We just had a conversation on Monday about the league’s ideas for changing up the game, and about tilting at windmills. Intentional walks aren’t that big a deal. Now extra innings are killing baseball, apparently.

Jeff Passan has reported that baseball is going to start testing out a new policy at Rookie-level ball. Every extra inning will start with a runner automatically standing on second base, with the idea of ending the game quicker. I can see the argument. Extra innings drag, especially if they go on for extended periods of time. This rule would theoretically protect against 19-inning wars of attrition in which position players get to try out their fastballs. Nobody wants to sit around into the wee hours of the morning until someone finally pushes a run across the plate. That’s the rationale behind this, right?

“What really initiated it is sitting in the dugout in the 15th inning and realizing everybody is going to the plate trying to hit a home run and everyone is trying to end the game themselves,” Joe Torre told Passan. And the same is likely true of the fan still sitting out in the bleachers in the 15th inning, no? Is anybody still watching at home in the 15th inning? The sooner a baseball game can end, the better. That seems to be the message here.

Yet this proposed cure may not be any better than the supposed disease.

The Australian Baseball League has this rule, and some other international formats of play employ it. It hasn’t garnered glowing reviews.

As we know, bunts stink. They’re a waste of an out. They work less often than you’d think. It’s not totally uncommon for a runner being bunted over from second to be thrown out at third. Plus, the league just publicly stated its vendetta against old-fashioned intentional walks this week. If MLB is concerned with pace of play, making extra innings even more of a slog through the mud feels quite counterintuitive.

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Pitchers need to get used to a different ball when they reach the big leagues. The variance is slight, but it is nonetheless noticeable. That was the opinion of four pitchers to whom I spoke, and facts back up their feelings.

According to a source within Major League Baseball:

• The MLB ball is made in Costa Rica, and the MiLB ball is made in China.
• The MLB balls cost more.
• There are some differences in the materials, such as the kind of leather.
• Tests are conducted, and the performance of the balls are in line with one another. Even so, major-league pitchers on rehab assignment are allowed to use MLB balls during their minor-league outings.

That last bullet point seems especially telling. Given the availability of that option, there is clearly a difference.

Here is what the handful of hurlers — all of whom pitched in both MLB and Triple-A last season — told me in mid September. Along with the physical feel of the spheroid, pitch movement and the carry of fly balls were also addressed.

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On the Construction and Feel of the Ball

Ben Heller: “It seems like it’s a bit tighter in the big leagues. And the ball is slicker, too. The way they rub it down here makes it a little slicker in your hand, so I find myself trying to get a little moisture to counteract that.”

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Yesterday, the Miami Herald reported that Jeffrey Loria has an agreement in place to sell the Marlins for $1.6 billion, a more than 10 fold increase in franchise value from the $158 million he paid to buy the team in 2002. If the team actually sells for that $1.6 billion total — and, according to follow-up reports, the final sales price hasn’t been agreed to, and there’s a long way to go between handshake agreement and the actual transfer of the franchise — Loria will have made an 18% compounded annual return on his initial investment.

That’s the kind of annual return promoted by scam artists and ponzi schemers, luring in investors with promises of huge returns that never materialize. An 18% annual return over 15 years that actually materializes is a huge business success, and Loria’s cash-out will serve to make him even more extraordinarily wealthy.

And as Ken Rosenthal wrote last night, these franchise valuations are not going to go unnoticed by the player’s association.

Oh, it’s good to be an owner.

Granted, it’s also good to be a player, but the most recent collective-bargaining agreement, with its modest increases in luxury-tax thresholds, already seems to be stifling salary growth.

The sale of the Marlins for $1.6 billion, or even a lesser but significant sum, would only reinforce to the players that they should be getting more, setting the stage for labor friction in the future.

If you’re one of the free agents that got roundly rejected by the market this winter, and then you see Loria walking away with a $1.5 billion profit on the sale of the team, it’s certainly easy to connect the dots and say that there’s something wrong here. But as easy as it is to hate Jeffrey Loria for the way he’s run the Marlins since buying the team, it’s also important to remember that people buying into MLB franchises right now are purchasing more than just a collection of baseball players.

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September 29, 2016, marked a cool and damp evening in Pittsburgh. PNC Park was sparsely populated for game No. 159 of the regular season, the final Pirates’ home game of the campaign.

The hosts had little to play for, having been eliminated from postseason contention, failing to make the playoffs after three consecutive trips to the postseason. The visiting Cubs had already secured a playoff spot and the best record in the NL.

I sensed many, including those in the press box, were ready for the season to end. Then the rains came. The tarp was deployed. Western Pa. was soaked by more than an inch of rain.

In the sixth inning of a 1-1 tie, the umpires decided they had see enough regular-season baseball in Pittsburgh in 2016. They sent everyone home with baseball’s first tie game since 2005. I was there as a witness, recounting the events for what turned out to be the last game story I wrote as a beat reporter for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

I am revisiting this history today because of the Jeff Passan’s report from Wednesday that revealed the league’s plans to experiment with some radical extra-inning practices at the lower-levels of the minor leagues this season — notably, beginning extra innings with a runner on second base. The goal is to avoid ridiculously long games that tax everyone, most notably young arms. And the experiment could eventually lead to implementation at the major-league level.

