Marlins Park opened to much fanfare four years ago, and while the team quickly abandoned what it had taken on as its new operational identity, there’s no abandoning a ballpark that fast. Not that the Marlins want to leave, anyway, but — love it or hate it — Marlins Park will be around for a while yet. One of the funny things about the stadium is that it took exactly one game for people to be left with a certain impression. That impression: it’s enormous. In the opener, Giancarlo Stanton hit into a couple warning-track outs, and Lance Berkman was one of many players to talk about the park to the media. Said Berkman:

“If they don’t move the fences in after this year, I’d be surprised,” Berkman said. “And I’m going two years as the over-under on that.”

He continued:

“It’s the biggest ballpark in the game,” Berkman said. “And people have tried that big-ballpark deal, and it never works. Detroit moved the fences in. New York (i.e., the Mets) moved the fences in. I mean, there’s a reason why it’s 330-375-400 (in most parks). That’s a fair baseball game. You try to get too outrageous, and you end up with something that I think is going to be detrimental to their ballclub. I mean, Stanton hit two balls that probably were two home runs. And they were both outs. And we won the game.”

To further Berkman’s point, Seattle and San Diego also later moved in their fences. In the end, Berkman was wrong about his estimate — the Marlins didn’t move in the fences after a year, or after two years. But they are now making changes after four years. Pretty much all the fences are being lowered, and maybe more importantly, they’re doing something about the vast center field. It’s taken this long, but like so many other newer ballparks, Marlins Park is taking a step toward neutrality.

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A couple months ago, we featured an annual article that detailed the most extreme home runs of 2015. It’s always a fun post to write, and this year, I had the honor of putting it together. We always include hardest-hit, longest, shortest, highest, lowest, you name it — it’s a veritable smorgasbord of dingers, and everybody likes dingers. Now that we’re a couple months removed from it, though, I realized it’s missing something: a thorough consideration of the players who hit those home runs.

Of course we expect and know that Giancarlo Stanton is probably going to hit the longest home run of the season. He tied himself in the category this year, even though he didn’t play in any games past June 26th — such is his domination of hitting baseballs long distances. But what if Erick Aybar – he of the .069 isolated-power mark — hit a massive home run to right field at AT&T Park, 2015’s hardest park to homer in for a left-hander? (Spoiler: he did not do this.) What if David Ortiz – he of the lowest speed score in baseball during 2015 – hit a triple in Anaheim, a very difficult park in which to triple for lefties? (Again, no, but you get the idea.)

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In the offseason, teams are frequently characterized as “winners” and “losers” based on the players they’ve acquired relative to the players who have left. Often, the so-called winners are simply the clubs who’ve been most active, bringing in the most players — regardless of cost — while the losers often are those clubs which have been more idle, making smaller moves to improve their rosters. These characterizations do not always translate to the field, as the case of the San Diego Padres illustrates. The Padres followed an active 2014-15 offseason with a poor 2015 campaign.

With that caveat having been made, many have declared the Washington Nationals losers this offseason not simply because Ian Desmond, Drew Storen, and Jordan Zimmermann are gone — replaced by a relatively modest group including Shawn Kelley, Daniel Murphy, Ben Revere — but mainly because they failed to land Yoenis Cespedes, Jason Heyward, or Ben Zobrist in free agency. While the team might be hidden winners of the winter, the Nationals are claiming their failure is due to a tightened budget caused by the Baltimore Orioles’ refusal to pay market value for their television rights.

For those who might not be aware, the Orioles — principally Peter Angelos, through regional sports networks MASN and MASN2 — air the Nationals broadcasts. The Orioles control the Nationals broadcasts as a result of negotiations with the team when the Nationals moved to Washington, D.C., thus encroaching on the Orioles’ television territory. Nathaniel Grow characterized the situation like this after the last major decision in the legal dispute between the teams:

In order to alleviate the Orioles’ concerns, MLB structured a deal in which Baltimore would initially own 87 percent of the newly created Mid-Atlantic Sports Network (MASN), the regional sports network that would air both the Orioles’ and Nationals’ games. In exchange, the Nationals were scheduled to receive an initial broadcast rights fee of $20 million per year from MASN, an amount that would be recalculated every five years.

Jump forward to 2012, when Washington requested that its rights fee be increased to $120 million per year. MASN and the Orioles refused, and as a result the dispute ended up in arbitration, with a panel of MLB team executives – the Mets’ Jeff Wilpon, the Rays’ Stuart Sternberg, and the Pirates’ Frank Coonelly – ultimately awarding the Nationals roughly $60 million per year in broadcast fees.

The Orioles believed they should pay the Nationals roughly half the amount the arbitrators awarded and appealed, getting the decision thrown out due to conflicts with the Nationals’ counsel. (For more on the decision, read Grow’s full piece linked above.) The case is still ongoing without a resolution and the Nationals are pushing the Orioles to head back to arbitration. The Nationals retained new counsel, and have filed a motion to compel the parties to arbitrate the case and set a value for the television rights. In their recent motion, the Nationals indicated that the Orioles’ failure to pay fair-market value for television rights has hamstrung the team in signing free agents to multi-year contracts.

