Juiced baseballs, starting relievers and MLB's next big thing

It's a cliche to say something "came out of left field," but when you're writing about baseball, you get to use that particular cliche. MLB's league office sent out a press release Thursday that came out of that proverbial left field, and it raises some very fundamental questions about the game.

Here's the big one: What does baseball want to be?

The surprising news was that MLB had received the results from a comprehensive study on the ball itself, spurred by the surge in home run rates across the sport since 2015. In a nutshell, as independent studies suggested, baseball has been played with a livelier ball in recent seasons.

Until now, baseball's response to the homer surge was that the ball…