By now, we’ve all seen The Jog, Monday’s clip of Hanley Ramirez lollygagging after a ball he’d kicked into left field as two runs scored. Joe Posnanski called it “devastating” and “nauseating.” “That’s not the way the game’s supposed to be played,” said his teammate, Wes Helms. Hanley was pulled out of the game at the end of the inning and rode the pine on Tuesday; “We all support what skipper did,” said Dan Uggla. Really, just about everyone, from Uggla to Posnanski to our own Jack Moore approved of manager Fredi Gonzalez’s austere treatment of his moody star. Hanley finally apologized and played in yesterday’s game.

But that wasn’t the end of the story. It turns out that, before Hanley’s apology, Andre Dawson took him in a room (with fellow Hall of Famer standing post) and chewed him out:

Look, I’m going to level with you. You either hear me or you don’t. For one, you’re not bigger than the game. You don’t show a manager up. The way you’re going about this is literally the wrong way. It’s an immature act … and this could come back to bite you in the rear end in the worst way…

You really have stepped across the line. You owe that manager a sincere apology. And if you think your teammates have your back with this, you’ve got another thing coming because the mind-set, and this is from me to you, the mind-set is these guys are laughing at you.

We know all of this because Dawson told the Palm Beach Post. Apparently, “This is from me to you” didn’t preclude Dawson sharing the conversation with the press. Perhaps Dawson calculated that making it public was best for Hanley’s development, that he deserved to be called out in the most public way possible — though, because the story paints Dawson in the most favorable possible light, it’s also easy to believe that Dawson was motivated by the desire to look good. But even in a world with mic’ed up managers, a full forty years after Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, what happens in the clubhouse usually stays in the clubhouse. In this case, it didn’t.

Of course, this isn’t the first time that Hanley has had problems in the clubhouse. Last fall, he and Uggla got into a major spat when he came out of a game with cramps and Uggla thought he should have stayed in the game. Jayson Stark quotes an anonymous ex-Marlin saying,

Hanley frustrates the guys on that team, because everyone knows how much talent he has. Everyone has seen how great he can be out there. But then they also see the times where he just kind of gets nonchalant. It seems like he can turn the switch on any time he wants to. But he doesn’t always turn it on.

Hanley isn’t going anywhere. He’s signed through 2014, and he’s not just the best and most expensive player on the team, he’s the greatest player in the history of the franchise. (Sorry, Jeff Conine.) So the Marlins just have to live with his foibles, in public and in private.

But Dawson’s move may be counterproductive. Stark’s source says of Ramirez, “When something goes bad, then [Hanley] thinks everyone’s against him.” In other words, says Posnanski: Hanley Ramirez “has a persecution complex.” It’s hard to imagine that he’ll feel any better after reading his man-to-man with Dawson in the newspaper. It’s clear that Hanley isn’t completely comfortable in his own skin yet. So, was Dawson right, that going public with tough love is the only way that Ramirez will ever learn? Or did Dawson cross a line of his own?

The Phillies have been accused of stealing signs, but did they do anything wrong? Sign-stealing isn’t exactly against the rules, but it isn’t exactly not. After reviewing the telecast of Monday night’s Rockies-Phillies game, during which Philly bullpen coach Mick Billmeyer was seen watching Rockies catcher Miguel Olivo through binoculars, Major League Baseball officially warned the Phillies not to cheat — while admitting, “We found the evidence inconclusive on what was being done.”

The rule against sign-stealing is generally more of an unwritten one. There’s nothing about it the Official Rule Book — in fact, there are no rules regarding signs at all. There was a 1961 rule banning sign stealing by means of a “mechanical device,” but no amendment was put in the modern rulebook. And then there’s a passage in a memo sent in 2000 by Sandy Alderson, then MLB’s executive VP of Baseball Operations:

Please be reminded that the use of electronic equipment during a game is restricted. No club shall use electronic equipment, including walkie-talkies and cellular telephones, to communicate to or with any on-field personnel, including those, in the dugout, bullpen, field and–during the game–the clubhouse. Such equipment may not be used for the purpose of stealing signs or conveying information designed to give a club an advantage.

Binoculars, clearly, aren’t forbidden.

So it’s more of a judgment call. Rob Neyer offers a harsh, but common-sense take: “Officially, it’s cheating if ‘electronic devices’ are used. I’ll take it one step farther, though. I say anything beyond the naked eye is cheating.” Charlie Manuel didn’t help matters with his denial: ““We were not trying to steal signs. Would we try to steal somebody’s signs? Yeah, if we can. But we don’t do that.”

