Atlanta Braves third baseman Chipper Jones will miss the start of his farewell season.

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Atlanta Braves third baseman Chipper Jones announced Thursday that he will retire at the end of the 2012 season. Jones, 39, leads all active players with 18 years of service with the same club, one more than the New York Yankees' Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera.

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The New York Yankees will have 18 interleague games on their 2012 MLB schedule. Their opponents include the Cincinnati Reds, New York Mets, Washington Nationals and Atlanta Braves. They will have two series against the Braves and Mets.

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The Yankees want to ease the pressure on Michael Pineda. "We don't need him to be a 30-win All-Star. We need him to be Michael Pineda," Mark Teixeira said. "Wherever Michael fits in, he's going to be great for us." Pineda worked around some erratic control in Saturday's 8-3 win over the Atlanta Braves, showing more velocity than he did in his first spring training...

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Baseball is back! Here at Big League Stew, we'll take a quick dash around the league each morning in an attempt to keep you updated on all the springtime storylines. •  A whole slew of pitchers and catchers arrived over the weekend, but not everyone came bearing good news. Atlanta Braves pitcher Tim Hudson confirmed that offseason back surgery will keep him out of the Braves rotation until at least May. There is a bright side, however. The disk surgery alleviated a lot of the pain Hudson had been feeling in the past. "I definitely feel like I'm getting around a lot better," Hudson told  MLB.com . "I felt like Fred Sanford for two or three years walking around the locker room." • CC Sabathia has experienced so much success over the early part of his career that he's more or less killed any media hysteria that might have centered on his weight. But the New York Yankees ace made it an issue himself on Sunday when he reported that he had lost 10-15 pounds in the offseason — and maybe even more, according to the waistline-watching eye of the New York Times' David Waldstein . As he enters the second half of his career, Sabathia wants to make sure his knees hold up. He says he'll try to do better with late-night room service orders, which are sometimes a necessary evil given baseball's schedule. • Our fifth annual swing through the Cactus and Grapefruit Leagues begins this week. Check back later for posts from Dave Brown's first stop: Clearwater and the Philadelphia Phillies. Also make sure to follow him on Twitter ( @answerdave ) as he'll be filing updates from Monday's rendezvous with the New York Yankees at Steinbrenner Field.

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Now that Michael Pineda has been traded to the New York Yankees, the Seattle Mariners have a hole in their rotation. The team reportedly now has a body to fill the space in the form of Kevin Millwood. MLB.com reports that the M's have signed Millwood to a minor-league deal with an invitation to spring training. Since entering the league in 1997, the 37-year-old Millwood has pitched for the Atlanta Braves, Philadelphia Phillies, Cleveland Indians, Texas Rangers, Baltimore Orioles, and Colorado Rockies. He's gone 163-140 with a 4.10 ERA and 1,976 strikeouts in that time. Last season, he went 4-3 with a 3.98 ERA and 36 strikeouts in 54.1 innings pitched. Let the rumors come to you. Follow Scoop du Jour on Twitter or Facebook .

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I, as a fervent New York Yankees fan, was surprised to learn that former first baseman Chris Chambliss actually played more games with the Atlanta Braves than he did in the Bronx. Chambliss, who will be 63 this Dec. 26, was a large part of the successful Yankees clubs of the...

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Spotless through the summer, Craig Kimbrel struggled in the stretch. The newest NL Rookie of the Year intends to learn from a particular late-season blemish. The Atlanta Braves' closer unanimously won the award Monday, with Tampa Bay pitcher Jeremy Hellickson emerging from a talented crop to take the AL honor.

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The Boston Red Sox' lead in the wild card race is gone. The Atlanta Braves' advantage isn't far behind. And with two games to go, the Red Sox and Braves have plenty of agonizing to do about the prospect of blowing a pair of huge leads down the stretch - and a brutal...

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Never in the long history of Major League Baseball has any team held a lead in September of eight games or more for a postseason berth and failed to clinch. Got that? Never happened. Not even once. And yet it could happen twice in 2011, because the Boston Red Sox and Atlanta Braves are teetering on the verge of collapsing in the season's final month the way no club has before.

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