“MASN’s underpayment of rights fees has already required the Nationals to fund payroll and other expenses from its own reserves, and further delay could require the Nationals to seek new financing,” says the team’s memorandum. “This is not only burdensome in its own right, but it places the Nationals at a competitive disadvantage to other baseball clubs, which typically receive fair market value from their regional sports networks for their telecast rights. Without this added income, the Nationals are handicapped in their ability to invest in efforts to improve the team. For instance, without this added and steady income, the Nationals cannot bring full economic confidence to investments in multi-year player contracts to keep up with the fierce competition for top players — especially when such control over finances is in the hands of a neighboring club.”

This might sound a bit like whining coming from a billionaire owner who just one year ago signed Max Scherzer to a seven year, $210 million contract, and reportedly made offers to Jason Heyward for roughly $200 million and Yoenis Cespedes $100 million, but those claims do have some merit.

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Jordan Zimmermann woke up Tuesday morning, read the report from the Associated Press that MLB appears to be considering a raising of the strike zone, yawned, took another sip of coffee, and quietly went back to working on the day’s crossword puzzle from The New York Times.

According to the AP’s interview with commissioner Rob Manfred, MLB is “studying whether to raise the bottom of the strike zone from the hollow beneath the kneecap back to the top of the kneecap.” We know that offense is as low as it’s been in 25 years with strikeouts at an all-time high, and while that’s partially due to ever-increasing velocity and changes in approach, it’s also got plenty to do with a strike zone that’s larger than any we’ve got on record, with the brunt of the expansion found in the lowest sliver of the zone. MLB can’t change how hard pitchers throw or where they put it, so the logical step, if they’d like to inject some offense back into the game (though it did come back up for the first time in six years last season), would be to rein in the strike zone a bit. If a change is made, it likely wouldn’t come until the 2017 season at the earliest, as it’s a matter to be discussed in collective bargaining negotiations, the results of which wouldn’t impact the league until the current CBA expires on December 1, 2016.

Raising the floor of the strike zone wouldn’t much affect Zimmermann, who pitched above the waist more than any pitcher in baseball last year. But certain guys make their living down in the zone, around the very sliver that’s being discussed as turning from a called strike to a called ball.

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Last September, at one point, the Astros staged an improbable ninth-inning comeback against the Angels. I don’t remember a whole lot of the details anymore, but there is still one play that sticks out in my mind, because it stuck out in my mind back then. George Springer neither started the rally nor ended it, but he did keep it alive with the bases empty and the Astros down to their last strike. Behold Springer in a 1-and-2 count against Huston Street:

All right, it’s one ball in play, and it was very nearly caught. So perhaps it was very nearly forgettable, but look at how Springer stayed with an attempted strikeout slider and made good contact the other way. It works well here as a representation of what George Springer got up to. It happened quietly — the Astros themselves were a bigger story than Springer as an individual, and theirs was a roster with Carlos Correa and Dallas Keuchel. Springer, for his part, missed time with injuries, which I’m sure he’d love to knock off. But there in the shadows, Springer turned himself into something less extreme. There was one big question mark hovering over his career, and now it’s been at least partially addressed.

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Lately there’s been a good amount of discussion regarding the National League adopting the designated hitter. To try and gain control of the runaway conversation, Rob Manfred has recently indicated no changes are on the horizon, but it really does just feel like a matter of time. I don’t need to go through all the reasons, but I do suspect change is inevitable. Whether it’s two or five or 20 years from now, the NL will probably have the DH, and everything’s going to be fine. The globe is going to be warming, perhaps uncontrollably, but the game of baseball’s going to be fine. Fans adjust, as they always do.

Because I grew up a fan of an AL team, and of a team with an awesome DH, no less, you can imagine where I stand. That being said, when the DH extends into the NL, I’m going to miss pitchers hitting. I don’t know if I’m going to miss the actual event, but I’ll miss the numbers, and I’ll miss the rare surprises. As far as the numbers go, I love that plate appearances in the major leagues are given to athletes with minimal training. It’s the closest we can come to knowing how we might perform if we were asked to bat. And I’ve really loved the AL sub-group. I’ll miss the reality of pitchers hitting in general, but I’ll especially miss AL pitchers trying to give it a go.

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After finishing in last place in their division in 2015, the Red Sox plan to bounce back in 2016. You know this because they’ve done things like sign David Price to a seven-year contract paying him a swimming pool filled with doubloons. Similarly they’ve dealt prospects to the Padres, which means “Wait, what?” in Spanish, for reliever Craig Kimbrel. They also dealt a starting pitcher, Wade Miley, to the Mariners, for reliever Carson Smith. Unless you subscribe to the idea that the Red Sox can’t abide a player who loses a cow milking competition — a reasonable position to take I’ll grant you — all of these are win-now moves. The Red Sox think they can compete in 2016.

