As the only league among the four major North American sports to operate without some form of a salary cap, Major League Baseball has always been in somewhat of a unique position. Without the traditional ceilings on team salary, the sport has always left itself open to financial disparity and all the articles and opinions that go along with it.

For 20 years, baseball has tried to curb big spenders through the use of luxury taxes. Six teams paid a total of $70 million in taxes this past year, and baseball decided to continue hammering away on high-payroll teams in the new CBA approved last December. While the financial penalties maybe caused teams to think twice before spending on the free-agent market, the luxury tax never directly affected a team’s ability to access one key pipeline of talent: the Rule 4 (or, June amateur) draft.

This all changed last December. As noted by Baseball America’s J.J. Cooper, exceeding the luxury-tax threshold will result in draft-related penalties beginning in 2018. The full list of sanctions is described on page 110 of the 2017-2021 Basic Agreement, but for those who don’t have that kind of time, they can be summarized in two points:

• If a team’s actual payroll exceeds $237 million in the 2018 season (increasing to $250 million in 2021), their highest draft pick will be moved back 10 places.
• If the offending team’s highest draft pick falls in the first six picks of the draft, their second-highest draft pick will be moved back 10 places instead.

For the first time, Major League Baseball has tried to affect a team’s ability to acquire amateur talent after spending large amounts of money. If a team wants to devote an outsized quantity of money (compared to the rest of the league) to acquiring established players, they have to risk the potential of their future by seeing a major source of young talent dry up slightly. However, if you look closely at the new penalties, you see less of a leash on high-payroll teams and more of an inadequate deterrent that will fail to provide any checks at all.

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Baseball is getting chippy.

On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that the Red Sox were being investigated by Major League Baseball for violating the league’s rule against using electronics in the dugout. Specifically, the Yankees filed a complaint alleging the Red Sox used an Apple Watch to receive information from their replay staff, who had used the video reviews to decode the Yankees signs. According to the report, the Red Sox did not deny the allegation, instead going with the playground favorite “they do it too” defense, filing a counter complaint stating the Yankees using a YES Network camera to steal signs.

Then yesterday, Athletics third baseman Matt Chapman got ejected after arguing with Angels catcher Juan Graterol over, you guessed it, sign stealing.

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I don’t know what brings you joy. Baseball, probably, or else you’re hopelessly lost on the internet. Chances are, you’re a fan of a team, so you root every day for that team’s success. Me, I’m less a fan of a team, and more a fan of players and subjects. One of the things that’s been bringing me joy is observing Mike Trout climb up the WAR leaderboard. It’s amusing because, obviously, Trout missed about six weeks due to injury, and it’s hard, obviously, to accumulate WAR when you miss a quarter of a season. Trout is amazing.

There’s a slightly lesser version of that same exact story. The best pitcher in baseball, by WAR, is Chris Sale. That’s not very surprising, recent stumbles aside. Yet, the second-best pitcher in baseball, by WAR? That would be Corey Kluber, who missed a whole month due to a back problem. Even though a month is a long time, in baseball terms, Kluber has put that unfortunate episode behind him, even threatening to create something of a Cy Young race. Kluber, generally, has been pitching like Corey Kluber. Just, an even better version. The Kluber of today might have baseball’s best pitch.

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Full disclosure: as you might be aware, I authored a book on the Pirates — Big Data Baseball — which was published in 2015. As a result, it’s possible that I write this piece with some bias.

Still, I wouldn’t have entered into that book project if I thought the Pittsburgh Pirates were run by fools, engaged in uninteresting practices, and set for a catastrophic 2014 season. To work on the project, I had to believe the Pirates were a team likely to enjoy more success.

I pitched the book following the 2013 campaign, after the Pirates’ first winning season since 1992. I felt it was a compelling narrative: the Pirates ended the longest consecutive streak of losing seasons in North American pro sports history by residing on the cutting edge of analytics and innovating new practices (like having a quant embedded in the clubhouse) while also remaining attentive to the human element. It was a story of creativity, collaboration, and peak Andrew McCutchen.

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At some point, there was going to be a correction. Pitchers have been taught forever to work off their fastballs. If not for the fastballs, after all, to what would the other pitches be compared? The fastball has always been the primary pitch, and yet it was something of an unexamined position. How many fastballs are too many fastballs? How few fastballs are too few fastballs? Do you actually need to throw fastballs the majority of the time?

This is the age of information, so this is the age of experimentation. Just the other day, Trevor Bauer was critical of Avisail Garcia’s expectation of a fastball. Tom Verducci wrote up a whole feature earlier in the year about the Yankees’ fastball avoidance. One thing we know is that the fastball rate is going down.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Willson Contreras’ Twitter behavior and the Yankees-Red Sox sign-stealing scandal, then answer listener emails about “up the line” vs. “down the line,” how rebuilding works, whether teams can count on the current home-run rate continuing, Deion Sanders’ career taking place today, the heat of the hot corner, the Hall of Fame candidacies of Joe Mauer and Justin Verlander, OBP vs. out rate, banning in-season trades, and more.

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Episode 764
Ashley MacLennan is a writer/editor for Bless You Boys, the proprietor of 90 Feet From Home, and the author — under the pseudonym Sierra Dean — of weird, beautiful novels. She was also FanGraphs’ writer-in-residence for the month of August.

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Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

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Audio after the jump. (Approximately 1 hr 7 min play time.)

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