Big Picture

Such is the power in West Indies' batting, that on Wednesday, Dwayne Bravo could have come in as low as No. 9. He didn't, because he was unrequired. Without Shimron Hetmyer, Rovman Powell and Bravo facing a single ball, West Indies still muscled their way to an imposing 196. Sri Lanka never quite looked like they were going to get there.

How do Sri Lanka turn this around, with only one day in between games? As has been the case all through the past 18 months, they rely heavily on Lasith Malinga to provide early wickets, and they struggle when he doesn't break through. Perhaps they will reflect that Wanindu Hasaranga - Sri Lanka's most dangerous bowler from the ODI series - could have been brought into the attack sooner than the 13th over. But he and Malinga can't be saddled with all the wicket-taking. If Sri Lanka are to challenge West Indies in the second match, the likes of Isuru Udana, Lakshan Sandakan and Thisara Perera will need to present more of a threat to the opposition top order as well.

West Indies' only real concern is how to make the best use of their extraordinary batting depth. On Wednesday, they perhaps did well to move Andre Russell to No. 3, before Kieron Pollard promoted himself to No. 4 - both those batsmen hitting 30s at strike rates of well over 200 through the middle period. Thanks to Oshane Thomas' five wickets inside the Powerplay, the West Indies attack was never really questioned.

Form guide

West Indies WWLLW (completed matches, most recent first)

Sri Lanka LLLLL

In the spotlight

Lakshan Sandakan has played more than 50 international matches, and has been around the top team since the middle of 2016, and yet, hasn't quite managed to nail down a spot in any of Sri Lanka's first-choice XIs. He was just okay through the ODIs, while Hasaranga carved them up. On Wednesday, he delivered three good overs, giving away just 19 runs and even claiming the wicket of Brandon King. But his last over cost 19 runs and ruined those figures - though it was no less devastating a batsman than Andre Russell who took him apart. The team management is showing serious faith in Sandakan at the moment, playing him in each of Sri Lanka's matches on this tour. He would do well to repay them with a performance that is good from start to finish.

West Indies' more destructive batsmen may command the greater share of attention, but Lendl Simmons has been outstanding at the top of the order in recent weeks. Three times in his last six T20 innings now, Simmons has carried his bat - West Indies winning the match on each of those occasions. On Wednesday, he played the situation beautifully, putting Sri Lanka under pressure by making a charge through the Powerplay, before moving into a supporting role when the bigger hitters came in. He made 67 not out at a strike rate of 131, and he did so without hitting a single boundary in the second half of the innings, letting Russell and Pollard have the pleasure instead.

Team news

There's no real need for West Indies to change their XI. They'll likely go in with the same team.

West Indies: 1 Llendl Simmons, 2 Brandon King, 3 Shimron Hetmyer, 4 Kieron Pollard (capt.), 5 Nicholas Pooran, 6 Andre Russell, 7 Rovman Powell, 8 Dwayne Bravo,9 Fabian Allen, 10 Sheldon Cottrell, 11 Oshane Thomas

Sri Lanka may think about bringing in Niroshan Dickwella for Shehan Jayasuriya, who collected a golden duck on Wednesday.

Sri Lanka: 1 Kusal Perera, 2 Avishka Fernando, 3 Niroshan Dickwella (wk), 4 Kusal Mendis, 5 Angelo Mathews, 6 Dasun Shanaka, 7 Thisara Perera, 8 Wanindu Hasaranga, 9 Isuru Udana, 10 Lasith Malinga (capt.), 11 Lakshan Sandakan

Pitch and conditions

Another good batting track is likely. No rain is forecast.

Stats and trivia

• Malinga's T20 captaincy record since taking over in late 2018 is now 12 losses to one win.

• Oshane Thomas is only one of two bowlers to have taken five wickets inside the Powerplay. The other is Malinga, who did it at the same venue in September last year.

• Sri Lanka have won six and lost four T20 internationals to West Indies overall, but have lost the last three on the trot.

Bangladesh selectors have given uncapped left-arm spinner Nasum Ahmed a spot in the T20I squad for the two matches against Zimbabwe on March 9 and 11.

Nasum picked up six wickets from 13 matches for the Chattogram Challengers, who made it to the second qualifier before they were knocked out. Overall, the 25-year old has played 17 T20s and picked up eight wickets at an economy rate of 7.23.

