Today's scheduled release is now live! The update includes some changes that are immediate and some that won't take place until a world is upgraded.

Engine Changes to Reflect Recent MLB Rule Changes

1. Intentional walks no longer consume any pitches thrown.
2. As regular season games enter extra innings, a ghost runner is placed on second base to start each half inning.
3. Position players may now pitch to save bullpen arms as games enter extra innings or when a team is trailing by 8 or more runs. A new trio of managerial settings are in place to provide managers with granular control of this feature. Mopup pitchers are prioritized over position players.
4. If a spring training game is tied after 9 innings, it will now end in a tie instead of extra innings.
5. The minimum batters faced rules are now enforced. See the official MLB rules.

Additional Changes

1. * The "Edit Manager Settings" page includes a new ruleset within Pitcher Settings to determine how position players should be used as mopup pitchers.
2. The "User Settings" page includes a new "Position Optimization - Threshold" setting within the Advanced Setting grouping. This impacts position recommendations for players across all your worlds.
3. * New roster size and pitcher limit rules at the big league level now match the new MLB rules. During the regular season and postseason, the ML team may have 26 players including up to 13 pitchers. During the Sept 1 roster expansion timeframe, the ML team have have 28 players including up to 14 pitchers. When a position player is demoted from the big league team, they must now only wait 10 "days". Pitchers must continue to wait 15 "days". As always, the waiting period is waived if they are being promoted due to an injury.
4. The Disabled List has been renamed the Injured List.
5. * Position players can now be placed on the 10-Day or 60-Day IL whereas pitchers may be placed on the 15-Day or 60-Day IL.
6. Reactions are now available on the "World Chat" page
7. The "Free Agent Report" & "Waiver Wire" pages now allow you to include your ML players for easy comparison when making decisions on who to sign or claim.
8. * An "Assistant GM" section has been added to the "Edit Rosters" page. It initially includes two features with more coming in the future.
9. More detail on the League & Player Transactions pages so you can see what level a transaction was tied to and who was the author of the transaction.
10. A new "Offseason" view has been added to the Edit Rosters page to make roster evaluation a little easier during the offseason when free-agency, arbitration, rule 5 draft, etc are taking place.

Bug Fixes

1. If you toggle worlds via the My Locker page, season and other values are now reset similar to when you change worlds via the Franchise/World dropdown.
2. The Franchise profile now reflects the proper league membership. This was broken with the recent addition of the Universal DH.

Engine updates and Additional Feature changes with asterisks won't be available until your world's version is upgraded. Two worlds were initially updated: Paul Skenes and Hardball Stiches. We plan to upgrade two more pre-regular season worlds Wednesday and two more worlds Thursday. Starting Tuesday, worlds will be upgraded during the world rollover process. Any worlds that have already rolled over but haven't started their season will also be upgraded Tuesday.

If there's a healthy demand, we may tie the engine changes to private world rules in the future. As of now, all worlds will eventually use the new logic.

There was also an improvement to how position evaluations & recommendations work. There had been different logic used in different places; this logic is now unified across the Player Draft, International Prospects, Position Optimization page (i.e. when you click a position on Player Settings or Edit Rosters page) and the new Assistant GM features.

Primary position logic is intentionally now stricter than secondary position logic. A player must meet ML thresholds (or your new user setting threshold, if more conservative) for each rating and must also meet a collective threshold. Secondary position logic is more lax where only individual rating threshold must be met. This yields more realistic outcomes where there will be 3B that can also play SS instead of always having SS that can also play 3B. There's also improved logic to determine the # of positions a player is recommended based on projected/current skill level. The better players will be recommended fewer positions. Recommendations can always be overruled manually.

We hope everyone enjoys the updates. We'll be actively monitoring and answering questions. We're also working on additional updates, some of which are being actively tested and will be coming very soon.