Chatter has been picking up that Major League Baseball will introduce a pitch clock in 2018. It’s felt like an inevitable development for some time, with the clock having been in place in the upper minors for the last few years. Reactions have been mixed, because reactions are always mixed, but the pitch clock is coming, and it’s probably going to be fine. We’ll get used to it, everyone will get used to it, and the game will remain by and large the same.

I made a point about the pitch clock last week. According to early reports, the proposed clock would only be used when the bases are empty, and I pointed out that the game only really slows down after somebody reaches. When there’s a runner on base, pitchers have more to worry about, so it makes sense that they’d work slower. But I don’t want to make this all about pitchers. We tend to think of pitchers as being responsible for dictating the pace. They are, after all, the guys holding the baseballs. But in any at-bat, there are two parties involved. As Buster Olney wrote in his report, no batter in the National League averaged more time between pitches than Odubel Herrera. And no batter in either league averaged more time between pitches than Marwin Gonzalez.

On average last year, overall, there were 24.2 seconds between pitches. For Gonzalez, that average was 29.5. That was up from the previous year’s 27.2, and up from his career low of 24.4. Pitching to Gonzalez was most recently 22% slower than pitching to a league-average hitter. Just as a pitch clock will make certain pitchers hurry up, it would have the same effect on certain hitters. At least, given proper enforcement.

I imagine we can mostly agree that’s a good thing. There’s baseball’s normal, familiar pace, and there are the players who push it too far. Wasted seconds benefit no one, and there’s no need for there to be just two pitches every minute. Players will need to maintain a good tempo. What effect this all ultimately has, we’ll have to see. Yet there’s one question we can answer right now: What in the heck is Marwin Gonzalez even doing?

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Somewhat quietly, the Rangers have ended up in a difficult situation. We tend to think of the Rangers as perennial contenders, and they’ve established a fairly good record of success, but they could be approaching a cliff. In the same way you see the Orioles as a club that could be rebuilding a year from now, the Rangers aren’t too different, now that Yu Darvish is gone and Cole Hamels has declined. Just like every other club, the Rangers are interested in Shohei Ohtani, but just like every other club, the Rangers have to understand they probably aren’t going to get him. They don’t occupy an enviable spot.

What the Rangers haven’t done, however, is throw in the towel. There is still a path to short-term success, even should Ohtani go somewhere else. It requires the Rangers to be smart with their money, trying to get the most bang for their buck. They’re presently on the verge of signing Doug Fister. Last I heard, all that’s left is a physical. This is a good start. Fister should supply some immediate help.

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Shohei Ohtani does not yet belong to a major-league team. No one really knows where he’s going to go, and he hasn’t even been actually posted. There are still some remaining hurdles to jump, but they’re only getting smaller and smaller. Ohtani will play in the majors in 2018. The odds of that are effectively 100%. It’s felt that way for a while, but as of later Tuesday, it’s almost official.

You probably read about how the players union wasn’t thrilled with the various proposed posting agreements between MLB and Nippon Professional Baseball. The union has its own interests, and it also had a place at the table, so it held out until it was satisfied. An eventual agreement nevertheless felt inevitable, and you can read about the terms right here. All that’s left is MLB owner approval, which will come on December 1. Ohtani will then be free to be posted. Teams will have about three weeks to negotiate. Of course, those negotiations will involve comically insufficient sums of money, but Ohtani is okay with that. This is what he’s chosen to do. It looks like he’ll have a contract by Christmas.

From the union’s perspective, it’s happy that this won’t drag out too long. The market won’t be paralyzed all winter. But no one’s reading this because they care about the union. It’s all about Ohtani, and about the team that he selects. We know with virtual certainty that he’s coming. He’ll report to a big-league camp in the middle of February. No one knows how good he’ll actually be, but when he chooses a team, baseball is going to be different. Ohtani can change an entire league’s outlook.

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It was a little over three years ago that I first took a look at this question. The article was a hit!