The selectors also recalled Mushfiqur Rahim and allrounder Mohammad Saifuddin, both of whom missed the three match T20I series in Pakistan in January. There was no place for Mohammad Mithun and Rubel Hossain, while Najmul Hossain Shanto's finger injury ruled him out.

"We had to offload Mithun and Rubel as we included Mushfiq and Saifuddin. Shanto is out injured," said chief selector Minhajul Abedin.

There was a time when Saqib Mahmood - a young seamer capable of reaching speeds of 90mph/145kph and extracting reverse-swing - would have been like gold dust for England.

But with Jofra Archer and Mark Wood both regularly cranking it up over the last 12 months of Test cricket, Mahmood recognises that the bar has been raised.

"For someone like me who touches 90mph, you're looking at these guys and it's almost like that's not quick enough anymore," Mahmood told PA. "I think those two guys have really raised the bar in terms of pace.

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"A few years ago… we were crying out for 90mph bowlers. Now we've got two bowlers who can get it up past 95mph. These guys make me hungrier to keep working hard and get quicker."

Mahmood, a late call-up to England's squad in Sri Lanka after Wood's injury, is yet to make his debut in Test cricket, but is one of only four frontline seamers to have made the trip alongside Stuart Broad, Sam Curran and Chris Woakes, with Archer also missing out through injury. And while he is not taking anything for granted, Mahmood hopes that his skill with the old ball can help catapult him into the side following strong showings across two warm-up games.

"In this team that's probably what I'll be looking to do: bowl short spells and try to be as quick as I can be," he said. "As a seamer over here you're not going to bowl the same number of overs you would in England so you have to make the most of them.

"I want to attack with the new ball, but I also want to attack later in the innings and not just be a bystander in the field when the spinners are getting through their overs. Whether that's by getting the ball reversing or by making something by bowling three or four overs as fast as possible, I just want to show everyone what I can do."

Mahmood has regularly touched 90mph in his televised appearances for Lancashire, but after struggling to reach such speeds in his handful of international caps to date, it has been suggested that he needs to focus on finding that mark more regularly.

But Mahmood is confident that an extra yard of pace "will come naturally" as he grows older and stronger.

"There is a fine margin, you have to be careful as a bowler and not search so hard for something that you lose what you've got," he said.

"At the moment I can bowl high 80s and also have skill and control. I wouldn't want to sacrifice anything in search of another three of four miles an hour but hopefully that will come naturally. I'm only 23 and as I grow older I should get stronger in my action."

England trained for the first time on their tour on Thursday at the Premadasa Stadium in Colombo. Jack Leach, who has a calf niggle, warmed up on his own before bowling in the nets, while Ben Stokes has arrived in the country after delaying his departure to attend a funeral.

Their first warm-up game against a Sri Lanka Board President's XI begins on Saturday.

You can't control the weather. But you can plan for it.

Like the boundary countback that handed England the World Cup (sorry to any New Zealanders reading this who don't want reminding), ICC playing conditions have again become the major talking point.

However, unlike the boundary countback, which was a decider for a set of circumstances that, if we are fair, few could ever have seen coming, then the prospect of rain ruining cricket matches is nothing new.

And on this occasion rain decided one of the biggest matches of the tournament. It came within a whisker of deciding two, before the clouds parted sufficiently for Australia and South Africa to play to a truncated finish. The home side won and the tournament can now be blessed with a final that pits the current powerhouse of women's cricket with the side that may well be its future powerhouse.

That will mean nothing to England tonight, though

The tournament's playing conditions meant that India were bound to take the final berth in the event of a washout, and justifiably so, given that they had topped their group with four wins from four. And given that form, there could have been no guarantee of England living up to their higher pre-tournament seeding and winning their semi-final. But it was galling for them not even to be given the chance to compete.

While the tournament is much more than about one team, there will be some relieved people that Australia - similarly at risk - managed to dodge the weather. They have been central to so much of the hype around this competition and the ambition to get a world-record crowd at the MCG. There are already 60,000 tickets sold, but had South Africa been handed the bye after topping their group, how many of those punters would have turned up for Katy Perry alone, or at all? Tonight's result may provide the final boost.

