Major League Baseball asked a federal court this week to toss out claims by several fans that the league’s broadcast territories violate antitrust laws. The fans claim that MLB’s divvying up of the United States and Canada into exclusive broadcast markets means that regional sports networks need not compete with each other to telecast a team’s games in the local market. Plaintiffs also allege that MLB has a monopoly over broadcast packages of out-of-market games through Extra Innings and MLB.tv, and that MLB uses that monopoly for anti-competitive purposes by imposing blackouts on local games. My initial post explaining the lawsuit is here.

This week, MLB filed a motion for summary judgment with U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin, who is presiding over the case in Manhattan. Under federal procedure rules, a party can file a summary judgment motion to argue that under a set of undisputed facts, the other side’s claims (or defenses) are legally untenable, and therefore a trial on those claims (or defenses ) is unnecessary. You can read a copy of the motion here.  

Note that several parts of the motion are redacted, which means they refer to MLB’s confidential business information. From what I can discern, most of the redactions relate to MLB’s national TV contracts and what would happen to those contracts should the plaintiffs succeed in blowing up the exclusive local markets. The evidence in support of the motion — documents and pre-trial testimony — is even more off limits, with much of it filed under seal. That means only court and the attorneys have access to it. The public does not.

Still, even with the redactions and the filings under seal, MLB’s position is clear.

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In theory, one would think Thursday was a good day for the Texas Rangers.

Ace Yu Darvish took the mound for an afternoon affair in Detroit. A few hours later, Texas enjoyed a 9-2 win over maybe the best team in baseball. The win drew the Rangers one game shy of .500 with a 23-24 record, but the victory was an afterthought because Thursday brought other, bigger-picture news.

Prince Fielder was scheduled for season-ending surgery on a herniated disc in his neck, and Jurickson Profar re-injured his shoulder. Fielder is getting a second opinion, but it’s almost a lock the first baseman will have surgery and is done for 2014, while Profar looks like he’ll be a non-factor this season. And this didn’t establish a new pattern — it continued an old one.

It’s not even Memorial Day, and the Rangers have been devastated by the injury bug. Almost no position has been left untouched, and it seems like every week brings a new ailment. It’s hard to say when everything started — left-hander Derek Holland injured his knee in the offseason — but spring training was unkind to the roster … and the season’s been the same.

There’s a sense that these Rangers are cursed, and though, eventually, they’ll have talent back and healthy at some point, it seems like the year is a lost cause with the Rangers too short-handed.
What’s the approximate impact of all the injuries they’ve experienced?

Read the rest on FoxSports.com.

I’ll begin my second post here at FanGraphs with a lazy comparison, sure to denounce any iota of credibility I’ve yet had the chance to establish.

Now, Corey Kluber isn’t David Price. We know that. But that’s over a full season’s worth of data from which to draw a conclusion, and Kluber has pretty much matched Price across the board. Price is one of the faces of baseball, who will almost certainly be cashing in for well over $100 million when he hits free agency in 2016, while Corey Kluber is mostly known as that guy who doesn’t smile.

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Pedro Martinez was a genius with a baseball in his right hand. One of the most dominant pitchers of all time, he didn’t just overpower hitters. He outsmarted them. When he was on top of his game – as he often was – he was almost unhittable. No starting pitcher in history has a better adjusted ERA.

Martinez might be best described as a thinking man’s power pitcher. His pure stuff alone would have made him a star. His ability to read hitters and maximize his talent put him on a whole new level. The Hall of Fame awaits.

Martinez – currently a special assistant for the Red Sox – shared the wisdom of his craft earlier this week at the site of some his greatest glory, Fenway Park.

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Martinez on the art and science of pitching: “Pitching is both [art and science] and you have to put them together. You have to study a lot. You have to study the movement of your pitches – the distance your pitches move compared to the swing paths of batters. You have to learn to read bat speed against the speed of a fastball. You can tell a slow bat or a long swing, or a short, quick swing. You counter those things. If a hitter has a slow swing, I don’t want to throw him anything soft. I want to go hard against slow. If he has a quick bat, I probably want to be soft more than I want to be hard. You have to be able to repeat your delivery and be deceiving at the same time.

“You repeat – you try to be consistent – until they start to figure out what you’re doing. If they don’t, that’s great. Just go through your routine and repeat, repeat, repeat. I wish I could have just thrown fastballs, but that wasn’t the case. I went along with the way the hitters and the game was going. I let the game come to me. I executed whatever I had to execute.”

On being a student of the game: “I would say the second half in 1996 is when I [made the transition from thrower to pitcher]. After that I felt I was on top of my craft. I felt like I could do what I wanted to do. I’d have off games sometimes, but everybody does. But most of the time I’d be around where I wanted to be. That’s when I feel I was becoming who I wanted to be as a pitcher. Read the rest of this entry »

There are two big stories with Jeff Samardzija right now. One is that he’s almost certain to get traded by the Cubs somewhere around the deadline, as a contender looks for a major rotation boost. The other is that Samardzija is currently 0-4 in ten starts with a 1.46 ERA. Of course, we pretty much never talk about win/loss record, and of course a pitcher on the Cubs is going to have a worse record than he deserves, but for as silly as this bit of trivia is, it really is astonishing. In Samardzija’s ten games, the Cubs have scored 20 runs.