Now I think it’s time to run the numbers again. People change. Situations change. Statistical projections change. Mike Trout is fantastically good. He is probably the best player in baseball, and he’s under contract with the Angels for another three seasons. Albert Pujols used to be fantastically good. He’s not so much anymore. He was just one of the worst players in baseball, and he’s under contract with the Angels for another four seasons. You know where this is going. You’ve probably wondered about this before, even though the hypothetical is stupid and unrealistic.

Trout isn’t going to get traded. Aside from everything else, he has no-trade protection. Pujols isn’t going to get traded. Aside from everything else, he also has no-trade protection. But let’s say the Angels wanted to make a trade. Let’s say they wanted to package the two players together. Does Pujols’ negative value outweigh Trout’s positive value? Would the Angels trade these players, combined, for nothing? Again, this is stupid. Let’s dive in.

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If the Giants weren’t 2017’s biggest disappointment, it’s only because the Mets lived their own waking nightmare. The Giants remain a popular product, but with popularity comes expectations, and the Giants have been garbage for a year and a half, in large part because the home-run spike seems to have passed them right by. Fast-forward to the present day, and the Giants find themselves in a situation of some urgency. They want to maintain their market share in the region, and they could stand to add some dingers. The Giants haven’t hit many dingers. They don’t want to spend another year in the basement.

It seems like the stars are aligning almost perfectly. When the Giants have needed help the most, there has become available a certain player, a certain dinger-hitter and league MVP, a lineup-changing colossus who’s rumored to want to play out west, around where he grew up. It’s no secret the Marlins are looking to trade Giancarlo Stanton, and it’s no surprise the Giants are deeply involved in the mix. Nothing has yet actually happened, but the two current favorites would have to be the Giants and the Cardinals. They’re the suitors who’ve been most aggressive.

And yet I’m not sold the Giants make such great sense. One can speculate only so much about a move that would be undoubtedly complicated, but the Giants don’t find themselves in an enviable position. Acquiring Stanton could be an awfully dangerous commitment.

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One more thing about this season’s unanimous American League Rookie of the Year, and possible American League Most Valuable Player. At some point, we’re going to fully move on beyond 2017, and all the numbers will just be a part of the record, only occasionally reflected upon. I want to dedicate one more article to what Aaron Judge just did. What he did, that is, and what it means.

We all probably have our favorite Aaron Judge highlight clips. “Favorite” might be strong, if you, say, root for the Red Sox, but we all remember certain moments. I imagine a lot of people out there most greatly appreciate Judge’s hardest-hit home runs. They’re spectacular, the lot of them. Yet, maybe it’s recency bias, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about a Judge double from early last month. Judge, you’ll remember, was struggling in the ALDS against the Indians, and then, in Game 4, Trevor Bauer threw him something hard, high, and tight.

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Back before the playoffs slammed shut door after door after door, the Diamondbacks hosted the Rockies in the NL wild-card game. Those were eight and a half wild innings, and from a win-expectancy perspective, the single most important event was a triple by Archie Bradley. I wrote it up as a whole post, because I’m a sucker for the rare pitcher triple. Pitchers don’t hit triples. Bradley’s included, this year there were eight of them. Bradley hit one. Jeremy Hellickson hit one. Patrick Corbin hit one. Jake Arrieta hit one. Luis Perdomo hit four.

Four triples. Luis Perdomo, a starting pitcher for the Padres, hit four triples. He had a total of five hits, and the other one was a double. No singles in the bunch. But anyway, back to the triples. He had half of all the pitcher triples in baseball. The Blue Jays just finished with five triples. That’s the whole entire team. The last pitcher to reach four triples in a season was Robin Roberts in 1955. Dontrelle Willis hit three triples in 2007. Mike Hampton hit three triples in 1999. Three is close to four, but three isn’t equal to four. The last team with at least four pitcher triples in a season was the 1977 Pirates. The Royals have three pitcher triples in franchise history. I know they don’t usually bat anymore, but this is 2,268 plate appearances we’re talking about. The Royals have been around a long time. Perdomo just left their pitchers in the dust.

What can we learn about baseball from Luis Perdomo’s four triples? Probably not very much. But this is nevertheless a statistic crying out for exploration. You know what we have to do. We have to go through each of the triples, to see how they could’ve happened.