There were plenty of nervous jitters when Australia were 10 for 3 against Sri Lanka with their campaign on a knife edge but they managed to haul that around. However, if they had stumbled out at the group stage or been beaten on the field by South Africa, at least they would have exited for cricket reasons.

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Of course, a reserve day is no guarantee of getting a game in. But if there are two days of continuous rain, then at least you can sigh and accept that it wasn't meant to be, regardless of the contingencies put in place. At least it would have given the match a chance.

And, while you can't make different arrangements on a city-by-city basis, Sydney certainly has history when it comes to rain-affected matches, particularly at the back end of the season. It was astonishing that February's BBL final, reduced to 12 overs a side, managed to get played to a finish, while the T20I between Australia and Pakistan in November was another to succumb to the weather (when, in another example of cricket's inflexible rule book, the interval wasn't shortened even though the overs were). If you are going to use the SCG to host vital games in late summer, it's probably worth a better back-up plan.

It is fair that the playing conditions couldn't be changed once the event had started - the lack of a reserve day has come into focus only because it rained - but it is a contingency that could have been in place. It should be for the future, but ideally it wouldn't take the situation re-occurring to prompt a rethink.

Boards sign off on playing conditions well in advance of the tournaments taking place, but are they being considered enough from an actual cricket point of view? Perhaps players should be consulted more in the process.

"While the tournament is much more than about one team, there will be some relieved people that Australia - similarly at risk - managed to dodge the weather"

Some of the reasoning as to why the semi-finals didn't have a reserve day do not really stand up to scrutiny. There is the talk of teams requiring separate travel and training days between matches, but earlier in the competition Bangladesh played twice in three days in Canberra and Melbourne. Heather Knight, unsurprisingly, said she wouldn't have had an issue with play-travel-play if the overall aim is to keep this tournament as short and sharp as possible. This applies to the men's tournament in October, too, where the existing conditions are again in place with only the final having a reserve day.

Also, at the men's World Cup last year, the semi-finals both had reserve days. It was needed for the India-New Zealand match at Old Trafford and, had it been required for England and Australia at Edgbaston, then there would have been just one day left before the final at Lord's. If that was okay then, why not now?

There are other elements that need to be looked at again. The double-header semi-final day was done with the best of intentions, but is it wise to squeeze so much important cricket into one day at the same venue? It also creates complications about how a reserve day would be used, but that should not be insurmountable. Coupled with the fact that the minimum overs had increased from 5 to 10 per side - again, with solid reasoning but perhaps without full thought of what could happen - it meant that there would have needed to be a minimum of 40 overs of play to get two results.

This tournament has had so many brilliant things about it. The final on Saturday will be a great event, maybe the greatest day ever for women's cricket, with the best two teams in the format locking horns in what is also a dream outcome for the marketing and commercial people. However, this was far from a perfect day for cricket.

The language of the proposed collective bargaining agreement was finalized late Wednesday night and is going out to NFL players Thursday morning, a league source told ESPN's Jeff Darlington.

The ballots were sent out at 9 a.m. ET Thursday, and the voting window will stay open for seven days, a source told ESPN's Dan Graziano.

Players will be able to cast a vote throughout the seven-day window, but they currently plan to wait the full allotted time before formalizing the results, meaning ratification is unlikely until later next week, an NFL Players Association source told Darlington.

If a majority of the voting players approve, the deal will go into place immediately, as the owners already have approved it. NFLPA chief DeMaurice Smith expressed confidence last week that the players would vote it through.

The new CBA would expand the NFL's playoff field by two teams starting with the 2020 season and allow the owners the option to expand the regular season from 16 games to 17 games as early as 2021.

But those are only the big-headline items. More than just a deal to increase the number of games played each season, this is a document that will establish and govern the rules under which the game is played, contracts are negotiated and rules are administered for the next 11 years, through the 2030 season.

First, a warning: Don't print out this article and take it to Vegas. Our 2020 MLB O/U's aren't bookie-approved -- they're just some debates we've been having this spring as we eagerly await baseball games that count.

Still, the answers could tell us a lot about how the upcoming season will play out. From Astros All-Stars to Bryce Harper's WAR and more, ESPN.com baseball writers Sam Miller, David Schoenfield and Alden Gonzalez make their picks.

Astros All-Stars: 1.5

Amid the blowback over the Houston sign-stealing scandal, will fans shut out the team's talented players come the Midsummer Classic? By rule, each team must get one player on the roster. Will the Astros be unofficially capped at that?

Sam Miller: Unless MLB makes an explicit announcement that legacy Astros aren't going to be eligible -- or that they get the minimum one representative and no more -- this is an easy over. The Astros have four of the 20 best position players in the American League, according to PECOTA projections, two of the five best starting pitchers, one of the five best relief pitchers, and we're talking about an All-Star roster that's going to swell to 40 names by the end of the process. You could imagine the pickers not wanting to be overly generous toward the Astros, but leaving all but one of these Astros off with a straight face would be like leaving June off a list of the 10 best months.

David Schoenfield: The Astros had four starters in 2019, including pitcher Justin Verlander. They had one starter in 2018 and three in 2017. We can safely predict that fans across the nation will not vote in any Astros as starters, so any players will have to earn their spots. That's where things get tricky, however, because teams like the Orioles, Tigers, Royals and Mariners might not have any legitimate All-Stars but will take up four roster spots. The league office now names the reserves, and it's possible said office will hold a grudge against the Astros for being a royal pain in the butt. That said, the Astros had six All-Stars last season, including Gerrit Cole, who is no longer with the team, but not including Zack Greinke, who was an All-Star with the Diamondbacks. Those six All-Stars also didn't include Jose Altuve, Carlos Correa or Yordan Alvarez, who certainly are All-Star candidates. Over.

Alden Gonzalez: I've been thinking about this for a while and have kept it to myself because I didn't want it to appear as if I were minimizing their transgressions, but regardless -- I think the Astros are going to be really good this year. Like, stunningly good -- because their major league roster is immensely talented, with or without trash cans, and because they're going to easily summon motivation during the inevitable lulls when most teams struggle to find an edge. Alex Bregman, Altuve, George Springer, Alvarez, Verlander and Greinke are All-Star caliber players, and that might not even be the full list. You don't think two of them will get in -- for a team that might once again win the division, for an All-Star roster that grows exponentially after players drop out? Come on now.

The Verdict: OVER

Giancarlo Stanton + Aaron Judge combined games played: 161.5

For those of you scoring at home, the two New York sluggers combined to play 120 games last year. Both are banged up this spring -- and neither will be in the Yankees' Opening Day lineup.

Miller: Even with the spring mystery around Judge's pec and the spring panic about Stanton's calf, this ought to be cleared easily. Look, yes, last year's Yankees got hurt a lot. It was a historic run of injuries, by the end of which their surgeons needed Tommy John surgery and their operating tables had broken legs. But that was just a weird year -- singular -- and at this point it's just superstition and recency bias causing us to assume worst-case scenarios from every injury report. There's simply no reason to think the Yankees -- who are smart and rich and fill every job in the organization with exceptional talent -- would have hired Dr. Nick to keep their players safe.

Schoenfield: I know Stanton played just 18 games last season, but he played 158 in 2018 and 159 in 2017. It feels like the panic about his calf injury is an overreaction to last year's injuries. Judge has averaged 106 games the past two seasons, which certainly isn't great, but the question posed isn't 200 games between the two but a mere 161.5. Over.

Gonzalez: I'm sorry, but I'm not gonna sit here and just pretend everything's OK. We're barely into March, and a team coming off a dizzying amount of injuries in 2019 already knows it will begin the season without two key members of its starting rotation -- Luis Severino and James Paxton -- and the two most dangerous hitters in its lineup. Not cool, and totally OK to say so. Judge and Stanton are merely nursing soft-tissue injuries and should theoretically return before May. But maybe there's a reason they've each had a hard time staying healthy in recent years. Maybe these crazy outliers last longer than one season, Sam! Under -- and I hope I'm wrong.

The Verdict: OVER

Gerrit Cole strikeouts: 299.5

The Yanks spent $324 million to land the winter's most coveted free-agent ace. Cole K'd 326 batters for Houston last year -- his first 300 strikeout season.

Miller: Since 2003, there have been only five 300-strikeout seasons. Those five all came in the past five years, though, as perpetually rising strikeout rates rose faster than starters' perpetually declining innings totals declined. There's no reason to think that rise is going to slow down, let alone reverse itself, which suggests it's a good bet that at least one league's leader -- if not both -- will clear 300 this year. On the other hand, it's always, always, always a good bet that any individual pitcher you name will miss some time over the course of a season and fail to reach career highs. So in spirit I'll take the over, but in actuality give me the under.

Schoenfield: The easy answer would be to take the under, since Cole has exceeded that total just once in his career -- last year, of course, when he fanned 326. Factor in a little regression and the possibility of injury and 300 strikeouts is a lot of strikeouts to bet on. Switching divisions doesn't appear to be a mitigating factor here. The non-Astros teams in the AL West fanned 5,773 times last season while the non-Yankees teams in the AL East fanned 5,824 times. The last pitcher to strike out 300 batters in consecutive seasons was Randy Johnson in 2002 (the final year of five in a row). Add it all up and I'll take the under.

Gonzalez: We went from zero 300-strikeout seasons from 2003 to 2014 to five 300-strikeout seasons from 2015 to 2019, and they all came from arms with plenty of mileage on them. Verlander did it in his age-36 season. Max Scherzer was 34, Chris Sale was 28 and Clayton Kershaw was 27 -- with more than 1,600 major league innings under his belt. Cole, 29, seems to have settled into a point in his career when he can reach back and get the strikeout whenever he wants, not unlike LeBron James being able to score every time he touches the basketball. The question is how often he wants to. In the first year of a gargantuan contract, while playing for the team he grew up rooting for and anchoring a rotation that is suddenly in need, desire will be aplenty for Cole. I say he gets to 300 again. Over.

The Verdict: UNDER

Shohei Ohtani innings pitched: 49.2

The Angels' two-way sensation had Tommy John surgery in October of 2018 and, while he batted in 106 games in 2019, he didn't pitch at all last season. His career innings total: 51⅔.

Gonzalez: The plan, at the moment, is for Ohtani to return to the rotation in the middle of May and start once a week. That would put him on pace for 20 starts. If he averages five innings per start -- he averaged a little more than that as a rookie in 2018 -- that's 100 innings. The Angels hope delaying him on the front end will prevent them from having to shut him down late in the season. If Ohtani stays healthy, this is an easy over. But this is the first two-way player since Babe Ruth, returning from major elbow surgery. Nothing is easy. I'll take the over.

Schoenfield: Ohtani's innings the past three seasons, including his final season in Japan: 25.1, 51.2, 0. We already know the Angels are bringing him along slowly and he probably won't join the rotation until May. We don't know exactly how often he'll pitch or if they'll let him go deep into games if he's dealing. Still, the commitment is there to let him pitch. If he makes 15 starts and averages five innings per outing, that's 75 innings. Over.

Miller: Given his past three seasons, and the nature of pitching while injury-prone, I think he's more likely to throw no innings than one inning, more likely to throw one inning than two, more likely to throw two than three, and so on -- every inning is a triumph not to be taken for granted. (This is true of many more pitchers than it's fun to acknowledge.) Under.

The Verdict: OVER

Mike Trout + Anthony Rendon OPS: 2.000

Rendon won a World Series last year with the Nationals. Trout won his third MVP. Now they're Angels teammates. Their (extremely impressive) combined OPS in 2019: 2.093.

Schoenfield: Do you have any inside information on the ball? Rendon had a career-high 1.010 OPS last season, but he moves from what was a very good hitters' park last season to a pitchers' park. His OPS over the past three seasons is .953. Let's see, Trout has averaged a 1.081 OPS the past three seasons. Even accounting for a little regression from Rendon, 2.000 looks doable thanks to the Great One. Over.

Miller: Oh, this one's too hard, I'll just let the projections do it for me. Let's see, PECOTA says they'll sum to ... 1.994. Well, that's barely any help at all! I would take the over if I knew that this specific thing was what Mike Trout cared about, that all he wanted this season was to have his and Anthony Rendon's OPS add up to at least 2.000. Or 2.100. Or 2.500. You tell me what it is Mike Trout cares about, and I'll take the over. Since he doesn't know or care about this prop bet, I have no choice but to stare at the tables dryly and conclude that, due mostly to Rendon's regression, they'll be a little bit under.

Gonzalez: This seems close. I'll say under, ever so slightly. Rendon's OPS might suffer once the Angel Stadium marine layer grabs hold of some of those balls he'll pull to left field on warm summer nights, and Trout has won two MVPs with an OPS that did not reach 1.000. You might be surprised to learn that in a time when walks are precious and hitters freely take strikeouts in exchange for slugging, no team had two players with a combined OPS that reached 2.000 last season. It's hard.

