Heading into the season, there was probably no more polarizing team in baseball than the Diamondbacks. Despite adding Zack Greinke, Shelby Miller, and Tyler Clippard over the winter, our preseason forecasts pegged Arizona as a 78 win team, a win worse than they finished a year ago. The organization themselves saw a wildly different picture, and so many articles were written about the divide that I had to write a piece in March trying to dispel the notion that we had some kind of bias against the franchise.

You know what’s happened since then. First, the team suffered a devastating loss when A.J. Pollock’s lingering elbow issues turned into a season-ending injury right before Opening Day. Then Zack Greinke gave up seven runs in his first regular season start with the team, and struggled through a slow start to the season. Then Shelby Miller imploded, pitching worse than any other starter in baseball this year. And now it’s the end of May and the team is 23-30, already nine games behind the Giants in the NL West race.

But this isn’t a post gloating that we were right all along. In reality, some of the D’Backs optimism surrounding their team has actually been more correct than our pessimism about the team’s chances, if you look beyond the overall record, anyway. Our projections didn’t like the Diamondbacks because it had a negative view of their role players, thinking that this was basically a stars-and-scrubs team that relied too heavily on a few elite players. But so far, those role players have been carrying the team, keeping it afloat while the big names struggle.

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For the last few years, Jon Roegele (among others) has been doing excellent work showing that the strike zone was getting larger with every passing season. Specifically, pitchers and catchers had started getting calls on pitches below the knees that they hadn’t gotten previously, and the rise of the called low strike led a pervasive myth that hitters had`gotten too passive, putting the onus on the batters for the decrease in run scoring, when the reality is that batters were being called out on pitches they couldn’t do anything with anyway.

With strikeout rates again at an all-time high, MLB has apparently decided to take some action after a few years of studying the issue. According to a Jayson Stark report from last weekend, the competition committee approved a tentative plan to “effectively raise the lower part of the strike zone to the top of the hitter’s knees”, beginning as early as next year, assuming the rules committee also approves the plan, and the issue will apparently be raised with the players during CBA negotiations, so they may have a voice in the changes as well.

And you can be sure that some of those players won’t be happy about the proposal. For instance, here was Adam Wainwright’s reaction to the report.

“It’s a horrible, horrible idea,” he said. “One, I’m a pitcher. And I’m a pitcher who likes to keep the ball low. Two, and mainly, all this talk about making the games shorter — what part of raising the strike zone up is going to do that? … They want more offense. I understand that. But taking 45 seconds off for an intentional walk one out of every three games isn’t going to make up for the added balls in the gap by raising the strike zone, in my opinion.”

At least Wainwright is honest and admits his bias right up front. This is a change that could potentially make his job harder, and like most self-interested individuals, he’s against things that have a negative consequence for him personally. But note that Wainwright doesn’t just stop at saying that he’s against it because he’s a pitcher, but he’s against it because he thinks it’s counterproductive to MLB’s other stated goal, which is to reduce the length of games back under three hours. As Wainwright and others would have you believe, instituting a smaller strike zone will lead to even longer games, and so MLB is barking up the wrong tree.

Except that the evidence suggests that this probably isn’t going to be the case.

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Last month, I mentioned that we were going to be partnering up with the Pitch Talks guys, and would be helping with their efforts to bring the fantastic baseball speaker series to the U.S. this summer. Today, we’re excited to announce what the summer tour is going to look like.

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Since the trading of some types of draft choices was allowed in the most recent CBA, we’ve seen teams use their “competitive balance” selections as currency, often swapping them for role players in minor mid-summer trades. As noted in this MLBTradeRumors post from last year, players traded for draft picks include the likes of Bryan Morris, Bud Norris, and Gaby Sanchez, although they have also been included in deals for better players like Jon Lester as part of a larger package.

Last year, though, the Orioles and Dodgers created a new kind of trade for a competitive balance pick, taking out the desired player aspect of the deal, and turning it into a simple cash proposition. Last April, the Orioles decided they didn’t want to pay the remainder of Ryan Webb’s 2015 salary — roughly $2.8 million — and so they gave the 74th overall pick in the draft to the Dodgers in exchange for LA taking Webb’s contract. The Dodgers didn’t actually want Webb, as they showed by immediately DFA’ing him upon receipt, and the deal stood as the first time two teams had clearly decided that it would be mutually beneficial for one franchise to purchase a draft pick from the other.

A year later, the Orioles decided to do it again, so last night, they traded the 76th pick in the draft to the Braves, along with the roughly $3 million remaining on Brian Matusz’s contract, in exchange for two non-prospects. For the Orioles, the competitive balance selections might as well be renamed “$3 million rebate checks,” because that’s apparently how Dan Duquette sees these selections.