Because sign stealing is prohibited more by gentleman’s agreement than by law, then it’s important to ask: does it work? A decade ago, Neyer examined one of the most famous sign stealing rings of all, during the 1951 New York Giants’ amazing 52-18 race to the World Series. An electrician named Abraham Chadwick installed a buzzer system in the Giants’ clubhouse; another Giant stationed himself out in the spacious Polo Grounds outfield with a powerful telescope and signaled each pitch as it was called.

However, looking at Retrosheet data, Neyer notices something remarkable: “The Giants actually hit worse at the Polo Grounds after they started cheating.” Half the team didn’t even want to know what pitch was coming. The whole team kept the secret, dutifully, for 50 years, but while it’s undeniable that they cheated — they kept it a secret, which means they had a sense it was wrong, and then finally admitted it — it’s awfully questionable whether it helped.

There’s certainly a major placebo effect to cheating. It makes the cheater feel confident and the cheated feel paranoid. According to the recent book The Baseball Codes, in 2005, Bob Wickman intentionally balked a runner to third because he feared that the guy was stealing his signs from second. So the fear of cheating — or thrill of not getting caught cheating — may be more tangible than its effect.

What should be done, then? Should the Phillies be punished? Or is the outrage misguided? My answers may seem contradictory: no and no. But baseball’s attitude towards cheating is deeply contradictory. The “if you ain’t cheatin’ you ain’t tryin'” mentality coexists with the righteous indignation of people who feel the game must be played “the right way.” Hence, the universal condemnation of steroids stands in stark contrast to the shrugs and muted praise for A.J. Pierzynski’s breaking up a perfect game by pretending he was beaned pretending to be beaned during a no-hitter. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Jeff Schultz compared the Phillies’ binoculars to the 1951 Giants’ elaborate operation, writing, “I say: Give that spy a raise.”

The Phillies shouldn’t be punished, because they haven’t violated the letter of any law. But they’ve certainly violated the spirit, as Neyer says. They’re not the first, and won’t be the last, to steal signs. Still, the next time they come to your town, feel free to boo.

Every time Alex Rodriguez does anything — poses in Details Magazine, slaps a ball out of a glove, shouts to distract a fielder from a pop-up, admits to taking banned drugs, runs across the pitcher’s mound — it gets analyzed to death. In this case, though, it’s Rodriguez’s latest detractor, A’s pitcher Dallas Braden (who called Alex out for running across the pitcher’s mound on his way back to the dugout), who won’t let it drop. In an interview yesterday with Comcast’s Mychael Urban, Braden said that he hoped that Rodriguez had “garnered a new respect for the unwritten rules, and people who hold them close to their game.” He also said that he didn’t like Rodriguez before it happened, either: “I’m not a fan of his antics… [this] wasn’t the first display of his lack of respect for the game or those playing it.”

But are those unwritten rules really all that meaningful? Braden isn’t the only player to assert that rule’s existence, as Bert Blyleven and Goose Gossage both agreed with Braden’s action in an ESPN interview. However, Joe Posnanski argues that Alex Rodriguez is so universally despised that he tends to get dinged for actions for which other players would get a free pass: “If that was Albert Pujols running across the mound, and that was a pitcher who has accomplished as much as Dallas Braden griping about it — say Anibal Sanchez or someone — it seems to me there would be a whole lot of ‘Shut your fat face, kid,’ talk going on across the country.”

Braden was incensed because Rodriguez had violated the rules of baseball’s unwritten code, a collection of ethical bylaws as deeply ingrained, and often as unchallenged, as the “book” that mandates exactly when you should bunt. Thanks to Tom Tango, Andy Dolphin, and Mitchel Lichtman, we’ve revisited the first Book quite a bit over here. The Code, however, is even more sacrosanct, because it’s less to do with wins and more to do with respect, even to the point of easing off the throttle when you’re way ahead, not stealing bases or working the count with a huge lead, or swinging at the first pitch after back-to-back home runs.