The Verdict: UNDER

Pete Alonso home runs: 44.5

The Met set an MLB rookie record with 53 home runs last year. Another 50 might be too much to ask, but ... how about 45?

Miller: Do you have any inside information on the ball? Like Dave alluded to in the previous question, the difference between the ball they played with last year and the ball they could, within production specifications, play with this year is enough to tilt almost every one of these props to the opposite answer. If Alonso were to get the over, he'd be only the third player in history to have two 45-HR seasons by age 25, and the others -- Prince Fielder and Jimmie Foxx -- debuted a lot younger and had more seasons to work with. On the other hand, Alonso is already in unprecedented territory with the rookie home run record, and until I see six well-struck balls die at the warning track on March 26, I'm forced to take the over on any home run offer.

Gonzalez: I don't have the inside information you guys are looking for, but I think you're pretty safe in assuming the baseballs will not be as, um, jumpy as they were during the 2019 regular season -- because how could they possibly be? Alonso's strikeout-to-walk ratio was troublesome, as were his overall struggles against off-speed pitches. He's going to hit a ton of home runs, but we're asking him to approach 100 of them through two major league seasons. That's a little much for a young man with a lot of swing and miss in his game, even in this era. Under.

Schoenfield: Over. Alonso will always have a lot of swing and miss in his game, but there's room to improve on his 31.9% chase rate. If he does that and swings at more strikes, he can hit 50 again.

The Verdict: OVER

Clayton Kershaw ERA: 3.25

The Dodgers lefty isn't the pitcher he once was, but, well, he's still pretty darned good. But the trend is clear. His past four ERAs, dating back to 2016: 1.69, 2.31, 2.73, 3.03.

Miller: Kershaw's FIP -- an ERA predictor that uses only a pitcher's strikeout, walk and home run rates -- was above that 3.25 mark last year for the first time since he was a 20-year-old rookie, suggesting his decline is very real and perhaps worse than the surface-level numbers say. On the other hand, for the third year in a row his FIP didn't predict his ERA at all, but was actually much worse than Kershaw's surface-level numbers said. I'll take the under, knowing there are two ways to win this one: Kershaw could reverse that decline and pitch like he did in 2018, 2017, or even (dream a little dream) 2016, or he could not reverse that decline, but continue to be the rare genius who can thread the FIP/ERA divide.

Gonzalez: Every five days last summer, Kershaw stepped atop a major league mound with inferior stuff, most of which looked awfully similar coming out of his hand. He still managed to compile 178⅓ innings, win 16 of his 21 decisions and post a 3.03 ERA that ranked 10th among qualified pitchers. It was, in its own way, amazing. It's hard to ever bet against Kershaw, but unless he ramps his fastball back in the 92 mph range, or gets his slider to travel with consistent depth, or develops a pitch -- be it a changeup or a two-seamer -- that can run in on left-handed hitters, it's hard for me to see him succeed to that level again. I'll take the over, then watch him prove me wrong.

Schoenfield: Never bet against Clayton Kershaw. At least in the regular season. Under.

The Verdict: UNDER

Mookie Betts runs scored: 129.5

Betts scored 135 runs last season for Boston, a career high. Now, he's in Hollywood -- in a Dodgers lineup that could be historic.

Schoenfield: This is a good one. Betts scored 129 runs in 2018 and 135 runs in 2019. Those Red Sox teams scored 876 and 901 runs. The Dodgers scored 886 runs in 2019, so even with the pitcher hitting they had lineups comparable to Boston's -- meaning there is plenty of power behind Betts to knock him in. Still, 130 runs is a big total: Only three players exceeded that in the last decade: Betts, Charlie Blackmon in 2017 and Curtis Granderson in 2011. Dodgers leadoff hitters scored 118 runs last year and their No. 2 hitters scored 120. But the leadoff guys also hit 44 home runs and the No. 2 guys hit 35. Mookie will have higher OBP, however, so I'll take 130-something.

