Time is undefeated. To fight it is to lose, and a waste of it. To kill some is a waste of your own. The knighted bloke best known for proclaiming time was on his side? He’s 74 now. Time — as one lord of it has said — is a wibbly wobbly timey wimey enterprise.

Apparently, Major League Baseball likes a challenge. Among their new pace-of-play solutions is to limit “mound visits” to six per team every nine innings, with one bonus visitation for each extra inning.

Everybody knows that visiting a pitcher to take the ball away from his failed, sweaty hands does not count as a mound visit, but the new limitation still leads to many questions — and varying, vague answers. The punishment for a forbidden seventh “mound visit,” for example. Commissioner Rob Manfred said there would be an automatic pitching change. MLB chief baseball officer Joe Torre then said that would only happen if a pitching coach or manager had the seventh chat. Or the catcher gets ejected. Or everybody gets to stay, because the seventh visit is allowed if the pitcher and catcher clearly get “crossed up.”

What counts as a “mound visit”? This is the official explanation on MLB’s website:

Any manager, coach or player visit to the mound counts as a mound visit under this rule, though visits to the mound to clean cleats in rainy weather, to check on a potential injury or after the announcement of an offensive substitution are excepted. Normal communication between a player and pitcher that doesn’t require either to vacate his position on the field doesn’t count as a visit.

Torre has been touring spring training camps to better explain to each team what the actual rules are. So far, managers have said they have a better understanding following Torre’s visit without elaborating as to how, exactly. The umpires aren’t entirely clear on the rules yet, either. Umpire Jeff Kellogg told the Twins there was a “mound visit” the other day when pitcher Phil Hughes walked over to his catcher Mitch Garver after taking a foul ball to the helmet. “When a guy takes a ball off the mask, [I’m] just checking to see if he’s all right and give him a second,” Hughes told the Star-Tribune. “We’re not talking about strategy or anything. [Kellogg] said as he understands it now, [it counts anyway], but he wouldn’t be surprised if some memos go out to clarify things.”

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Again, I don’t know how we define a “super-team era,” but it sure feels like we’re in one. At the moment, seven teams are projected to win at least 90 games in the season ahead. Just about every division appears to have a clear favorite, with the exception of the AL East, and that one’s only unclear because two teams are really good. There’s an argument to be made that having so many strong teams has slowed down the market. After all, what hope could the other teams have?

And yet, there’s an opening. It all comes down to setting a goal. If you’re one of the non-super-teams, you can do only so much to climb into the tier. It’s tremendously difficult to turn a decent team into a great one over the course of one offseason. But what if the goal is to simply make the playoffs? Five teams from each league make it every year. Each league doesn’t have five obvious favorites. From one point of view, the playoffs are nearly random, and once a team makes it in, anything can happen. And, you know, when the best teams are winning so many games, the barrier for playoff entry can actually be lowered.

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This is Sung Min Kim’s third piece as part of his February residency at FanGraphs. (He gets a couple extra days because of the month’s brevity.) Sung Min is a staff writer for River Avenue Blues, the biggest independent New York Yankees blog on the web, and has freelanced for various publications including Deadspin, Sporting News, VICE Sports, the Washington Post, and more. He can also be found on Twitter. He’ll be contributing regularly here this month. Read the work of all our residents here.

Pace of play has, without a doubt, become a hot-potato subject in MLB and for commissioner Rob Manfred. The league, of course, recently made some rule changes in order to quicken game flow, alterations that mostly concern things like mound visits, commercial breaks, instant replay, and the timing of pitching changes. We even had a league executive make some, uh, interesting propositions about the ninth inning.

While many of MLB’s proposals this offseason have focused on improving pace of play, other possible rule changes have sought to more explicitly shorten games. One such idea is to increase the size of the strike zone. The idea here is straightforward: more strikes means quicker at-bats, and quicker at-bats means quicker games.

With the new pace-of-play measures already announced, we won’t be seeing a bigger strike zone yet. However, another league already put that measure in practice in 2017. Last year, before the season’s start, the KBO (Korean Baseball Organization) announced that they were going to adopt a wider strike zone.

The KBO made the decision for different reasons than MLB would. First, it seemed like a knee-jerk reaction to Team Korea’s poor showing in the 2017 World Baseball Classic. South Korea, the host of Group A in the first round of the tournament, was eliminated after the first two games, losing to Israel and the Kingdom of Netherlands (though they did beat Taiwan in their third and final contest). That early exit served as a wake-up call, inspiring league officials to think critically about the game.

But there was another reason for the change. KBO has been a high-offense environment for the past few seasons. From 2014 to 2016, the league enjoyed an average OPS of .807, .787, and .801 respectively. It was not always this way, though. As recently as 2012, KBO skewed more pitcher-friendly, believe it or not. That season, the league had a .698 OPS. Since then, hitter OPS has increased by about 100 points in just seasons, which is significant.