Jason Turbow and Michael Duca’s new book, The Baseball Codes, details all the things that, by tradition, players aren’t supposed to do, and they recently published an excerpt on Yahoo. And it’s good to have them on paper, because some of them are a lot less defensible than others. Some of the rules are both widely known and sensible, like the stricture against standing at home plate to admire a home run: it’s disrespectful to the pitcher, and it’s also really embarrassing if you’re wrong about the distance, as Alfonso Soriano ought to know by now. But other rules seem a little bit more dubious. What’s so bad about trying to increase a lead, whether you’re stealing bases or working a count? The deadball era is long gone; leads are never truly safe. Why would you voluntarily forgo offensive weapons in your arsenal? And, for that matter, should we really care about who steps on a pitcher’s mound?

Eno Sarris noted that Braden’s “moxie” has shown up not just in his willingness to confront Rodriguez, but in his willingness to throw his good changeup more often. He’s having a decent year so far, but he’s a lefty with a high-80s fastball who basically gets by on control and handedness. He doesn’t make too many headlines with his results on the field, which was Alex Rodriguez and Joe Posnanski’s point: it’s a silly rule, and anyway Braden doesn’t have the stature to enforce it. The latter is a bit ad hominem, but the former seems reasonable. It probably is a silly rule.

Then again, it’s a silly league, in which grown men put on matching shirts, pants and shoes and get paid millions of dollars to play a children’s game. So, to some extent, all the rules are arbitrary. I’m all in favor of scrapping the mercy rules which legislate against running up the score: if you can push runs across, I think you owe it to your fans to do so. Moreover, the rules about respect and retaliation have been drastically changed in the last few years, as retaliatory plunking has effectively been regulated out of the game through multigame suspensions. (That notwithstanding, Zach Duke recently had to apologize for not hitting any Dodgers after two of his own teammates were beaned.) Baseball’s ethics are mutable, after all, and changes in player’s rules and incentives tend to influence behavior far more effectively than any unwritten code ever could.

But should moundrunning become standard practice? I don’t think so. Certainly, I hope, this whole episode will help remove the “unwritten” status of much of baseball’s Byzantine ethics code. Baseball’s basic unit of respect — the fundamental importance of not “showing up” your teammates or opponents — remains, and ought to remain. Rodriguez may have finally acclimated himself to the role of a heel, so he may find that moundrunning suits him. The rest of the league should probably take heed.

By now, you’ve probably heard about Arizona’s proposition SB1070 — the “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act” — which was signed into law by Gov. Jan Brewer on April 23, just two weeks after MLB announced that the 2011 All-Star Game would be held in Phoenix, for the first time ever. The law will go into effect in three months. It “requires a reasonable attempt to be made to determine the immigration status” if “reasonable suspicion exists” that the person is an illegal immigrant. Because of the high proportion of Latin and Hispanic players in baseball, and the Diamondbacks are one of the most prominent (and most mobile) of all Arizona corporations, that means that baseball — and the Arizona Diamondbacks — are caught squarely in the middle of all this.

Boycotts and picket lines for Diamondbacks games have already been threatened. There was a picket line at Coors Field yesterday, and there’s a Facebook page calling for a picket and boycott of tonight’s game against the Cubs at Wrigley Field. The Seattle blog HorsesAss.org called for the Mariners to pull out of the Cactus League. Washington Post columnist Robert McCartney came out in favor of a boycott of D-Backs games, and New York Daily News columnist Mike Lupica called for next year’s All-Star Game to be moved out of Phoenix. The blog La Nueva Raza called for a complete boycott of all things from Arizona. So has Rep. Raul Grijalva — a Democrat from Arizona, advocating a boycott against the state he represents.

The team feels unfairly squeezed, issuing a statement to the Arizona Republic newspaper: “Although D-backs’ Managing General Partner Ken Kendrick has donated to Republican political candidates in the past, Kendrick personally opposes (Senate) Bill 1070… The D-backs have never supported (Senate) Bill 1070, nor has the team ever taken a political stance or position on any legislation.” It’s hardly a full-throated condemnation, but the team is certainly trying to set itself apart from the bill. Certainly, if any of these boycotts take hold, they could stand to lose a fair amount of cash. The issue of moving the All-Star game is bigger, though. All-Star Weekend is a major revenue driver for a city, as it lasts for days and is the center of the baseball universe for the better part of a week, with no other games taking place.

Many have pointed out that there is Arizona precedent for a sports league to relocate a major event on the basis of a disagreement with state law. In 1991, the NFL moved the 1993 Super Bowl out of Arizona after the governor canceled observance of a holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr. That had an immediate effect: the holiday was approved by voters in 1992, and the 1996 Super Bowl took place in Tempe. A similar action by MLB would likely provoke a similarly strong reaction from the Arizona electorate, though a strong reaction is no guarantee of a repeal of the bill.