Gonzalez: Betts will lead off for the Dodgers this season. Following him will be Max Muncy, then Justin Turner, then Cody Bellinger, then some combination of Corey Seager, Joc Pederson, Gavin Lux, Will Smith and, if Pederson is ultimately traded, A.J. Pollock. As Dave pointed out, the Dodgers scored 886 runs last year, just 15 fewer than Betts' Red Sox -- with a pitcher in the lineup most of the time and, of course, no Mookie Betts. Last year's Dodgers offense was scary. This year's promises to be historic. And I'm not about to put limits on it. Over. Why not?

Miller: Hey, I'm asking you for the last time: WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT THE BALL?! If we assume 30 home runs for Betts, and we assume a Dodgers lineup that performs about as well as it did last year (other than the addition of Betts), then we have this: The Dodgers' leadoff hitters scored 34.4% of the time they got on base last year, not counting home runs. At that rate, and assuming Betts hits 30 homers, he would need to get on base 291 times. That means playing every day, never missing a trip to the plate, and nearly matching his career-best .438 OBP -- a stretch, given he's never had another season over .400. Maybe he'll hit more than 30 homers, maybe the Dodgers' lineup will be better, maybe I forgot to carry a one along this process, but I'll take the under.

The Verdict: OVER

Bryce Harper WAR: 4

Harper signed a 13-year, $330 million deal with the Phillies before last season. His WAR in 2019, according to baseball-reference: 4.2.

Gonzalez: Over the past four years, Harper's FanGraphs WAR has gone from 2.9 to 4.8 to 3.4 to 4.6, so, who knows. Harper is still only 27 years old. He should be significantly better than this every single year, and yet, here we are. Topping this mark might hinge on two factors that are impossible to predict: Health and defensive effort. I'll take the over because this sport is so much more fun when Harper plays at an elite level.

Miller: Under. I'm tired of having huge expectations and feeling disappointed by Harper's borderline Hall of Fame-ish career. I'm ready to have some low expectations and watch him splatter them on a seat in the third deck. I bet you anything he will, too, cause he's still so talented and strong and when he gets on a hot streak there's nobody -- aw, dang, did it again.

Schoenfield: Over. While it now seems we'll never see 2015 MVP-level Harper again, I'd like to think he has more in him than we saw last season (.260/.372/.510, 125 OPS+). Over, although not by much.

The Verdict: OVER

Ronald Acuna Jr. home runs + stolen bases: 79.5

In his age-21 season, the Braves superstar narrowly missed becoming just the fifth member of the 40/40 club, slugging 41 home runs and stealing an NL-best 37 bases.

Miller: Under. Stolen bases have a habit of disappearing fast, especially for big guys.

Schoenfield: Over. A few more home runs will balance out fewer stolen bases.

Gonzalez: Under -- not because Acuna isn't great, but because that's an extremely high bar.

The Verdict: UNDER

Two years ago, before baseball had become consumed by the scandal of scurrilous teams trying too hard to win, we had the simmering crisis at the opposite end of the spectrum: teams not trying hard enough.

Back then, "banging the trash can" might have meant what the Marlins had just done over the 2017-18 offseason: They traded four of their best players (Christian Yelich, Giancarlo Stanton, Marcell Ozuna and Dee Gordon) in one winter, turning a second-place team into a nearly certain last-place team. They tore it down. They tanked.

They weren't alone. Roughly a third of the league's teams that winter had done nothing to improve, or had actively gotten worse, solidifying the standings before the first game had been played. According to FanGraphs' playoff odds at the time -- which depend on both current standings and projected estimates of each team's underlying talent -- the Marlins' chances of making the playoffs dropped to 0.0% three days into the season, and five other teams joined them at 0.0 by the end of April. Though the lack of competitive effort was confined to front offices -- players still tried their hardest on the field -- Scott Boras invoked the precedent of the 1919 White Sox: "We kicked people out of the game when they tried to not win."

Back then, I wrote for ESPN The Magazine about the sport's slow and then fast embrace of tanking since Branch Rickey pioneered it in the 1950s and concluded that "terribleness had been weaponized" and that we were "seeing surrender strategy taken to extremes." It was a bleak outlook.

A lot can change in two years. Or a lot can stay the same. Was that bleak outlook right? Where do we stand on tanking? Let's check in on some of the trends, data, outcomes and predictions we described in that Mag piece.

1. What I wrote then: "'Moneyball' is now synonymous with the willingness to lose games, without shame, for years at a time, to build something far off in the future. We're only now seeing the surrender strategy taken to its extremes."