However, in order to win now, these new players will have to perform better than last year’s new players, Hanley Ramirez and Pablo Sandoval, did in their first seasons in Boston. After producing a collective 6.4 WAR in 2014, the last season with their previous clubs, Ramirez and Sandoval recorded a cumulative -3.8 WAR in 2015 with Boston. That’s a drop of over 10 wins in total from two players aged 31 and 28, respectively — not exactly ages at which you expect players to fall off a cliff. Perhaps more surprisingly, a large portion of that negative production came from the players’ defense.

As you know if you read these same electronic pages, Ramirez was a mess at his new position of left field in 2015, so much so that there are no more jokes to make about him. Literally all of the jokes have been made. As a result (of his defense, not the joke thing), the Red Sox are moving him to yet another a new position this coming season. That was surprising because we all figured a guy who had played shortstop in the majors would be able to handle left field. Apparently not. And yet this isn’t an article about Hanley Ramirez. It’s an article about Pablo Sandoval’s defense. Who would have guessed?

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“Kyle Gibson?”

That was the first comment from my piece, yesterday, on Francisco Liriano, who embodies a league-wide trend of pitchers subtly altering their approach and hitters seemingly failing to adjust. You see, Gibson’s name was twice invoked in a group of unique pitchers, and, given the context of the groups, Gibson stuck out as something of a stranger in the room.

The first group looked like this:

• Carlos Carrasco
• Jacob deGrom
• Kyle Gibson
• Corey Kluber
• Max Scherzer
• Madison Bumgarner

OK, then.

The second group looked like this:

• Francisco Liriano
• Kyle Gibson
• Dallas Keuchel
• Wade Miley
• James Shields
• Tyson Ross
• Jeff Locke
• Jon Lester
• Gio Gonzalez

The second group is less illustrious than the first, but Gibson finds himself surrounded by some impressive company regardless. The first group, the distinguished group, is made up of the pitchers who most often got batters to chase pitches out of the zone in 2015. The second group is made up of the pitchers who worked out of the zone most often in 2015.

So, you’ve got Kyle Gibson, here, in both these groups, throwing pitches outside the strike zone all day long and getting batters to chase at them like Carrasco, and deGrom, and Kluber, and Scherzer. And you’ve got Kyle Gibson, here, who had one of the lower strikeout rates in baseball last year, and has K’ed fewer than six batters per nine innings over the course of his career, while his chase-inducing contemporaries like Carrasco, and deGrom, and Kluber, and Scherzer are striking out 10 batters per nine and overpowering lineups across the major league.

What gives? Where are all of Kyle Gibson’s whiffs? He already turned himself into a solid pitcher, a three-win pitcher, last season, racking up nearly 200 innings with an ERA, FIP, and xFIP all under 4.00. He’s proven himself as a quality arm. Take a quality arm and add some extra strikeouts, and you’ve got a dominant arm. And it seems like he should be getting those extra strikeouts. Yet, here we are.

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Featuring Chris Davis, Zack Greinke, Jason Heyward, David Price, and Justin Upton, this offseason’s free-agent class was one of the best in recent history. Of that group, Davis, Heyward, and Price entered free agency with the minimum six years of service time, while Greinke was taking his second bite at the free agency apple and Upton had his slightly delayed by a contract extension signed with Arizona before the 2010 season. Of this year’s class, Mike Leake, Jeff Samardzija, and Jordan Zimmermann also went without contract extensions before hitting free agency, creating one fantastic class. Next year’s class is much weaker — not because there are fewer valuable players who’ve recorded similar service time, but rather because so many great players entered contract extensions delaying free agency.

Yoenis Cespedes has a one-year opt-out in his new contract with the Mets that will enable him to enter a poor free-agent class with aging hitters like Jose Bautista, Adrian Beltre, and Edwin Encarnacion; mid-level outfielders like Carlos Gomez and Josh Reddick; just one elite pitcher in Stephen Strasburg; and a few elite closers in Aroldis Chapman and Kenley Jansen. Next year’s class was not always like this. A slow erosion of free-agent eligible players occurred over the last several years, robbing the market of what could have been one of the greatest free-agent classes of all time.

Consider the following timeline:

• March 26, 2012 — Milwaukee Brewers sign catcher Jonathan Lucroy to five-year deal worth $11 million with an option to take the deal through the 2017 season.

• April 16, 2012 — San Francisco Giants sign Madison Bumgarner to five-year deal beginning in 2013 worth $35 million with two options that could take the deal through the 2019 season.

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Pitch-framing as an idea has existed for almost as long as the game, but it wasn’t until we started getting numbers for it that people really started to think about it in depth. At that point we were introduced to the idea of a catcher potentially being worth a few extra wins just because of how he catches pitches behind the plate. That was startling, and it was fascinating, but there was an important question that wasn’t being discussed enough — is the existence of pitch-framing good? Valid arguments on either side. But it seemed that there was nothing to be done until we got an automated strike zone. Humans will be humans, after all.

On the other hand, humans can change. Humans can learn; humans can be trained. One interesting observation during the PITCHf/x era is that, over time, those human umpires have collectively started to call an increasingly consistent zone. PITCHf/x provided feedback, and umpires could get better as a result. Now, I can’t help but wonder if we’re seeing the beginning of the end for pitch-framing. Catchers are always going to catch a little differently, but I wonder if there are fewer available rewards.

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