Because of those two things going on, relatively few people might have noticed a third thing going on. Samardzija remains a quality starter, but ever so quietly, he’s changed his profile. The starter version of Jeff Samardzija in 2014 isn’t the starter version of Jeff Samardzija from the two previous years, and in particular, this version of Samardzija doesn’t get as many strikeouts, even though he still has all his stuff. Last year, he was tied in strikeout rate with Shelby Miller and Gio Gonzalez. This year he’s even with Kyle Lohse. At the moment, Samardzija is one of the most talked-about pitchers in baseball, and so we might as well talk about why he isn’t quite what he was. It’s not that he’s a worse pitcher. It’s that he’s a different pitcher.

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The Giants are fourth in the National League in runs, and they’ve got a new Big Bat in the middle of the lineup. Michael Morse didn’t have a great season last year, and he came to the Giants to rehabilitate his value on a one-year pillow contract. Now things are going well for team and player, and there’s something to his approach — his mentality about aggressiveness, his openness to adjustments, and his enjoyment of the game — that makes it all work. Especially with a wrist that’s finally healthy.

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We’re coming up on Memorial Day, and Mike Moustakas is hitting .152/.223/.320. That’s going to be his line for a while, because the Royals just optioned him out to Triple-A, and are going to hope he remembers how to hit against minor league pitching.

On the one hand, a case could be made that Moustakas’ performance was unsustainable, and a little positive regression would get him back to prior levels. After all, his walk and strikeout rates are right in line with career norms, and his .168 ISO is actually close to a career high. His overall line has been sabotaged by a .155 BABIP, the lowest in baseball for any player with 130 or more plate appearances. While BABIP for hitters has a wider range of true talent levels than BABIP for pitchers, no Major League player is going to run a sub-.200 BABIP for any real length of time. Given a longer leash, Moustakas’ numbers would have improved.

But let’s not kid ourselves; this isn’t just a small-sample BABIP problem. Over the last calendar year, Moustakas has hit just .227/.279/.368, putting up a 75 wRC+ that is only acceptable for an Andrelton Simmons-level defender. For his career, spanning over 1,600 plate appearances, Moustakas has an 80 wRC+. Even regressing Moustakas back to his career norms doesn’t make him good, and it’s not like Moustakas holds no responsibility for that .155 BABIP to begin with. In fact, his career is basically a case study in how to run a really low BABIP.

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Roughly a quarter of the 2014 season is in the books, and the sample sizes are creeping toward a representative level. Over the next couple of weeks, let’s take a somewhat deeper look at some of this season’s more noteworthy players and performances to date. “Noteworthy” doesn’t always mean “best”, though it does in most cases. Today, we’ll take a look at the first quarter performance of Yasiel Puig, who has done his best to blot out any notion that last season’s breakout was a fluke. His 2014 numbers are even better than last year’s, which were believed by many to have overly fueled by BABIP. What makes Puig tick, and how good could he eventually get?

In the aftermath of the A’s successful signing of Yoenis Cespedes, the Dodgers ventured into the Cuban professional ranks and signed Puig to a seven-year, $42M major league contract in 2012. Like Cespedes before him and Jose Abreu afterward, Puig had great success in Serie Nacional, the top rung of the Cuban professional ranks. Unlike them, however, he had not sustained this success – a loud .330-.431-.581 line in 2010-11 – over a material period of time. In addition, Serie Nacional stats are notoriously spotty. Critically, however, the guy the Dodgers signed was only 21 years old at the time. If this seven-year gamble panned out, they would be locking up Puig through age 27, while the A’s and White Sox would be buying themselves some decline phase along with some of Cespedes’ and Abreu’s prime years. Was Puig good enough to warrant such an investment?

It didn’t take long for that question to be answered definitely. Puig knifed through the Dodgers’ system, batting .328-.405-.611 over 229 minor league at-bats, and then exploded onto the scene at Dodger Stadium last summer. While his style has often overshadowed it, the substance has been there from Day One. While his plus-plus arm strength, his rawness in certain aspects of the game, and his immaturity in general often garnered the headlines, Puig has been one of the game’s top offensive producers since the day he showed up. How historic is the opening to act to his career? Consider this.

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After writing some good posts for the Community Blog, August Fagerstrom got our attention, and is now joining the staff of FanGraphs. He will be contributing regularly here. If you want to follow in his footsteps, the Community Blog is a great place to get noticed.

Late Tuesday evening, Kurt Suzuki hit an inside-the-park home run off San Diego Padres reliever Nick Vincent. As you likely know: Kurt Suzuki is a catcher. Another thing you likely know: catchers, generally speaking, are not fast baseball players. Kurt Suzuki is no exception to that rule. A third thing you likely know: inside-the-park home runs are generally reserved for fast baseball players. Kurt Suzuki is an exception to that rule. Here’s how it happened:

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Twitter user and probably good person Cory Little brought something to my attention the other day. The San Francisco Giants were playing a game in Colorado, and, following a somewhat ordinary looking sequence of events, from the top of the fifth inning:

• Brandon Hicks flies out
• Brandon Crawford singles
• Tyler Colvin doubles
• Madison Bumgarner strikes out
• Gregor Blanco triples
• Hunter Pence singles
• Pablo Sandoval strikes out

Three-run inning for San Francisco. Three two-out runs. The Giants took the lead, though they’d ultimately lose on a walk-off. What’s interesting isn’t the sequence, as it’s presented. What’s interesting is the sub-sequence. Let’s zoom in on the Bumgarner strikeout. The six pitches:

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