I recently pre-ordered The MVP Machine by Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sawchik, and I wanted to take a minute to recommend this book to like-minded baseball fans. I really enjoyed Ben's previous book, The Only Rule Is It Has To Work, co-written with Sam Miller, Ben's co-host on Fangraph's Effectively Wild podcast (Nate Silver called the book "brutally honest" and "blissfully funny").

If you pre-order before June 4th (and forward your receipt to [email protected]) you'll also get "a bonus chapter, an exclusive conversation about the book, and other extras" (on June 4th).

In other news, I recently received the following e-mail:

Version 22.08 of Baseball Mogul 2019 includes improvements to the artificial intelligence in Pitch-By-Pitch mode. Pitchers now select and locate pitches more realistically -- based on the count, batter and game situation -- and batters behave more realistically in terms of the pitches they choose to swing at.

One way to see these changes is by viewing pitch-by-pitch results in Version 22.08 alongside results from Version 22.06, and comparing them to actual data from Major League Baseball: