Don’t look now, but the Minnesota Twins lead the major leagues in runs scored per game. The Minnesota Twins — with a line-up featuring the likes of Chris Colabello, Pedro Florimon, Kurt Suzuki, Aaron Hicks, Josmil Pinto, and Trevor Plouffe — are scoring 5.52 runs per game in a month where Joe Mauer has been kind of terrible. On the list of amazing things to happen this April, this has to rank near the very top. And the way they’re scoring runs is perhaps just as surprising.

When you think of organizations that have committed to a patient approach at the plate, you probably think of the Red Sox, Yankees, A’s, and Indians; clubs with long track records of emphasizing on-base percentage and working counts. You probably don’t think of the Twins; over the last three years, Minnesota’s hitters rank just 24th in OBP and are tied for 16th in walk rate. Even with a franchise player like Joe Mauer, taking pitches and getting on base hasn’t really been a point of emphasis for the Twins, and Mauer found himself surrounded by the likes of Ben Revere, Ryan Doumit, Alexi Casilla, and Danny Valencia.

Those four are all gone now, however, and the new Twins don’t look much like the old Twins. Their 12.9% walk rate leads the majors, and their .354 OBP ranks second only to the Colorado Rockies. The Twins are basically walking their way into wins, and it looks like it might very well be be design.

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11 days ago, I wrote about baseball’s new definition of a catch, and how the interpretation of the rule created some ridiculous problems for baserunners on fly balls to the outfield. Applying the transfer rule from the infield to the outfield was an unmitigated disaster, and simply made the game worse. In that piece, I guessed that, due to the slow pace of change in MLB, we would have to live with the rule for the rest of the year, and return to sanity in 2015.

In reality, though, we only had to live with the rule for those last 11 days, because according to Ken Rosenthal, MLB has already reversed course and the old definition of a catch will return to MLB in time for tonight’s games.

Starting Friday night, umpires will rule on catches the way they did in the past, using more of a common-sense approach rather than following the letter of the law, according to major-league sources.

A catch, forceout or tag will be considered legal if a fielder has control of the ball in his glove, but drops the ball after opening his glove to transfer the ball to his throwing hard, sources said. No longer will the fielder be required to successfully get the ball into his throwing hand.

This is the only reasonable definition of a catch, and kudos to MLB for fixing this so quickly. They aren’t exactly known for swift action or reasonable timelines on obvious decisions, but it took them less than a month to realize they had made a mistake and reverse course on their error. For as much grief as MLB got for changing the rule to begin with, they deserve credit for fixing it in an unexpectedly quick fashion.

I do wish we would have seen someone try the “drop the ball on purpose” play, though. Oh well.

When the Tigers decided to swap Prince Fielder for Ian Kinsler — side note: Kinsler is already +1 WAR ahead of Fielder on the season, reinforcing just how great a deal that was for Detroit — it was done, in part, to open up a spot on the field for top prospect Nick Castellanos. Fielder’s departure meant that Miguel Cabrera could move back to first base and Castellanos could take over at the hot corner, improving their defense at both positions. And Castellanos’ minor league track record suggested he would bring some offensive upside to the table as well.

So far, he’s basically lived up to expectations. He came in to the day with a 98 wRC+, right in line with what Steamer and ZIPS forecast before the season began, and that was with a .256 BABIP; give him some positive regression on that front, and the overall package looks like a slightly above average offensive player. While Castellanos is more of a good-at-everything-great-at-nothing kind of hitter, his most positive attribute so far has been his below average strikeout rate; at just 15%, he’s striking out about 25% less than a league average hitter this season.

But while we could have expected a better-than-average strikeout rate from Castellanos based on his minor league track record, the fact that he’s striking out so rarely is actually pretty weird. Because Nick Castellanos, for the first few weeks of 2014, has the 9th lowest contact rate in all of baseball. He has about the same contact rate as Curtis Granderson and B.J. Upton. He’s making contact less often than Ryan Howard, Giancarlo Stanton, and Adam Dunn.

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After a two-decade stretch of offensive prowess, pitching is dominating Major League Baseball once again. The “Year of the Pitcher” has turned into the “Half Decade of the Pitcher” and at this point we might as well call it an era, because these changes don’t look like they’re going away any time soon. Whether it’s Felix Hernandez, Clayton Kershaw, or most recently Jose Fernandez, it seems like every team features a staff ace that used to be described as a once-in-a-generation talent. What was rare is now commonplace

As FOXSports’ own Rob Neyer has written on several occasions, the shift towards lower-scoring games has been a direct result of a rapidly increasing trend towards more strikeouts. 2013 set the record for highest average strikeout rate — 19.9% — but that isn’t really such an accomplishment anymore; the league has actually broken the all-time record for seasonal strikeout rate in each of the last six seasons.