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If you come to this site, or are something more than just a casual baseball fan, you likely know that Josh Donaldson is pretty great at this whole baseball thing. With four straight top-10 American League Most Valuable Player Award finishes, and one actual MVP Award in his trophy case, this should seem pretty straightforward. And yet, relative to how good he is, I feel he’s still a little underappreciated. So in that spirit, I wanted to dig in a little on just how good he is. The answer is that he’s been historically great.

Let’s start, as we often do, with a table.

Donaldson didn’t become a regular in the majors until his age-27 season. That was back in 2013, four seasons ago. Since then, he has been one of the best players of all-time for his age. Look at him right there, nestled between Greg Maddux and Mickey Mantle. What?

Before we get to the players who appear on this table, though, let me give you a quick sampling of the players who aren’t on it: Jeff Bagwell, Miguel Cabrera, Steve Carlton, Lefty Grove, Eddie Mathews, Mike Piazza, Cal Ripken, Alex Rodriguez, Tom Seaver, Duke Snider, Tris Speaker, and Cy Young, just to name a few. When was the last time you thought of Donaldson as superior to A-Rod? Obviously, I’m not saying that Donaldson’s career is better. In the time he’s been a regular, however, he been nearly as good as possible.

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Usually, these things tend to go in one direction. We talk about a player who seems underrated, and then, in time, that player becomes rated more or less appropriately. We’ve seen this happen with, say, Jose Quintana, who used to be considered a nobody even while he was pitching out of his mind. A lot more people now know how good Kyle Seager is. People know how good Starling Marte is. People have even figured out how good Kevin Kiermaier is, basically. Obligatory Ben Zobrist mention. Great players don’t stay hidden too long. I should note that I’m open to the argument Mike Trout remains underrated, but that’s different, because his ability is impossible for humans to understand.

You don’t see many players go from underrated to understood to underrated again. Such a sequence ordinarily wouldn’t make any sense. Yet, sometimes, there are just atypical circumstances. Of course there’s no infallible metric for underratedness. I know that I can’t prove anything, so we can get that out of the way up front. But I’m just here to remind you about A.J. Pollock. Pollock was once criminally underrated, and then, as time passed, he was recognized as one of the greats. Then he missed almost an entire baseball season. Out of sight, out of mind — that is how we work. So Pollock is back to where he was, preparing for camp as Arizona’s neglected star.

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There are different ways to turn a team around. That’s probably an obvious thing to say, but it’s true. Another thing that’s obvious and true: teams are made of humans. Because of that, no turnaround is entirely uniform in nature.

Even so, a team might emphasize certain traits when attempting to rebuild or improve. On-base skills, power, etc. Some of those turnarounds are easy to follow; others, less so.

Given the relatively short history of defensive metrics, the turnaround of team defense hasn’t been thoroughly chronicled, and yet teams have certainly made it a priority. Just last year, the Astros and Indians exhibited improvements in the field in a way rarely matched. Looking further back, it’s possible to find other teams that have accomplished the same feat. The question, though: how did they it? Maybe it’s possible to use past successes as a road map for current teams! So, let’s find the next Indians and Astros.

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Matt Wieters is a free agent right now, but he won’t be for long. Spring training is right around the corner, and Wieters is a legitimate big-league backstop, so at some point his expectations and a team’s open-mindedness will come into alignment. These things can drag out sometimes. A few years ago, people thought Prince Fielder was screwed. He signed for $214 million in the last week of January. Scott Boras is good. He should pretty much always get the benefit of the doubt.

Yet in the case of Wieters, you can see why he’s still out there. This is all prompted by a Ken Rosenthal article titled: “Why is veteran catcher Matt Wieters still on the free-agent market?” Boras is quoted within, and, what the hell, let’s just get right to it. Boras obviously has his agenda, but it isn’t hard to pull his argument apart.

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It’s been quite a while since we kicked off our position-by-position look at 2016 hitter contact quality, which arrives at its last official installment today. (There will be a small number of add-on articles covering pitchers and hitters who didn’t quite qualify as “regulars.”) We looked at AL catchers earlier this week; today we move on to the NL crop, again utilizing granular exit-speed and launch-angle data in the analysis.

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Major League Baseball has been floating a bunch of different ideas lately to help improve the game: automatic intentional walks, starting a runner on second in extra innings, and one that would likely have the most impact, raising the lower bounds of the strike zone.

If you feel like you’ve heard that last one before, it’s because you almost definitely have. Jon Roegele has been chronicling the expansion of the strike zone for years. It’s not just him, though. Just last year, there were reports that MLB planned to raise the strike zone. In response, August Fagerstrom discussed who might be affected the most. August isn’t around these parts anymore, so consider this post your update on the pitchers who might be negatively affected by a slightly higher strike zone.

First, consider the visuals below. They’re from a 2014 piece by Roegele and were reproduced by Fagerstrom last year. They documents how the strike zone has expanded downward over the last decade.

It’s pretty obvious from these graphs that pitches in the lower part of the zone were being called strikes more often in 2014 than five years earlier. But these images are from a couple seasons ago. Is it possible, given the talk last season about raising the strike zone, that umpires took it upon themselves to do it? To compensate for the lower-zone creep happening of late?

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