I could write a whole article on why that is. But for now, we’ll stick to the strike zone. After the offensive environment of the last few years, officials felt that the balance needed to shift back towards pitching after three consecutive years of inflated run-scoring. By increasing the strike-zone width and calling more strikes, pitchers would gain some advantage.

When announcing the change, the head KBO umpire official Kim Poong-Gi explained that the league would not explicitly re-define the strike zone. Rather, the intent was to maximize the size within the regulated measure. That meant, hypothetically, the pitch that touches any portion of zone boundary would be considered a strike.

And the new zone did inspire change.

Two pitches don’t conclusively prove the point, but as examples, here is Kim Gyeong-Un of the Hanwha Eagles, taking a pitch for a ball on May 18, 2016.

And here is Min Byung-Hun of the Doosan Bears taking a called strike three on a pitch in a very similar location on August 31, 2017.

The new mandate not only affected ball and strike calls but also average game length. In 2016, the average KBO game lasted 3 hours and 23 minutes. In 2017? Just 3 hours and 17 minutes. It is perhaps noteworthy, as well, that for the first month of the season, the average game length was 3 hours and 12 minutes, a whole 11 minutes shaved off the previous mark. That seems even more significant! So, hypothetically, the strike-zone change could be a practical short-term solution to quicken games.

There is a nagging question, though — namely, what happened after that first month? If we compare April to the rest of the season, we do see differences in strikeout rate and called-strike rate

The five-minute jump between April and everything after that seems significant enough to demand an explanation. Two theories are often invoked. The first is that hitters got acclimated to the change, decided to adapt a more aggressive approach, and produced. The second is that the umpires gradually went back to the previous strike zone.

The first theory is going to take some numbers to support. The wider strike zone bumped up the strikeout rate and reduced the walk rate throughout the league. As you see below, there were definitely more called strikes. As a result, hitters became a bit more aggressive.

Given the changes, more strikeouts, fewer walks, and more swings are to be expected. Hitters hit .272/.339/.400 in April and .289/.357/.447 from May till the end of the season. And most importantly, for the league’s purposes, here are the overall league slash lines:

2016: .290/.364/.437
2017: .286/.353/.438

The new strike-zone measure, while initially helping with the pace of play, did little to address the run-scoring environment. You could argue that the new strike zone encouraged hitters to be more aggressive and resulted in more balls put in play. The league 2017 BABIP of .327 is not much of a change from .326 and .331 from the previous two seasons. As the slugging percentage would indicate, the power did not die down either. In fact, the home-run total increased from 1,483 to 1,547. All in all, after a blip in the first month, the hitters simply continued to rake, and the game length regressed back to the norm.

The second point however, is partially confirmed. As the new rule was implemented, it became clear that pitches that did not touch the strike zone boundaries were often called strikes. In a mid-July interview, Kim Poong-Gi admitted that they “tweaked” the strike zone to make it smaller than it was in April. “Because the strike zone was overly wide in April, we adjusted it a bit smaller,” Kim said, “but we are still enforcing the wider strike zone width.” If that is true, then the numbers may back up the correlation. In April, the league ERA was at 4.46. It increased to 4.63 in May and saw a dramatic rise in June to 5.64.

That brought attention to a new problem: consistency. It can be hard enough to enforce a new measure. It gets harder when every umpire has a different zone.

The wide-strike-zone experiment, for now, is still an experiment in the KBO. Kim Poong-Gi announced in December that the league will continue to use wider strike zone in 2018. It’s very doubtful that it will solve the run-scoring issue in 2018 with the current pool of hitting and pitching talent in the KBO. Regarding pace of play, it would be easier to conclude something meaningful if there wasn’t such a disparity between the first month of game and the rest of the season’s. Other factors might account for some of the change in game length. Given the fluctuating game length trend and the overall inconsistencies, one could say that the strike-zone change created more problems that it solved. Does that mean that MLB should ditch the idea completely? Not necessarily. If the umpires can enforce a consistently sized zone throughout the season and give the players a good idea what to expect, then it could be executed decently.

Of course, another thing to note is that, throughout the baseball history, the strike-zone rules have changed multiple times. The regulation was not passed on a stone tablet like the Ten Commandments. It has been a product of adjustments according to the environment. For instance, in 1968, The Year of the Pitcher, MLB experienced an all-time pitcher-friendly season during which hitters slashed a mere .237/.299/.340 overall, with pitchers thriving to the tune of a 2.98 ERA. In 1969, the league responded by reducing the strike-zone size. In 1987, the league saw a then-record 4,458 home runs in a season. MLB adjusted the strike zone before the 1988 season by increasing the size. So it goes. The odds are that we will see another strike-zone change in future. Whether it will be for the pace of play remains to be seen.

All stats from Statiz unless otherwise specified.