And 2014 is just continuing the trend; the current league average strikeout rate of 20.8% would easily break the 2013 record. This is not a trend that seems to be peaking, only ever increasing, and at some point, MLB will be forced to confront the issue that the game is moving away from hit-it-and-run towards swing-and-walk-back-to-the-dugout. The league has shown that, if pitching begins to dominate too much, they will intervene to make things more equitable and move the sport back towards a more reasonable balance; after the 1968 season, they lowered the pitching mound, and in 1973, the American League adopted the Designated Hitter.

Things aren’t quite to those extremes yet, but the offensive levels of 1972 and 2014 maybe aren’t as different as you might think. The last year that pitchers had to bat in the AL, MLB as a whole hit .244/.311/.354; this year, MLB is hitting .248/.317/.389. There’s more power now than there was then, but the rate of hits and outs in the game are nearly equal to what they were before the DH existed. Having the National League adopt the DH would force offensive levels up, but it wouldn’t do much to turn the game away from its affection for strikeouts.

Instead, I’d like to suggest an alternative remedy that doesn’t require any new rules or any change to an existing rule. That alternative? Help Major League umpires move the strike zone back over the plate. More specifically, to make this adjustment when left-handed batters are at the plate.

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Last night, Cliff Lee dominated the Dodgers, throwing eight shutout innings, while striking out 10 batters without walking anyone. In other words, it was just your normal Cliff Lee start. For the season, Lee now has 38 strikeouts against two walks; this is just what he does. But just because we’re used to Cliff Lee’s ridiculous command doesn’t mean we shouldn’t remember to appreciate it.

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The season is still only three weeks old, and basically anything can happen over the course of 20 baseball games. The Brewers aren’t the best team in baseball, the D’Backs aren’t the worst, and Jesse Chavez isn’t going to win the Cy Young Award. But, at the same time, the most recent data is also the most informative data, and there are some numbers that can have meaning quicker than others. While you shouldn’t care too much about a team’s Win-Loss record on April 21st, we can boil down early season team performance into numbers that a bit more heavily represented by skill rather than randomness.

One of my favorite ways to look at team performance is wOBA differential. It’s basically the same concept as run differential, but strips away the heavy factor that sequencing can have on runs scored and runs allowed. The order of events matters in the outcome of past results, but holds little predictive value, and by looking at non-sequenced results, we can get a better idea of how a team has performed than if we also introduce the timing of those events into the mix.

wOBA differential isn’t perfect, of course; it doesn’t include baserunning, for one, and teams can move the needle a little bit by how often their baserunners advance, but that portion of the game is fairly small relative to everything else. By and large, wOBA differential gives you a pretty good idea of how teams have played thus far. So, let’s get to the numbers.

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You probably are well aware that offensive levels in baseball have collapsed over the last few years. We’re well past the “Year of the Pitcher” and are now at a point where run scoring is as scarce as it was back in the 1970s. It seems like no one can hit anymore, or at least, no more than one or two guys per team anyway. For various reasons, the recent trends in baseball have almost all gone in favor of the pitchers.

But not quite all. There is one place in baseball where offense is actually trending upwards, and that trend is behind the plate.

Last March, Mark Smith wrote about the improved offensive levels of catchers in recent years, but with another year of data and our new by-position split leaderboards, I think it’s worth pointing this out again. Especially because, for the first few weeks of 2014 at least, the trend seems to only be accelerating.

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Being a good young baseball player right now is a little bit like going on that famous episode of Oprah: “You get a long-term deal, and you get a long-term deal, and you get a long-term deal!” On Monday, Jedd Gyorko became the latest youngster to land a big contract, signing a six-year contract with the San Diego Padres; the deal guarantees him at least $35 million and includes a team option that could push it closer to $50 million over seven seasons. The league is enjoying record profitability, and instead of chasing aging pricey free agents, teams like the Padres have chosen to take their newfound wealth and use it to keep their best young players around for six or seven prime years.

These deals have historically been big winners for MLB teams, as they’ve traded on young players’ desire for financial security to hold down salaries for future superstars like Evan Longoria, Andrew McCutchen, Paul Goldschmidt, Chris Sale, and many others. The return on investment has been so consistently positive that teams are now racing to get similar deals done with every player who shows that they might have the ability to be a core building block for the future.

From 2008 through the end of the 2013 season, there were 47 contract extensions that covered at least four seasons, and most of them were in the six- or seven-year range, especially if you account for the team options that the players gave up in order to get their first big paycheck. As I noted in that analysis of those contracts, only a half dozen or so of those contracts have ended up not working out for the organization. The success rate on these deals has been extraordinarily high, especially when compared to the minefield that is free agency.

However, if there’s one team that hasn’t reaped the benefits of the recent extension craze, it’s probably these very same San Diego Padres. Two of the half dozen or so deals that haven’t worked out in the team’s favor have been signed by the Padres: Cameron Maybin‘s five-year, $25 million deal and Cory Luebke’s four-year, $12 million contract, both signed in March of 2012.

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