Dustin Ackley just drove in the go-ahead run in the top of the 11th. Mariners ahead of A's 2-1.

Not sure if this has been covered yet, but:

MLB wants to expand replay to include fair-or-foul calls, "whether a fly ball or line drive was trapped" and fan interference all around the ballpark. Umpires still must give their approval and it's uncertain whether the extra replay will be in place by opening day.

Personally, I'm not a fan of replay on fair-or-foul calls, but there it is. My guess is that we're going to see a lot more close calls get called "fair" and then (maybe) rescinded on replay, for the same reasons that NFL refs consistently err on the side of ruling a fumble on the field--if you reverse a "foul" call, it's hard to tell what might have happened, but it's generally really straightforward to reverse a "fair" call. I think it's a matter of taste, but for a call that umps get correct so often, I'd rather see focus on improvement directed elsewhere. We'll see how it plays out, I know to a large degree I'm swimming upstream on this issue.

Eliminating a practice of some teams, there is a prohibition on "taxi squads" -- calling up players from the minors and not activating them.

Do teams really do this? I can't think of any recent examples. Usually the Twins are in dire need of the player they call up since they tend to have a wait-and-see approach to players going on the DL.

And there's at least one issue still to be decided.

For the postseason, the sides agreed to negotiate on tiebreaker rules -- do teams tied for the last wild-card berth meet on the field, or will the tie be broken by a formula?

I hope it's on the field. I hate tiebreakers with the unbalanced schedule. I mean, I guess I hate the wild card with the unbalanced schedule, but tiebreakers are a further injustice (in my book.) I suppose the issue is that this means the players have to play more games without additional compensation, since paying players extra for the playoff game would conceivably provide an incentive on some level for teams to want to tie to end the season. Yeah, it's a little far-fetched, but given its history with gambling and game fixing, I think they are right to be cautious.

I'm probably getting ahead of myself, though--travel and schedule are likely bigger culprits. Who wants to be the team that plays three games in three days in three different cities? Well, I guess I'd rather do that than sit at home because I lost a tiebreaker, but I suppose on some level that's a matter of taste, too.

Quick uniform number switches will be a thing of the past.

Players must tell the commissioner's office by July 31 of the preceding year if they want a new jersey. That is, unless "the player (or someone on his behalf) purchases the existing finished goods inventory of apparel containing the player's jersey number." As in, every replica jersey, jacket, T-shirt, mug and anything else with a number that's anywhere in stock.

I wonder what made this a pressing issue. It seems like most players that switch their number spontaneously are either accommodating a teammate or pretty unknown. This also makes me wonder if, say, the NBA got burned when Kobe switched his number and MLB didn't want that to happen to them. (Unsure on how the timing works there.) I'd guess the major ramification here is if a team makes a big free agent acquisition and the new guy wants an occupied number, the new guy is going to have to buy a whole bunch of jerseys to make it happen.

The deal also bans players and team officials from asking official scorers to reconsider decisions -- clubs must instead send video to MLB to appeal calls -- and increases punishments for slow-moving hitters and pitchers, raising pace-of-game fines up to $10,000 each for the sixth violation and beyond.

Anything that reduces bias on the part of official scorekeepers is a plus in my book. The scorekeepers don't get paid enough to deal with players complaining about their decisions anyway. Not a big fan of the pace-of-game fines. Does the league get fined every time the players are ready to play and the commercial break isn't over yet?

That's about it, except for no corporate tats. Have there been any high-profile cases of this? I can imagine some corporation might pay good money for a forearm tattoo.

The Angels reportedly just signed a new TV deal worth $3B over 20 years. I'd guess that it's backloaded to some degree, so let's say for the sake of argument it starts at $131M in 2012 and goes up $2M/year after that.

Say you had a 40,000-seat stadium and hosted 81 home games per year. You charge $70/ticket on 10% of your seats, $60/ticket on 10% of your seats, $50/ticket on 20% of your seats, $30/ticket on 30% of your seats, $20/ticket on 20% of your seats, and $10 on 10% of your seats. If you sell out all 81 games at those prices, you'd make $120M.

