It is often said that deadlines spur action. And in the law, there is perhaps no greater deadline than the start of a trial. So it was not particularly surprising to learn that Major League Baseball agreed to settle the Garber lawsuit — the case challenging its television broadcast policies — this morning, just minutes before the trial in the case was scheduled to begin.

Parties have reached an agreement in Garber v MLB broadcast rights antitrust case. No trial. Details not available yet.

— Zach Zagger (@ZachZagger) January 19, 2016

The terms of the settlement still have not been made public, and it may be another day or two before we learn what the agreement entails, as we wait for the attorneys to draft a formal contract. So it’s impossible at present to precisely determine what impact the deal will have on fans.

Realistically, though, one can anticipate that the terms of the settlement will likely be similar to those reached by the same plaintiffs attorneys in an analogous case against the National Hockey League last year. Specifically, in that case the NHL agreed to offer out-of-market fans the ability to purchase single-team packages of the NHL Center Ice service. Notably, however, the NHL’s settlement did not force the league to change its blackout policy, so hockey fans remain unable to view games involving their local teams via the Center Ice service without a cable subscription.

Assuming that MLB settled the Garber case on roughly equivalent grounds, this outcome may be somewhat underwhelming for fans. MLB had already announced last month that it intended to introduce single-team packages on MLB.TV this season, so such a concession in the Garber case would seemingly provide little new benefit to fans. While MLB may have gone a little further to sweeten the pot for a settlement, it is doubtful that the league would have gone so far as to voluntarily modify its blackout policies in any substantial way before trial.

So fans that were hoping that the Garber case would spell an end to blackouts will likely be disappointed once the final settlement terms are announced.

Regardless of the terms of the deal, the settlement will ultimately need to be approved by the presiding judge in the case — Judge Shira Scheindlin — before it becomes official. As part of that process, fans will have the opportunity to provide feedback regarding the sufficiency of the deal. But considering that Judge Scheindlin approved the settlement in the NHL case without lodging any serious objections to it, one can reasonably anticipate that whatever deal MLB reached this morning will eventually be approved as well.

This past Friday, players who both (a) are eligible for arbitration and who (b) hadn’t yet signed a contract for the 2016 season exchanged salary numbers with their clubs for a possible arbitration hearing. If you aren’t familiar with the details of Major League Baseball salary arbitration, here it is very briefly: teams and players file salary figures for one-year contracts, then an arbitration panel awards the player either with the contract offered by the team or the contract for which the player filed. More details of the arbitration process can be found here. Most players will sign a contract before numbers are exchanged or before the hearing, so only a handful of players actually go through the entire arbitration process each year.

Last year, Alex Chamberlain and I worked with data from MLB Trade Rumors to create a data visualization for the players who went through some part of the arbitration process. This year, I’ve updated the visualization and added an interactive element to it. It covers every arbitration-eligible player who has either signed a one-year contract this offseason or has filed for arbitration. Players who signed multi-year extensions are omitted.

Three colored dots represent a different type of signing: yellow represents a mutually-agreed contract signed to avoid arbitration, red represents the award of the team’s offer in arbitration, and blue represents the award of the player’s offer. A gray line represents the difference in player and team filings. Only players with whom teams exchanged numbers on January 15, 2016 will have grey lines. These can be filtered by clicking the “Filed” button. The “Signed” button filters out players who have signed a contract for 2016; this will change as arbitration hearings occur. Finally, “All” includes every player represented in the graph.

The chart is sorted by either contract value or by the midpoint of the arbitration filings. The final contract value takes precedent over the midpoint since this represents the resolved value. Most players have a sizable different between their filing and the team’s filing, but a few players like Josh Donaldson, Kevin Jepsen, Didi Gregorius have much smaller discrepancies, so their filing point and midpoints are all close to one another.

I will be updating this graphic as players sign and hearings occur from now through February.
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The Orioles, in conjunction with the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, are hosting a Baseball Analytics Hackathon on Friday, February 5th. It will be an all-day affair, and there will be food provided throughout the day, so that you don’t need to burn precious brain space worrying about where to go eat. Which is nice.

Hackathons are generally an excellent way to expose oneself to people in the industry, and this particular event comes with the added bonus of having data scientists from one of the largest consulting firms in the world on hand as well. Not too shabby. As if that wasn’t enough, there will be prizes awarded for the top projects.

If you’re interested, you need to move quickly, as registration closes this Friday, Jan. 22. One neat item is that you don’t have to register individually, you can also register as a group. This would seem to insure that if you and a group of friends want to attend that you don’t have to worry about being split up on arrival.

Below is the poster for the event, and you can follow this link to register. Happy hacking!

All winter, it’s been pretty clear that the Tigers needed another outfielder, and with an apparently soft market for Yoenis Cespedes and Justin Upton, it seemed perfectly logical for the Tigers to jump in and make a play for one of the better remaining players on the market. After all, this is a win-now team that threw $110 million at a good-not-great starter at the start of the off-season, and has a core of quality players who aren’t getting any younger; leaving a gaping hole in the outfield for the sake of cost effectiveness, at this point, was a strange proposition.

Apparently the Tigers now agree, and look like they’re going to be the landing spot for Justin Upton.

Sources: Upton six-year deal with #Tigers expected to be in $125M range. Agreed upon in principal, per @BNightengale.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) January 19, 2016

The crowd projected Upton for 6/$120M before the off-season, while I came in at 7/$140M, so the price seems right in line with what was presumed to be reasonable before the market looked to have softened. Given that Chris Davis and Ian Kennedy — also presumed to be dealing with little leverage — also landed larger than expected contracts in recent days, it may be time to stop assuming that the remaining free agents are going to have to take big discounts to get a long-term deal at this point. There’s clearly still plenty of money hanging around.

For the Tigers, Upton is a significant upgrade, even though he’s also more of a good player than a great one. If he can retain some of his non-offensive value as he ages, this contract should turn out okay for Detroit. It’s not any kind of steal, but it’s a good player at a reasonable price for a team that needed win-now production and probably shouldn’t be too concerned with their long-term future. The inevitable crash is coming to Detroit in a few years, and at this point, the only question is if they can get a title out of this roster before it happens. Adding Justin Upton to the 2016 roster makes that more likely.