now has a definitive favorite.

Countdown to Royals spring training has inched under 30 days, with pitchers and catchers reporting Feb. 20. If you’re looking for a quick offseason fix — other than the Prince Fielder to Detroit bombshell — we've culled together a collection of some of our favorite baseball links from the past two months.

On Monday and Tuesday, the Royals avoided arbitration with six of their seven arbitration-eligible players. The flood of deals was capped on Tuesday with one-year contracts for Jonathan Sanchez, Luke Hochevar and Felipe Paulino. 

Here’s an updated look at The Star’s payroll projections for this season.

Last week, at the Royals' annual awards luncheon, first baseman Eric Hosmer offered up some confident and optimistic thoughts on the upcoming 2012 season.

“We feel like now is the time,” Hosmer said, “where we’re ready to make a playoff push and win this division.”

Well, it appears the Royals organization — especially the marketing department — is taking a similar approach to 2012.

It’s that time of year again.

Baseball America, an industry leader in amateur and minor-league baseball coverage, is slowly releasing its lists of top-10 prospects from each organization. And the Royals’ list, while yet to be released on its website, is in the latest edition of the BA magazine.

We continue on with our collection of leftovers from the Royals Awards Luncheon on Wednesday afternoon:

But first, a couple links:

• Here’s a collection of video interviews from Wednesday’s media session.

Spent most of Wednesday afternoon at the Royals Awards Luncheon at the Overland Park Convention Center. The sparknotes version: There were lots of highlight montages and references to heart and winners.

We’ll have plenty of offseason Royals coverage in Thursday’s paper. (Teaser alert: We caught up with Eric Hosmer and discussed his offseason and expectations for 2012.) But there were plenty of other Royals in town to accept awards — Alex Gordon, Bruce Chen, Lorenzo Cain, Johnny Giavotella — and thus no shortage of story lines or questions to ask.

We're still approximately 50 days away from the Royals' first spring workout for pitchers and catchers on Feb. 21. But plenty of players from the Royals organization were still busy playing baseball over the holidays.

The Venezuelan Winter League and Mexican Pacific League regular seasons came to an end on Friday. The Dominican Winter League is still in the midst of the playoffs.  And the Puerto Rican League regular season will conclude on Wednesday.

Another year of baseball (and Ball Star) in the books, we now look back (and forward) with a formulaic retrospective of stories and moments from 2011 — and predictions for 2012. 

 Five days that defined 2011

Here’s something that is kind of hard to believe: Carlos Beltran has never played a major-league baseball game against the Kansas City Royals.

It’s now been nearly eight years since Beltran played his last game in Kansas City, a performance that included a solo homer in a 12-3 loss to the Detroit Tigers at Kauffman Stadium on June 24, 2004.

This post is a few hours late. (Sorry.) But we established a Ball Star policy a few years back that says if the Royals ever acquire Yuniesky Betancourt to be their utility (Yutility?) infielder, we have to do a post.

So these will be some scattered words, thoughts and links about Betancourt, but maybe scattered is the way to go. There is already quite a bit of noise out there surrounding this signing. And we don’t want to repeat too much of it here.

The news filtered out late on Saturday night, the framework of a deal showing up on a local Wisconsin baseball blog and websites here and there.

By early Sunday morning, the details were mostly confirmed. The trade — first offered up as a possibility by the Bernies Crew blog — was going down.

The Royals were sending starting pitcher Zack Greinke (and shortstop Yuniesky Betancourt) to Milwaukee in exchange for shortstop Alcides Escobar, center fielder Lorenzo Cain and right-handed pitchers Jeremy Jeffress and Jake Odorizzi (photo above).

On an Arizona morning in mid July, Milwaukee left fielder Ryan Braun entered a ballroom at a luxurious desert resort. He took a seat at a small, elevated table, and the NL All-Star team filled in around him.

It was media day at the 2011 All-Star Game, just hours or so from the Home Run Derby, and just a day away from Braun’s fourth All-Star appearance in five seasons.

On Thursday in Dallas, the Los Angeles Angels dished out more than $330 million to two players, first baseman Albert Pujols and left-handed starter C.J. Wilson.

The deals punctuated a historic winter meetings, in which the newly-named Miami Marlins went Steinbrenner and Angels’ owner Arte Moreno became the anti-Mr. Burns.

In all, the Marlins and Angels combined to spend more than $500 million this past week. Just a reminder: That’s roughly 1,000 times what Eric Hosmer will make in 2012 — or 37 Jeff Francoeur contract extensions.