April Madness: We'll Never Be Royals

OK, MLB has given us some new rules stats to chew on. These are through Saturday.

Violations: There have been 112 violations in 126 games — that’s 0.89 violations per game. I believe that’s well under what they were expecting for the first 10 days or so of the season. The violations break down like so:

• 77 pitch timer violations by pitchers

• 29 pitch time violations by batters

• 2 batter timeout violations

• 1 pitcher disengagement violation

• 0 shift restriction violations

This last one is particularly interesting to me. So far, teams have not illegally shifted even once. I have a theory about this that may be completely wrong, but when has that stopped us before, right?