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Five years ago, the Los Angeles Dodgers signed an $8 billion television deal to broadcast games locally on a Time Warner cable station, SportsNet LA. While quite large, there was some precedent for an agreement of this size. By that point, the Angels, Astros, Giants, Mets, Padres, and Yankees had all received billion-dollar contracts of their own. The Dodgers’ deal is notable, however, for how poorly it worked out. Even today, half of Los Angeles can’t watch the club because Time Warner and DirecTV have yet to agree on terms to broadcast games in Los Angeles.

The combination of the Dodgers’ situation and the Astros’ own disastrous effort to create a regional sports network appeared to indicate that the RSN bubble was about to pop.

That didn’t happen, though. Not at all, really. Soon, the Mariners sold their rights for a billion dollars, followed by the Rangers, Phillies, D-backs, and Cardinals in subsequent years. The Reds likely received something close to a billion dollars for a pact that begins this season. And now even the Tampa Bay Rays seem to be getting a billion dollars of their own.

The Rays’ deal, reported by John Ourand and Daniel Kaplan of the Sports Business Journal, will begin next season and pay the Rays an average of $82 million per season over 15 years, which amounts to $1.23 billion. The Rays are set to receive $35 million in the last year of their current contract, and that will increase to roughly $50 million in 2019. Assuming a steady rise over the life of the deal, rights will increase at 6.7% annually. The Rays’ new agreement is worth significantly less than many of the others inked over the last few years and doesn’t appear to come with an ownership stake. However, the money for the Rays is an indication that tremendous value still exists in the acquisition of local rights even as the landscape of television changes.

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In a bonus, non-team-preview episode, Ben Lindbergh talks to FiveThirtyEight’s Rob Arthur about his new research into the changing construction of the baseball and its possible effect on the rising home-run rate. Then Ben talks to trailblazing baseball researcher Tom Shieber, the senior curator at the Hall of Fame and a recent recipient of SABR’s Henry Chadwick Award, about his origins as a researcher, his pictorial deep dives into baseball’s past, and the Hall of Fame’s artifact archive.

Audio intro: John Lennon, "Crippled Inside"
Audio interstitial: Sloan, "What’s Inside"
Audio outro: Buzzcocks, "Hollow Inside"

Link to Rob Arthur’s article about the baseball
Link to 2018 Henry Chadwick Award announcement
Link to Tom Shieber’s Baseball Researcher blog
Link to Ben’s article about baseball in Elementary
Link to Larry Granillo’s article about baseball in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

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On Tuesday, in Grapefruit League play, those in Clearwater, Fla., witnessed what might possibly represent the future of defensive alignment. They at least saw how aggressive and creative first-year Phillies manager Gabe Kapler is prepared to be.

As Matt Gelb reported for The Athletic, non-roster invite outfielder Collin Cowgill and Tommy Joseph (who is playing some outfield this spring) were told before the game that, if Tigers switch-hitting prospect Victor Reyes batted left-handed, they would swap corner-outfield positions. Reyes did bat left-handed, and when he did, Cowgill and Joseph swapped their positions mid-inning.

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Even if you’ve been living under a rock or taking a between-jobs vacation, you’re probably aware that the Royals lost their longtime first baseman and franchise staple, Eric Hosmer, to free agency. Earlier this month, the Padres signed Ol’ Hos to an eight-year, $144 million deal, no doubt because their new head of Research and Development lobbied for the move (even after having previously declared him one of the winter’s free-agent landmines).

On Wednesday, the Royals filled their positional vacancy by committing $140.5 million less than the Padres did, inking Lucas Duda to a one-year, $3.5 million deal with plate-appearance-based incentives — $100,000 for reaching 300 PA, and for each 25 PA interval up to 600 PA — possibly yielding another $1.3 million.

While Duda and Hosmer are both listed at 6-foot-4, swing left-handed, and crossed paths in the 2015 World Series — most notably when the latter’s wild throw home in the ninth inning of Game 5 allowed the former to score the game-tying run — there are obviously some differences between the two. Hosmer, a 2008 first-round pick out of a Florida high school, has dark hair but is viewed within the industry as something of a golden boy, while Duda, a 2007 seventh-round pick out of the University of Southern California, is blond but seems to have been treated like the proverbial red-headed stepchild.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Texas Rangers. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from our own (both Eric Longenhagen’s and Kiley McDaniel’s) observations. For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of our prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this.

50 FV Prospects

Calhoun doesn’t have a position (he’s been tried at third, second, and in the outfield since college), but he’s going to rake. Scouts have him projected for plus hit and power. He takes huge, beer-league-softball hacks but has the hand-eye coordination and bat control to make it work. He could yank out 30 or more homers as soon as he’s given regular at-bats. The corner-outfield and DH situation in Texas is pretty crowded, but he should start seeing regular big-league time this year. There’s some risk that Calhoun’s aggression is exploited the way Rougie Odor’s has been, but otherwise Calhoun looks like a stable mid-order slugger.
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