Excerpt: "Shane Victorino"

"Victorino isn't one of those guys, but at least for the moment, he's committed to this plan. Last night, Victorino came up in the bottom of the seventh with the Red Sox down 3-1, with one out and runners on second and third, to face Darren O'Day. O'Day is incredibly tough on right-handed batters: .202/.271/.295 career (and better than that during his time as a healthy, established reliever), .163/.229/.240 this year. If there was ever a time for Victorino to go back to the left side, it was this high-leverage spot against a tough righty. Instead, he fell behind 0-2 and lined softly to second base."

Excerpt: "Matt Harvey, Turning Point"

"Let's play it out. If pitcher injuries are, for practical purposes, random, what does this mean for baseball management? Well, for one, I think it can put an end to the hyper-limiting of workloads in the minor leagues. If a pitcher is healthy and effective, you let him pitch, subject to reasonable restrictions on in-game pitch counts tied to a pitcher's age -- ideas that have been around since Craig Wright was promoting them. You advance pitchers more quickly; the practice of taking college starting pitchers in the draft and sending them to A ball has never made sense. If you didn't think Mark Appel could handle the Midwest League you probably wouldn't have taken him first overall. Start these guys at Double-A and stop making them waste pitches at a level that's beneath them. And when they're ready, they're ready; there's no career path with pitchers the way there is with hitters, where you want to hold them back to make sure you get as much of the peak under team control as possible. A pitcher can start the All-Star Game in July and be out for the next season come August -- so if he can help you now, let him help you now. No shutdowns, no Verducci effect, no nothing. Let the best pitchers pitch in the major leagues, because none of us are good enough to know when they'll stop being able to do so."

Excerpt: "How to Break Pitchers"

"Ogando and Davis are the latest victims of a new phenomenon: moving young pitchers from starting roles to one-inning relief roles and back. Up until the last 10-15 years, young starting pitchers could be broken in with long-relief work. It was Earl Weaver who said that the best place for a young pitcher was in the bullpen, and he practiced that. In 1965, a 19-year-old Jim Palmer relieved 21 times for the Orioles, making two six-inning appearances and seven others of at least three innings, with just seven of fewer than two innings. Ogando has made 103 relief appearances in his career and has gone more than two innings four times. Davis made 54 appearances in 2012 and went more than two innings three times. Palmer was pitching out of the bullpen in much the manner he would as a starter, facing hitters multiple times, having to pace himself, getting to throw all his pitches. Ogando and Davis were…not doing that."

Excerpt: "The Tigers' Bullpen"

"The real keys, though, are the same pitchers who have been effective for Leyland for two years now: Joaquin Benoit and Drew Smyly. Benoit inherited the closer role from Valverde. Since his first post-Valverde save on June 16, Benoit has a 1.17 ERA in 23 innings, with a 25.5% strikeout rate and a 24/7 K/BB. The Tigers are 22-1 in the 23 games he's pitched, the one loss coming when he made a get-work appearance with the Tigers down 3-1 in the ninth on June 27. At 35, Benoit is posting the highest groundball rate (41.6%, per Fangraphs) of his career, which is one reason why his low home-run rate -- just two this year -- isn't entirely a fluke. Benoit's HR/FB of 6.7% isn't out of line with his rates since he moved to the bullpen in 2005. Benoit is example N+1 supporting the idea that a pitcher good enough to pitch the eighth inning is good enough to pitch the ninth."

Teach Your Children? Well.

Last night's Yankees/Red Sox game provided any number of memorable moments, ones that will stick with us for a while. There was Ryan Dempster's repeated attempts to injure Alex Rodriguez. There was Rodriguez's revenge, a monster home run that kicked off the Yankees' game-winning rally. There was Joe Girardi just missing Brian O'Nora with a right hook.

Me, I'll remember the crowd. I'm going to remember more than 30,000 people standing and cheering a man repeatedly throwing a small, hard object at another man. I'll remember how the crowd…a mob, really…egged on Dempster, rewarded his failed efforts with applause, encouraging his violence and imploring him to take another shot at hurting another man. I'll remember the savagery. I'll remember the glee. I'll remember the moment when our inability to properly place "acquired and used substances we don't approve of" in the hierarchy of offenses reached a peak, forever making clear the hypocrisy of the last decade.

Last night happened for a lot of reasons, but one is that we've demonized sports drugs as part of a laughable notion that athletes are responsible for parenting other people's children. "The children" has become a loaded phrase, something of a joke, really, shorthand for nonsense in the nominal protection of the vulnerable. When Congress allowed a grieving father's erroneous beliefs to sidetrack an already ill-conceived hearing into excessive hitting of home runs, it sealed the idea that you could force baseball players to have their behavior tested, monitored, investigated and, if necessary, punished, all for the sake of the children. It was critical that baseball players be shown clean so as to create an example for the young athletes of America, then punished if they broke the rules, to show those same young athletes that cheating in this area would be taken seriously. Baseball gave in to the testing-industrial complex, itself a morass of moral hazard, and sacrificed the privacy rights of its workers for some poorly-reasoned greater good.

We saw how fraudulent that idea was last night, when on national television in a high-visibility game, the children of America were shown that not only was violence the answer to dispute resolution, not only was persisting in violence -- pitch two, pitch three, pitch four -- the path to justice, but that being repeatedly violent would garner you a standing ovation and no discipline. If the point of forcing a prove-your-innocence program, of investigating the behavior of baseball players without bounds, is to establish baseball as a moral force for the good of the children of America, then last night, in its embrace of violence, its encouragement of savagery, set that effort back. I don't care what a man puts in his body or how he defends himself for doing so -- throwing baseballs at him is wrong. Cheering it is disgusting. What did the children at Fenway Park learn last night?

It's never been about the children, of course, They're a red herring. I know this because discussions about the evils of sports drugs are often interrupted by advertisements for beer and Scotch and lottery tickets. We care about the children? Let's ask them. Ask the children of American what is worse for their well-being: beer or synthetic testosterone. I'm serious. Put Gallup in the field to find out whether scratch-offs or HGH have a more deleterious effect on the lives of fourth graders. For that matter, while we're asking, let's see if they're more traumatized by the prevalence of sports drugs or by having things thrown at them by bullies while authority figures stand and watch.

We are completely around the bend on this issue. There's no longer any place in the discussion for facts, for perspective, for placing the issue of sports drugs in the context of other issues that challenge both baseball and society, for placing the issue of sports drugs in the context of the history of both baseball and society. These are complicated issues and they've been reduced to a nonsensical heroes-and-villains narrative because it's easier to talk about the people than the ideas. The ideas are what matter. Ballplayers come and go, chemists comes and go, drugs come and go, ballgames come and go and we're no smarter about the relationships among ballplayers, chemists, drugs and ballgames then we were when this all started.

Thirty thousand people cheered as one man threw a baseball over and over again at another man. What do we tell the children about that?

Excerpt: "Go to Replay on Replay Plan"

"If you wanted replay to be a fiasco, this is the system you would implement. It's complicated, it's slow, it shifts responsibility for getting the calls right from the umpires to managers, it may disenfranchise fans at the park. It makes an assumption -- that the number of erroneous calls is evenly distributed -- that is demonstrably false. It grandfathers in, for no earthly reason, the current process of reviewing home-run calls, with the idiocy of all four umps leaving the field.

"It's not enough to say, 'But it's cool that we're getting more replay.' You want your kid to go to college, but if they come home one day and say they're going to clown college or beauty school or UCLA, you don't praise them for getting it half right."