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I was one of 30 people with a vote for the American League Rookie of the Year award. I voted for Aaron Judge. We all voted for Aaron Judge. Not only was Judge’s win unanimous — it was one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever made in my entire life. When you first get voting privileges within the BBWAA, people will warn you that it can be surprisingly difficult. These awards matter, to players and families and teams and fans, and voters need to give them far more thought than an outsider might think is reasonable. When you have an actual vote, suddenly it feels so much more real, and you can think yourself in circles. It’s no longer hypothetical. It’s no longer just firing off a tweet or three. When you have a vote, there are stakes.

Yet picking Judge was easier than picking shampoo over soap. It was easier than making my coffee with water over oil. Rarely has an award had so obvious a candidate. Judge was so good a rookie he’s a finalist for the league MVP. He just led all of baseball in wins above replacement. Judge wound up at 8.2 WAR; our rookie filter on the leaderboards isn’t perfect, but, using it anyway, there have only ever been four better rookie seasons. And Judge beat the next-best rookie in either league by 4.2 WAR; there have only ever been two bigger gaps. Mike Trout was absurd in 2012. Cy Blanton was absurd in 1935. Aaron Judge was absurd in 2017. Rookies aren’t supposed to do what he did.

It’s no surprise all the voters were on the same page with regard to Aaron Judge. It would be inexcusable not to give him first place. But I was apparently the only voter to give second place to Jordan Montgomery. I didn’t think much about what the other voters would do, because first is all anyone truly cares about. But now I feel obligated to explain myself. You can even read along, if you can bring yourself to think about down-ballot rookie votes. It’s a niche interest.

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Javier Baez strikes out. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s his whole thing, but it’s kind of a big part of his whole thing. Picture Javier Baez. Picture him hitting, not running or slapping a tag down on some poor, unsuspecting opponent. You see that swing? We’re all picturing the same swing. Sometimes that swing connects and it hits the ball a very far distance. Many more times, that swing whiffs. It finds nothing but the disappointing freedom of air. I don’t need to further explain Baez to you; his reputation is well established. He just homered 23 times, and twice more in the playoffs. He just struck out 144 times, and 11 times more in the playoffs. He wound up with a contact rate of 66%.

So Baez strikes out. I’m here to ask you about one strikeout in particular. Really, it’s two strikeouts, I guess, but they’re virtually identical, and one is from Game 5 of the recent NLCS. I didn’t write about this immediately because it didn’t seem relevant, not within the greater, ongoing postseason context. The postseason is dead now. Now we’re in a very different kind of postseason. So I’d like to shine the light on unusual Javier Baez strikeouts. Specifically, I want to know what you think about them.

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Carlos Beltran didn’t play in Triple-A. Technically, that isn’t true — Beltran appeared in five games with Omaha in the year 2000. But by that point, he was already a major-league regular. Beltran didn’t make the classic stop in Triple-A, and, for that matter, he didn’t make the classic stop in Double-A, getting called up after just 47 games with Wichita. They were 47 deeply impressive games, and the Royals couldn’t wait to use the 21-year-old center fielder for themselves. The Royals couldn’t have known then just how long it would be until they’d be relevant, but they knew they weren’t good. They also knew Beltran might pull them out of the ditch.

I don’t know for how long baseball people have been saying that the ball always finds the new guy, but when Beltran subbed in for his big-league debut on September 14, 1998, the first batter immediately hit the ball in his direction. So, also, did the second batter. With that, Beltran recorded his first-ever putout. Minutes later, he had his first-ever hit; minutes after that, he had his first-ever run. In just the next inning, he drew his first-ever walk. Beltran didn’t start the game, but he still made the most of it, and although debuts make for lousy predictors, the signs were right there. At arguably too young an age, Carlos Beltran hit the ground running.

Two decades later, Beltran has announced his retirement. He’s 40 years old, now, and he just won his first-ever World Series. There was really nothing left for Beltran to do. Beltran will presumably one day occupy a spot in the Hall of Fame, because along the way — and it was a long way — Beltran was just about everything.

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