When home plate umpire Clint Fagan made the decision not to eject Zack Greinke for hitting Miguel Montero with a pitch, and a subsequent decision to eject Ian Kennedy for hitting Greinke with a pitch, he was answering a couple of probability questions that umpires and eventually Major League Baseball will have to face.

It’s not a question of whether the hit by pitch was intentional or not. You’re never able to answer that question. The probability that the act was intentional from the point of view of the umpire/disciplinarian is never 0, even on the most innocuous-looking play, and it’s pretty much never unless Cole Hamels is just begging for a suspension.

Happy Wednesday.

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The Monday Takeaway
As the time ticked away toward Andy Pettitte’s return to the Yankees, they had plenty of options for which hitter they’d have to send down to make room. And it was as much a philosophical question as it was one of performance.

Remove Lyle Overbay and you’d probably lose him to waivers, but it was the position-prudent thing to do. Mark Teixeira was back, and how many first basemen do you need? Send down David Adams and at least you’re preserving a roster with four outfielders.

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After the Tigers hit back-to-back-to-back home runs in the fourth inning this afternoon Jason Hammel hit Matt Tuiasosopo with a high breaking ball on the first pitch of the subsequent at-bat and Hammel was ejected.

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Among the game’s many unquantifiable mysteries—up there with how many extra wins or losses a good or bad manager contributes to a team—is how many wins a season baseball teams pass up because of decorum.

It’s probably a small number. Talent, plus some small deviations for statistical noise and fluctuations in #TWTW, is still what determines the standings. But I would venture to say that it’s a non-zero number. In other words, teams are too nice to each other or have too much respect for the game.

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Bryce Harper made his major league debut on April 28, 2012. It took 11 days for someone not only to project his future as a New York Yankee but also to put an outrageous salary number on it. Thirty-seven days later, ESPN wondered in its Yankees coverage about Harper’s future in pinstripes.

It’s a bit of an industry, making projections on who’s going to be a New York Yankee. Felix Hernandez was a future Yankee forever until the Mariners made sure that he wasn’t. Just this week, that infamous Royals graphic placed Mike Trout on the Yankees already. And the terrific New York Daily News-er and 80-grade Internet troll Andy Martino gave his Mets followers a little “FY” treatment regarding Matt Harvey.

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Ramon Ortiz turns 40 tomorrow, and I didn’t get him anything. That’s probably okay. Nobody else did, either, and that’s what makes the end for him so much harder to watch.

We remember the end for the great ones, whether they went out on top like Chipper Jones and seemingly Mariano Rivera, or with nothing left, like Willie Mays. And by the way, we got them something.

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In 50 years, and that may be a conservatively distant estimate, we will hear much less talk about defensive shifts.

First of all, there might not be baseball in 50 years. It’s why I’m always hesitant to answer questions that start with “will we ever see,” because “ever” is a really, really long time compared to the current lifespan of baseball (unless it isn’t).

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The Wednesday Takeaway
The traditional rules of pitching depth aren’t supposed to apply to the Tampa Bay Rays, the story goes. If one of the young homegrown arms goes down to injury or if one ceases to be affordable, you just order another part from the factory in Durham, N.C., and repeat as necessary.

That theory is really being tested this year. In April, they broke a 1,207-game streak of not using a starting pitcher signed as a major-league free agent when they needed to go scraping for Roberto Hernandez to replace James Shields.

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The leader of the last Rangers pitching staff to lead the league in runs allowed was Rick Honeycutt, so you know it’s been a lean few decades. Complemented by Frank Tanana, Charlie Hough, Danny Darwin, Mike Smithson and an able bullpen, that Honeycutt-led staff allowed 609 runs in 1983—11 years before the Rangers’ move to their current, hitter-friendly ballpark.

That’s an ambitious example to follow for this Rangers team, which currently leads the league in runs allowed per game, chased by another team hardly helped by its home park, the Yankees. Ultimately the third-place Tigers may catch them, helped by the more neutral Comerica Park, but that’s not really the point here. It’s that this is so unlike the construction of any Rangers team we’ve seen in this generation of the offensive explosion and immediate aftermath. This season, Texas is living at the league median on offense, eighth in runs scored per game.

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Through the first-ballot Twitter account of Hall of Fame President Jeff Idelson and others, we’ve already seen snippets of the best of the Hall’s Diamond Mines scouting report database—an online version of the exhibit that recently opened in Cooperstown to honor scouts. We’ve been introduced to glowing reports on Moeller High School star Ken Griffey Jr. and on Auburn’s Vincent Edward Jackson, whom scout Kenneth Gonzales correctly predicted would win the 1985 Heisman trophy and would become a standard for the incomparable in baseball. We’ve seen Albert Pujols called overweight in four different sentences in one paragraph and Craig Biggio lauded as a future major-league catcher, though one whose bat might not play in the big leagues.

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On a Miami team that’s going to stand out on leaderboards for all the wrong reasons, Juan Pierre finished the weekend with 11 stolen bases, one ahead of Pittsburgh’s Starling Marte for the NL lead. The story of a 35-year-old with a .280 on-base percentage who might lead the league in steals isn’t bringing fans to the ballpark, but it is one of the most interesting stories on a Marlins team without many of them.

It’s been 12 years and six address changes since Pierre won his first stolen base crown. He was then a member of the Rockies, a team on which you wouldn’t expect to find a top basestealer, given the ease of hitting home runs in pre-humidor Coors.

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