Angels ticket prices are probably a little higher than that, but but we can see that roughly speaking, this puts their local TV revenue on the same magnitude as what we might expect their ticket revenue to be. On top of that, they've got national TV revenue from the league, luxury box sales, parking revenue, concessions revenue, and ad revenue from the outfield walls, etc. I don't really know what those add to the bottom line, but it's not hard for me to envision a total revenue of about $700-800M next year.

How much extra money can signing Pujols make them in the really short term? I don't think it's too bit a stretch to say that adding Pujols, not so much adding any kind of star appeal there is, but adding 6 wins next year, pushes them close to 48K/game attendance next year. It doesn't seem like a huge bump from 40K/game, given the size of their market. Then say they get revenue from an additional 3 playoff home games (1 in ALDS and 2 in ALCS), at ticket prices double that of regular season games, because Pujols (or Pujols/Wilson if you want to look at it that way) is enough to push them ahead of the Rangers. That'd be roughly an extra $24M in regular season ticket revenue and an extra $10-11M in postseason ticket revenue.

So in the short term, it's pretty easy to see outcomes where the Pujols signing turns a profit for the Angels. In the longer term, I think the security of that long-term TV deal gives the Angels enough payroll to compete even if Pujols is nearly a non-contributor, and by that point they've potentially gained a bunch of fans along the way.

Looking around professional sports, MLB has to have one of the most convoluted scheduling schemes in the world. On the simple/elegant end of the spectrum, you have many professional soccer leagues, in which a team plays every other team in the league once on the road and once at home. On the other end of the spectrum is MLB: play each team in your division (which may have 4, 5, or 6 teams in it) 18 times each year, and play teams outside your divison but in your league 6-10 times each. Then play your "rivals" from the opposite league in 6 games each year, unless of course you don't have a rival because with uneven number of teams in each league not everyone can have just one rival. Then play three games with a handful of teams from the NL, mostly from the same division, but not always.

I feel that no matter what individual justification there is for each aspect of the schedule, the end result is a big mess. Surely it doesn't spoil my enjoyment of baseball, but it seems to make the season unnecessarily complicated.

With the Astros reportedly moving to the AL West, all divisions will have 5 teams, removing a huge barrier to a more elegant schedule. Yes, there will always be some interleague baseball going on, but I'm personally not opposed to this. As a counterbalance to the large number of intradivision games, it's nice to have some variety in the schedule.

With balanced divisions, there are a number of realistic simple schedules that can be created. The first one that came to mind for me was:

1) Play all teams within your divisions 9 times at home and 9 times away.
2) Play all teams in your league but not in your division 3 times at home and 3 times away.
3) Play all teams in one NL division 3 times at home.
4) Play all teams in a different NL division 3 times on the road.

And there's your 162 games. While I'm not a big fan of playing each team in the division 18 times a year, I do like playing intradivision teams more often than other teams, and 18 is a number which makes things work out easily. Setting the schedule this way would make it so that each team within the division played the same schedule, which I think is a big improvement on the current schedule.

The one thing this would do away with is the intraleague rivalry matchups, which can lead to persistently unbalanced schedules within a division. If it is so important that two teams play one another, they should be in the same league or the same division. A lot of the high attendance for these series can be attributed to the timing of the games--they are typically scheduled as a summer weekend series, which is going to have higher attendance anyway because the weather is warmer and it's easier to go to the games on the weekend.

The one big problem I see here is that the schedule is almost too symmetric--in order to get the season done in the same number of weeks as now, you can't always play two 3-game sets each week. It might be possible to split up the 9-game intradivision sets in such a way (1 4-game, 1 3-game, and 1 2-game) that you can compress the schedule enough. Looking back to 2009, the Twins had at least nine 4-game series in the schedule, so it could be tricky to make everything work out right.

Back in reality, there is probably little chance that the schedules will be this balanced when they come out in 2013, but they shouldn't be quite as arbitrary as they are now.