But is a boycott fair? Is it fair for baseball fans to punish the Arizona Diamondbacks for being based in a state which has passed a law that is unpopular in other states? Is it sensible to assume that refusing to see Diamondbacks games is the best way to change the law? Is it sensible to assume, as Dave Zirin of The Progressive writes, that “a boycott is also an expression of solidarity with Diamondback players such as Juan Gutierrez, Gerardo Parra, and Rodrigo Lopez”?

Whether or not the bill lives or dies will have little to do with whether Robert McCartney or Mike Lupica decide to go see the D-Backs when they’re in town. So it’s purely a decision about your personal morality. I’m not quite sure where I stand. What about you?

A month ago, we had a spirited argument over the idea of “floating realignment” — a basically impossible-to-implement notion by which teams would be able to choose which division they wished to play in. It signaled that Major League Baseball recognized the current alignment of teams is flawed, particularly because of the Yankee/Red Sox domination in the AL East.

Now, courtesy of Yahoo’s Jeff Passan and NBC’s Craig Calcaterra, we have a new idea: “unalignment.” Delete all divisions. Eliminate unbalanced schedules. The top four teams in each league advance to the postseason. As it was before the advent of the division era in 1969, playoff placement would depend entirely on won-loss record, not on who shares your division.

The plan has a few obvious things to recommend it, simplicity and fairness chief among them. Unbalanced schedules have been controversial since they were introduced, an attempt by Bud Selig to nurture baseball rivalries and boost revenues — and of course nothing boosts revenues more than a few more Yankees-Red Sox games every year. They also are patently unfair: the Blue Jays play 50-60 games a year against the Yankees, Red Sox, and Rays, while the Tigers play 50-60 games a year against the Royals, Indians, and White Sox, and the Cubs play 50-60 games a year against the Astros, Pirates, Reds, and Brewers. It’s a lot easier to win games when you can beat up on the weak, whether you’re the Yankees or the Twins.

And it’s a lot harder to win games when you’re trapped in the same division as baseball’s two wealthiest teams, as recently measured by Forbes. As Joe Posnanski writes, “The Yankees’ revenue stream is so enormous, it will give them a gigantic competitive advantage that should make them the favorites to win every… single… year.” So it seems doubly unfair to punish the Blue Jays, Orioles, and Rays for the Yankees’ structural advantages by forcing them to try to leapfrog the richest team in baseball, every… single… year.

The plan’s main drawbacks? The thing is, the divisions and unbalanced schedule aren’t all bad, as many of Calcaterra’s readers point out. Because the divisions are generally geographically aligned, the unbalanced schedule means that teams play a greater number of away games in the same time zone as their home city. It does make for a more exciting stretch run for each team to have to play its division rivals more than others. Getting rid of divisions might increase fairness, but it’s not clear that it would make the stretch run more exciting: “No one wants to watch a tenth place team,” writes David Pinto. Because of their infinitely deep pockets, the Yankees and Red Sox will still be at the top of the heap, and it likely won’t be any easier for small-market and mid-market teams to make it to the playoffs. The ones left at the bottom, meanwhile, will be depressingly further down.

The thing is, any realignment solution is bound to be unsatisfying, because ultimately they’re all workarounds for the real problem, which is baseball’s underlying asymmetry of revenue. The Yankees will always be richer than everyone else, no matter what. Passan defends his own plan by saying that it’s the best solution “short of a salary cap, to which the players’ union will never agree.” This is a workaround solution that doesn’t address the true structural problems of baseball’s revenue, all in order to benefit the Orioles and Blue Jays while possibly adversely affecting teams in the other five divisions in baseball. It just doesn’t seem worth it.

UPDATE: Rob Neyer responded to this post.

As he so often does, Rob Neyer asks an interesting question — and then declines to give an answer. On Tuesday, Ricky Romero absolutely dominated the White Sox. He didn’t give up a walk till the fourth, didn’t let the ball out of the infield till the 6th, and he took 12 strikeouts and a no-hitter into the 8th inning. At that point, White Sox catcher and sixth-place hitter A.J. Pierzynski decided to take matters into his own hands, writes Yahoo’s Andy Behrens:

Romero skipped a pitch in the dirt to Pierzynski leading off the eighth inning — not a terrible pitch, mind you, because AJ had been hacking at similar offerings all night. But late in the game with his team trailing 4-0, Pierzynski resisted the urge to swing. When the ball hit the ground near his feet, he began hopping as if an anvil had landed on his toe. But in fact, nothing had landed on his toe. Replays were clear. He had not been hit.

