Mikey York was coming off Tommy John surgery when the Tampa Bay Rays drafted him out of the College of Southern Nevada in the fifth round of last year’s draft. It soon became clear that he wasn’t fully recovered. The Las Vegas native was shut down after allowing 16 runs in just 9.1 innings at Rookie-level ball.

This year was a different story. York didn’t take the mound until late June, but once he did, he was lights out. In 11 starts between short-season Hudson Valley and Low-A Bowling Green, the 21-year-old right-hander allowed just 36 hits in 61 innings. He walked 11 and fanned 53, and finished the campaign with a 0.89 ERA.

Along with a repaired ulnar collateral ligament, the promising youngster possesses big-league bloodlines. His father, Mike York, played 13 professional seasons and had stints with the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Cleveland Indians. Blessed with a feel for his craft and a bulldog mentality — Nolan Ryan and Greg Maddux are role models — Mikey York aspires to follow in dad’s footsteps as a Tampa Bay Ray.

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York on his repertoire and approach: “My biggest thing is that I like to command my fastball — throw it for strikes, get ahead early, work on the hitters. I like to get them off balance by mixing speeds, working inside and outside, changing eye levels. Most importantly, I let them put the ball in play.

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So, things might be getting out of hand…

A lot of folks inside and outside the game don’t care for September roster expansion. After all, why play the game one way for five months, with one set of roster rules, and then in the most crucial month of the season change the limits of rosters?

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Early Thursday, I listened to an exchange between Buster Olney and Indians president Chris Antonetti. As you’d expect, there was talk about the Indians’ winning streak, and about the impressive play of Jose Ramirez. But Olney also asked Antonetti about an observation that had been relayed to him by some number of league evaluators. In the opinions of those evaluators, one area where the Indians stand out is in their reluctance to throw predictable fastballs. Pitchers have been taught forever that the fastball needs to be established early on. What if a team simply didn’t believe that?

Listening to the segment got some gears whirring. This isn’t a post about the Indians. This is a post inspired by an observation about the Indians. Let’s have a little talk about fastball usage.

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Episode 765
The 2017 season features the highest strikeout rate in the game’s history and the highest home-run rate and the highest collective fastball velocity and the most indulgent use of relief pitchers. The game, in short, is experiencing entropy — an inevitable descent into chaos or disorder. Is the destruction of the sport imminent? “Probably not,” says managing editor Dave Cameron, who uses evidence to support his claims.

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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 51 min play time.)

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Doug Fister has only made more and more sense. He was most surprising in the early days, the successful days, the days when Fister was a command-first No. 2. He was never considered much of a prospect, because prospect evaluators love them some velocity, but Fister made it work through his pinpoint location. He was, in a sense, in the same mold as Dallas Keuchel and Kyle Hendricks. And then, gradually, Fister got worse, as his repertoire eroded. He lost what speed he had, and he lost his results, having exceeded his own narrow margin of error. Fister joined the Astros in 2016 as a roll of the dice. He wasn’t very good, and then he was a free agent. He didn’t get a job until the desperate Angels signed him in May. He was dropped a month later. Fister became what he was going to become, having gotten to the end of the line.

Yet one last opportunity beckoned, one with the Red Sox. Dave Dombrowski had seen Fister’s best self, and he needed a pitcher. Over Fister’s first month, he allowed nearly a run per inning. A shift to the bullpen ended on July 31 anyway, and Fister has taken off. He’s thrown seven games, and he’s looked like…classic Doug Fister. I mean that. Seemingly out of nowhere, Doug Fister has turned back the clock.

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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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