DrungoHazewood

When you start sorting players on criteria like "second basemen with .150+ ISO through age 24" you get a lot of all stars.

I don't like the idea that the clubs escape all blame and get to benefit from PED-enhanced performance right up to the moment someone is caught, then they get out of the entire contract. Right now it's nearly certain that teams sign players they suspect of cheating knowing they don't have to pay during suspensions, this just removes all responsibility from the clubs. The league would be telling the clubs to sign anyone, take advantage while you can because you have total protection from that contract, it's 100% on the player.

Quite a coincidence that Bonds has gotten involved in one of the 30 MLB organizations that have PED users.

A 30-year-old middle reliever with <100 innings in the majors.

Yep, yep. Once again the sign of PEDs is a homer spike. Gordon had half his career round-trippers in 2015.

I'm more kindhearted. I think some people aren't cheating but there's no way to tell one way or the other.

But his indy league manager said he was healthy and throwing 97!

Rights don't apply to people making a lot more than me!

I think there need to be limits and a balance of testing vs. intrusiveness. But also get the feeling that popular opinion might side with getting the rich baseball player out of bed at 3am and canceling his family vacation so we can be extra sure he's not taking HGH.

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.