Rob Neyer points out that this isn’t just cute gamesmanship: it’s unethical and ought to be condemned, not praised.

“I don’t want to get into the awesome logistics that would be involved here … but, ethically speaking, isn’t there an argument to be made for punishing Pierzynski?…
It’s cheating, and in some quarters there are rules against such things.”

According to Rule 6.08(b) in the baseball Rulebook, a batter is entitled to first base on an HBP if “He is touched by a pitched ball which he is not attempting to hit unless (1) The ball is in the strike zone when it touches the batter, or (2) The batter makes no attempt to avoid being touched by the ball.” Pierzynski didn’t deserve first base, but the umpire, the on-field arbiter of truth, awarded it to him.

There isn’t much difference between this and a run-of-the-mill blown call. It’s not completely clear that he lied: after all, it’s conceivable that Pierzynski truly believed that he got hit, much as many a hitter will argue till he’s blue in the face that a called third strike was really a ball, or that he was really safe at first. Of course, it’s more likely that he knew the ball missed him, lied to the ump for his own advantage, and the ump wrongly believed him. That certainly wouldn’t be the first time a player (or a manager) has argued his own cause to an ump despite knowing he was wrong — it’s just one of the few times that it has ever actually worked.

Neyer’s right that it would be a logistical nightmare to institute a law prohibiting lying. (A good start might be expanding the use of instant replay, which would make it harder for a player like Pierzynski to lie his way on base.) A big problem is that umpires have fewer in-game modes of punishment at their disposal. In soccer and basketball, players who feign phantom injuries can be assessed personal penalties if they’re caught in a lie. In hockey, there are penalty minutes; in football, penalty yards. In baseball, the only way the umpire could have punished Pierzynski in the moment would be to have thrown him out of the game, which would have been excessive.

Still, I’m sympathetic to his point, especially because Pierzynski’s play is effectively the baseball equivalent of flopping in soccer and basketball: it’s bush league, it’s unsportsmanlike, it delays the game, and it creates a major moral hazard problem, because it incentivizes every other player to lie.

But how do you punish him? The commissioner’s office can’t very well levy a fine for doing something that isn’t prohibited in the rulebook, and public ostracism won’t make much of a difference either: A.J. Pierzynski has made a career of ticking off fanbases and clubhouses alike. As satisfying as it would be to punish a player for lying, it isn’t very practical — after all, it’s impossible to know exactly whether a player is genuinely mistaken or intentionally dissembling.

Ultimately, Neyer’s righteous indignation is understandable, but it’s misguided. Instead of focusing on the player’s motivations, we should aim for greater accuracy: vetting and replacing the worst umpires in baseball, and permitting instant replays to ensure that the right calls are being made.

Bill Simmons, ESPN’s Sports Guy, may be the most popular sports columnist on the internet, but until recently he was a saber denier, writing about how people like you and me were making baseball less fun for him. Until the day after April Fools, when the Sports Guy finally, proudly proclaimed himself a member of our ranks. He explained: “I stopped writing about baseball these past two years when the sabermetrics movement became too complicated for my liking… Fundamentally, it’s moronic.” So he decided to learn more about stats, and recommended all of his readers familiarize themselves with OPS, OPS+, UZR, VORP, WAR, BABIP, and FIP.

You’ve read Bill Simmons — pretty much everyone has at some point. He’s funny, he’s ubiquitous on ESPN, and he’s been prominent for more than a decade, basically a lifetime in internet terms. If you’re not from Boston, you may have gotten annoyed at how happy he was when every single one of his teams kept winning, but that’s who he was: he wrote like a fan, and just about every sports blogger to follow in his footsteps has consciously or unconsciously borrowed from his style. As Rany Jazayerli has written, “If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Simmons is the most flattered writer in America.”

But the most-imitated sports writer in the country barely wrote about baseball in the last two years, during which time we’ve seen nearly every team in baseball turn to sabermetrics either implicitly or explicitly (by hiring someone like Tom Tango or Josh Kalk), and we’ve even seen a few more beat writers willing to integrate sabermetrics into their dispatches, like Chico Harlan of the Washington Post and the sainted Joe Posnanski. Beginning this offseason, many Fangraphs writers have written for ESPN, first on the hot stove and now on a new baseball stat-oriented blog, TMI. And they’re bringing in their fans and readers, slowly but surely.

