DrungoHazewood

If long-term payments concerned 23-year-olds we'd have far fewer sales of $60k monster trucks.

They had one in the late 80s and early 90s. Earl managed, Dan Boone threw knucklers, and tens of fans showed up.

I don't know... would that be meaningful to a 20-something guy who might not gross that much in 20 years if he doesn't make the majors? A player's take might be "who cares about a $1M fine, soon I'll be making that every month in the Majors."

The minimum would have to be quite high. Currently it's about 14 league minimum players to equal one year of a 1-win free agent. Let's guess there are 300 minimum-salaried players in MLB, and total salaries are $3B. That makes minimum-salaried players 5% of total salaries. For a typical team that would make $5M for the lower class, and $95M for arb/free agents. Quadrupling the minimum would still make the split 80/20.

You mean the indy leagues don't have World Anti-Doping Agency approved PED testing programs? Also, has there ever been a case of someone getting popped for PEDs and just going to the NBP or KBO or Taiwan? Or Mexico? You couldn't come back without serving your suspension, but if you're an Eddie Gamboa level player you don't care.

The hardest thing will be marginal major leaguers. You could devise punitive measures that keep established players from using, mostly. Like a three-year ban and voiding of contract for a 2nd offense. But how do you stop guys who're making $10-30k a year in the minors? If the take PEDs and make the majors it's a ~20x increase in pay. Massive raise. Far, far more than they could make outside the game. If they're caught, so what? Barely worse off than making a pittance playing for Canton-Akron. I don't know how you fix that, the incentives are too great.

Let's say in his three arb years he makes 2, 4, 8 million. That's $14M, plus the maybe $2M he'll earn his first three. So $16M going into free agency. Meaning he'll have to be worth 49-16 or $33M in free agency. That's maybe four or five wins. What percentage of players similar to Schoop are worth at least four wins in free agency? That's almost more art than science since you need to develop a list of comparables from a niche profile; young, powerful, strike-zone challenged middle infielders. Here's a list: Nap Lajoie, Carlos Baerga, Juan Samuel, Robinson Cano, Bill Hall, Rougned Odor, Bret Boone, Schoop, Frank Catalanotto, Jorge Cantu, Alfonso Soriano. I figure most of them were more than worth a $33M deal in free agency.

Don't ask me, but adjusting strike zone size is far simpler than tracking a 93 mph slider to an accuracy of a fraction of an inch.

No. It would be almost trivial to adjust strike zone sizes. You have sub-$1k cameras and cell phones that do good facial recognition.

Don't paint with such broad strokes. There's some automation in car manufacturing. Ford might use a line that's 90% automated and 10% manual intervention. Morgan probably is 90% manual and 10% automated. We currently have a process with balls and strikes that's 100% manual. A person QA'ing the strike zone boundaries defined by image recognition software in real time is more like the 90% solution. Perfect is the enemy of good enough. A solution doesn't have to be some kind of philosophical ideal to have value.

You mean the tops and bottoms? With image recognition software that figures out where knees and letters are, probably QA'd by humans as the game progresses.

So? Why is that a problem? I'd much rather have someone click a pointer on the guy's letters to define the top of a strike zone than have the ump calling 10% of balls strikes. Defining a batter's zone is far less subjective than guessing balls and strikes. There are different levels of human subjectivity and automation in processes, and with free will we can decide what makes sense.

A set strike zone would favor certain types of players. I don't think that's a good thing. Diversity of player types is a good thing.

Yea, don't overthink this. You don't need sensors. Pitch f/x type data is fine.

It's ridiculous. Gausman throwing gas, gets several Ks that are turned into non-Ks by bad umpiring, and the O's losing. Bring on the robot umps. Any day would be fine.

Just a made-up number based on the data I've seen that can interpreted as about 10% of pitches are rulebook strikes called balls and vice versa.

For 130 years nobody could do anything about bad umpiring. Now we can. To me it all comes down to the fact that today everyone knows about a bad call within seconds and you can't just leave that hanging out there. It's an elephant in the room. It will not be long before an ump calls a pitch 8" off the plate strike three with the tying run on third in the 9th in October, and it'll be all anyone talks about for months.

I'm all for incentivizing performance. But I'm not sure drawing a line between 88% accuracy and 88.3% accuracy on called ball/strikes and demoting everyone below the line (and taking at least a year long 80% pay cut*) would have the intended effect. I'd guess a substantial fraction of promoted umps would fall below the threshold, and as a group they might be worse than the demoted umps. I'd rather just take the umps out of ball/strike calls for the most part and give them electronic aids. * I'm assuming AAA umps make a small fraction of what MLB umps do, similar to players, but I don't know that for sure.

What I'm saying is that threats like firing 1/3rd of your employees each year might work on McDonalds employees or something, but probably have a lot of negative consequences among high-skill jobs. What you might find is that the spread in talent/performance in MLB umps is tight enough that how you implement your measurements becomes more important than performance. It's likely that you already have a very high performing group up umps and that all your system will do is cause bitterness and discontent as an almost random group gets axed every year.

Or you'll quickly find out that it wasn't poor umps so much as a nearly impossible task. What would happen if the bottom 33% of MLB rosters were banished at the end of each year? My guess is a small but noticeable decline in MLB talent.

Isn't baseball known for its ability to quickly and proactively address obvious problems?

I think it's nearly certain, and umps guessing and missing 10% of pitches and making up their own strike zones will be one of those things we laugh about the old days.

Rule 2.00- Definition of Terms The STRIKE ZONE is that area over home plate the upper limit of which is a horizontal line at the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants, and the lower level is a line at the hollow beneath the kneecap. The Strike Zone shall be determined from the batter’s stance as the batter is prepared to swing at a pitched ball.

I once read someone argue that the game needs injustice meted out from on high to really be poetic and tragic and meaningful. I think that's a load of crap.

The conspiracy theorist in me thinks some curmudgeons pushed to implement replay in an NFL-challenge way so that it would be clunky and they eventually do away with it. Another part of me says they just lacked imagination and took the What Would The NFL Do path of least resistance. The obvious way to help with balls and strikes is a real-time indicator that only the home plate ump is privy to, indicating if it was a strike. We'll see if they do something more ill-conceived.