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Last winter, coming off the best season of his career, Yoenis Cespedes hit the free-agent market, and promptly heard crickets. He watched David Price and Zack Greinke break $200 million in early December, and then saw Jason Heyward set the market for outfielders with a $184 million deal a week later. And then he sat and watched a bunch more pitchers get paid, while he, Chris Davis and Justin Upton sat around waiting for offers that never came. Finally, in January, all three eventually found homes, but Cespedes was unable to land the big deal he was looking for, instead taking a three-year deal from the Mets that gave him the chance to hit the market again this winter, if he so chose.

A quarter of the way through the 2016 season, Cespedes opting out of the last two years of the deal is now a foregone conclusion; the only way he wouldn’t hit the market this winter is if the Mets re-do his deal before he gets there, or if he blows out his knee between now and October. Cespedes has not only carried over last year’s second half surge, but he’s even somehow building on it.

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It’s May 19th, and the Phillies are in first second place in the National League East. Yes, the Phillies. The team that generated a 1,000 “tanking is ruining the sport” articles this winter has, six weeks into the season, the third-best record in the National League. As Jeff Sullivan noted this morning, their remarkably excellent bullpen has been one of the primary drivers of the early success, with David Hernandez and Hector Neris surprisingly emerging as dominant forces in the middle innings, and Jeanmar Gomez driving another nail into the coffin of the necessity of a “proven closer”. And yet, despite being in second place at this point, if you look at our current playoff odds, you wouldn’t actually know that the Phillies are off to a great start.

See that flat line across the bottom? That’s the Phillies. Their 24-17 start hasn’t moved the needle, at all, on our forecasts expectations for their chances of reaching the postseason. Okay, that’s not exactly true; they’ve gone from a 0.1% chance of winning one of the two Wild Card spots in our preseason forecast all the way up to a 0.3% chance of getting to the play-in game now. But their odds of hanging on to the NL East? Still close enough zero to round down when displaying one decimal point.

This is, to some, puzzling. A question in my chat yesterday brought up the point that our system is far more bearish on the Phillies hot start leading to postseason success than others; Baseball Prospectus gives them a 2.3% chance of winning the division and a 7.6% chance of getting a Wild Card spot, for 10% overall odds of reaching the playoffs. FiveThirtyEight is even more bullish than that, putting them at 4% to win the NL East and 13% to reach the postseason. So why is our system so stubborn relative to others attempting to look into the same crystal ball in order to see what the final standings will look like in October?

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Over at ESPN, Jayson Stark talked to Rob Manfred about the fact that, a year after chopping six minutes off the length of the average Major League game, those gains have been almost entirely lost in the first six weeks of 2016. Included in that piece was this chart, which shows the trend over the last 11 years.

Average Time Of Game

SEASON	TIME OF GAME
2006	2:48:11
2007	2:51:13
2008	2:50:38
2009	2:51:47
2010	2:50:46
2011	2:51:57
2012	2:55:58
2013	2:58:51
2014	3:02:21
2015	2:56:14
2016	3:00:26

SOURCE: ESPN.com

The four minute and 12 second gain from last year to this year is actually larger than any of the per-season gains made during the 2011-2014 stretch when MLB games lengthened quickly; that kind of rise in game length is clearly frustrating to Manfred, especially after the gains they made last year. As the commissioner notes to Stark in the piece, MLB believes there are a variety of factors contributing to the longer games, with players not taking the pace-of-play initiatives as seriously this year, cold weather, and simply the structural change in results all contributing. Stark points out that walks and strikeouts are both up again, so overall pitches are up, and more pitches equals more time. But let’s try to go beyond that and look and see if we can quantify the differences in game length this year.

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Over the last couple of years, we’ve talked a lot about the Kansas City Royals and the ability of certain teams to sustainably beat estimates like the BaseRuns expected records we publish on our standings page. Famously, the Royals have won far more games than our numbers thought they would — over the last three years, they’ve won 25 more games than their BaseRuns Win% would suggest — making two straight World Series appearances and winning last year’s fall classic along the way.

Interestingly, though, with less fan fare, Missouri’s other team has also been winning far more often than BaseRuns suggested was likely. Over the last three years, they’ve won 23 more games than their BaseRuns expected record, nearly as many as the Royals. Last year, they won 11 more games than expected on the strength of an historic clutch performance. As Ben Lindbergh noted in a Grantland piece last summer, the Cardinals pitching staff was insanely good at stranding runners last year, so their run prevention ended up being fantastic even as their pitchers routinely danced with danger.

Six weeks into 2016, however, the tables have turned. The Cardinals are just 20-18, already finding themselves eight games back of the Cubs in the NL Central, except BaseRuns thinks they should actually be 25-13, which would give them the second best record in all of baseball. A year after posting one of the largest positive differences between expected record and actual record, the Cardinals have already won five fewer games than expected, and if they continued at this pace, they’d post the largest negative differential for any team in a single season.

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