Still, few institutions have the readership of Bill Simmons. At this point, he’s about as mainstream as mainstream gets. Now that Simmons is one of us, his favorite stats are mainstream, too. If he keeps writing about FIP, UZR, and WAR, they will gain a much wider currency than ever before. Of course, that also means the nuances will be missed, the stats will be misused, and faulty conclusions will be drawn. Just days after the Sports Guy’s stat piece, in which he’d condemned Bobby Jenks on the basis of FIP, Matthew Carruth responded on the TMI blog to point out the drawbacks of FIP and merits of xFIP when evaluating relievers. Simmons’s conversion doesn’t mean that stats will be understood better, just more widely.

And that’s enough. As T.H. White wrote in The Once and Future King, the best way to spread an idea is simply to make it available. That’s what the Sports Guy did. (He also linked to me in the UZR section, which was — I’ll admit — a thrill.) Welcome to the mainstream, fellow freaks!

The Atlanta Braves are back: they’re a pretty good team that has enough talent to make the playoffs, but not to go very far. They led the majors in starters’ ERA last year, they have a top-5 farm system and some of the best frontline talent in the majors. They’ve missed the playoffs for four straight years, averaging just 80 wins a season, but this could be the year they finally make it back. (CHONE and the Fangraphs Fans think the Braves will win the division in 2010.) The trouble is, they’re in the same division as the back-to-back NL champs, and they have some of the same weaknesses they’ve always had.

The team has some exceptional young stars: C Brian McCann, SS Yunel Escobar, P Jair Jurrjens, and P Tommy Hanson are all under team control through at least 2013, not to mention rookie super-prospect Jason Heyward. But they’ve been surrounded by below-replacement-level talent in recent years, the sort of aging veterans that 68-year old manager Bobby Cox can’t lay off but GM Frank Wren really ought to know better, like Garret Anderson, Corky Miller, and Chris Woodward. Cox is retiring after 2010, and probably will move into the front office brain trust, as John Schuerholz did after he retired. Wren will finally get to hire his personal manager, but he won’t necessarily have a much freer hand in personnel decisions: Cox and Schuerholz will continue vetting every move.

Wren’s showed some ability to fill the team’s holes through trades, but he still often leaves dead weight on the roster. Throughout his tenure, the team has strangely been strongest up the middle and weakest at the corners, as it likely will remain in 2010, unless the team gets exceptionally lucky with injury risks Troy Glaus and Chipper Jones, and Kaline-like production out of Heyward. As a result, they’re significantly underpowered. No regular in 2009 slugged .500, and there’s a good chance no one will in 2010 either. The team’s power shortage is one of its biggest offensive weaknesses: this team has long had trouble in one-run games, hitting more poorly in later innings and stranding runners on base. The power outage meant that despite being 11th in OBP in 2009, the Braves were 17th in runs: they could get them on, but couldn’t get them in.

Beyond Heyward, OF Jordan Schafer and 1B Freddie Freeman are the only impact position prospects in the high minors; once Heyward graduates, the Braves’ farm strength will be almost entirely in pitching. And as it was at their height, the Braves will be led by a terrific young pitching staff and a more-or-less average offense. (In 2009, the Braves had the 17th-highest OPS in baseball and the lowest starters’ ERA in baseball, exactly as they had in 2000.) That’s a formula that works for them, though it’s also a formula that led to five NLDS losses in six years.

The Phillies are the team to beat, but their payroll is ballooning, and they’ll have much less money to work with if they happen to miss the playoffs. Because of their farm system and young team-controlled stars, the Braves are the team best positioned to pick up the slack. They’re one of the best teams in the National League. But these days that’s almost a backhanded compliment. There’s a reason that the first six teams on the Organizational Rankings are all in the Junior Circuit.

Baseball’s playoffs stretch on far longer than they ought, into the sleet and snow of November. Major League Baseball finally has begun to admit its problems and to address them. In this fall’s League Championship Series, there will no longer be an off day between games four and five, thanks in part to Mike Scoscia’s complaints a few months before. “The removal of the off-day during both League Championship Series,” said Bud Selig, “marks the first step in a process that will ultimately result in an improved postseason format for our game.” In other words: the format isn’t quite improved just yet. I tend to agree.

It was not a day that made sense to have off, considering that it was not a travel day, and a scheduled travel off day occurs after the fifth game anyway. It’s good that it’s gone, and that particular series will have greater continuity. But the monthlong playoffs have not been shortened. Even a fan of the team that won it all last year, Benjamin Kabak of River Ave Blues, complains: “The truth is that the Yanks played 15 games over 30 days in October, and that stop-and-start schedule disrupted the flow of the games.” Yankee fans join players and managers like Mike Scoscia in their general dissatisfaction with the present state of affairs.

The reason, of course, is the same as always: television revenue. As Tyler Kepner of the New York Times writes: “The World Series is still scheduled to start Wednesday, Oct. 27, because Fox wants only one scheduled weekend, not two, and does not want to broadcast a game on Friday night.” In other words, if baseball is serious about “an improved postseason format,” they’ll have to ruffle Fox’s feathers. Thanks to its share of a $3 billion deal signed in 2006, Fox retains exclusive control of the World Series through 2013, and will split the rest of the postseason with TBS for the rest of that timeframe. It’s hard to imagine that MLB will reduce the number of days in the playoffs while that deal is still in effect.

However, change is necessary, particularly since Selig is serious about regularly holding the World Baseball Classic. Because baseball is an outdoor sport, and the baseball season stretches from spring training in February to the World Series in November, there’s really no healthy time to hold the WBC. Shaving a few extra days off the playoffs would permit far greater leeway to hold the Classic before or after the regular season.

But the Classic only occurs every four years. The most compelling reason for change is the simplest: the playoff format is widely recognized to be flawed, and even the Commissioner of Baseball recognizes that his sport needs “an improved postseason format.” Seldom is there an issue on which everyone agrees, as they do on the need to fix the playoff schedule. That rare fact ought to lead to action.

Major League Baseball has been preoccupied with cleaning up the game, instituting harsh penalties for fighting, intentional beaning, and even attempted beaning. The tough disciplinary regime has been set in place over the past decade by Frank Robinson, who served as MLB’s Director of Discipline before returning to the manager’s chair in 2002, and Bob Watson, who replaced Robinson and has been the rules guru ever since. They were both all-star hitters during their playing careers, and don’t seem to mind too much that their actions have served to narrow the inside corner — a fact that has been brought up endlessly as the penalties have gotten ever more severe for pitchers with the temerity to plunk, to graze, even to brush back.

Now Cliff Lee has been suspended for five regular-season games for throwing two pitches at Brandon Chris Snyder in a spring training game on Monday, without hitting him. (First Lee threw near him, and then he threw behind him.) Lee was steamed because Snyder had knocked him over in a play at the plate two innings earlier. Lee felt that the punishment was lopsided and overly harsh, particularly because after the second pitch, Snyder started walking out towards the mound. As Lee described it: “I was trying to go inside, a couple got away from me, and the guy hitting got mad and came towards the mound and I got thrown out of the game in the process. That’s it in a nutshell.”

Lee was being disingenuous: he was clearly going after Snyder. MLB.com analyst Harold Reynolds argues, “The suspension comes because of what Cliff said afterwards.” Still, a five-game suspension for not hitting a guy in a game that doesn’t count is absurd. What does this punishment serve? Is it meant to deter spring training beanings? Meant to punish Lee for lying about his intent with the pitches? Or is it meant to send a message that a pitcher may not ever brush a hitter back? Snyder nonetheless took steps toward the pitcher, so if baseball truly wants to prevent fighting, they should at least have fined him. If anything, Lee restrained himself: he certainly could have hit Snyder if he wanted to. How many regular-season games would Lee have been suspended if he did so? Seven? Ten? And what purpose would that have served?

Whatever the intent, Major League Baseball went too far with the punishment. Cliff is a headstrong guy, and if he’s pissed, it’s hard to imagine that he’ll refrain from giving a guy a close shave, so I can’t imagine that this will serve as an effective deterrent to his future behavior. Moreover, if the punishment for throwing behind a guy is as harsh as that for plunking him, there’s no real reason for a pissed-off hurler to refrain from beaning a guy, further decreasing the deterrent. At the same time, punishing a man for comments made in a postgame press conference seems anathema, especially when the game is an exhibition. For some reason, MLB felt that this punishment was warranted. I thoroughly disagree.

(Note: in an earlier version of this blog post, I stupidly wrote “Brandon Snyder” instead of “Chris Snyder.” Thanks to reader CSJ for pointing it out.)