Where we stand now: We were, it appeared, seeing more teams embracing tanking, richer teams embracing it and better teams embracing it, and the teams that embraced it were doing it with fulsome bear hugs. Is that still true?

While it can be hard to know whether teams are bad on purpose or because they're just terrible, we can say this: Since we wrote that article just before the 2018 season, we've seen the bottom tier of teams get worse than they've been at any point since at least baseball's last expansion, in 1998. The bottom five teams last year averaged an incredible 105 losses. In 2018, the bottom five averaged 103 losses. Both of those would be the most for the bottom five since at least 1998. (On average, the bottom five teams lost 98 games apiece in that time frame.)

Again, though, we can't say for certain that the Blue Jays (95 losses), Royals (103), Marlins (105), Orioles (108) and Tigers (114) were trying to lose, or aggressively not trying to win. But:

• Those five teams had all cut payroll, by an average of $62 million from the 2017 payrolls -- about 40%.

• Of the 50 largest free-agent contracts signed the previous winter, none was landed by any of these five teams. The Tigers' signing of Tyson Ross -- for a total guarantee of only $5.75 million -- was the biggest expenditure any of these teams made.

• As it stands now, all five teams' payrolls are set to be lower again this year (despite a bit more significant action by the Blue Jays and Marlins this offseason).

Those are telltale signs of teams that are not just bad but uninterested in being even a little bit better.

Coupled with the rise of a handful of superteams, that has given baseball its least competitive balance in decades. At Baseball Prospectus, Rob Arthur found that the gap between the best and worst teams was already larger in 2018 than in any season since 1954. And then 2019 got even worse.

2. What I wrote then: "Baseball's commissioner, Rob Manfred, has argued that it's a 'self-checked strategy ... the more people adopt the strategy, the less likely it is to be successful ... only one guy can get the No. 1 pick.'"

Where we stand now: Whether Manfred is right about the causal relationship -- that more teams tanking means dividing up the tanking pie into smaller slices of tank -- it is clear the perceived inevitability of future success following full teardowns has taken a huge hit. Back in 2018, we were coming off three consecutive World Series won like clockwork after deep, stark rebuilds: the Royals, Cubs and Astros, who made losing now to win later look so predictable that Sports Illustrated predicted their title three seasons in advance, to the year. The Astros' World Series was (in part due to widespread cheating that was revealed only years later but also) explicitly a bet on the predictability of the whole thing. They welcomed the shame of those losses because they knew, on a longer timeline, that baseball's unpredictability could be tamed.

But since then it has been harder to tame. The same year the Astros won the World Series, there were five teams we might have described as anti-competitive -- not good and not, for that season, trying to get good: the Padres, Reds, White Sox, Brewers and Phillies. They were projected at FanGraphs to win the fewest games entering that season, each had cut payroll at least 25% from peak payroll (without adjusting for inflation), and none had signed significant free agents the previous winter. All of them seemed clearly to be punting 2017, with expectations of consolidating and getting good in 2018 or 2019.

But unlike the Astros and Cubs, who zoomed from the bottom to the top as if it were guaranteed, those five teams have had mixed results in the years since. The Padres are exciting and did build one of the best farm systems ever, but they have finished in last place in each of the past two years, despite having already added Eric Hosmer (before 2018) and Manny Machado (before 2019). The White Sox finished 28½ games out of first place last year, and (like the Padres) are interesting for their youth but nothing close to inevitable. The Reds finished last in 2018 and (with a franchise-record payroll) finished fourth in 2019. The Phillies' top prospects from the rebuild era have mostly busted spectacularly, and despite adding Bryce Harper last year they still haven't had a winning season since the rebuild. They, like the Reds and Padres, fired their manager.

And then there are the Brewers, the undeniable victor from this group. They went from a position of apparent tanking entering 2017 to the seventh game of the NLCS in 2018 and another postseason appearance in 2019. They're the team a GM can still point to and claim inspiration from. But even the Brewers aren't nearly the prototypes the Astros and Cubs were: Despite lousy preseason projections in 2017, they turned out to be pretty good that year, just missing the playoffs. That suggests their great post-tank success is less about the benefits of tanking and more about the benefits of cannily acquiring and developing a bunch of really good overachievers. Furthermore, despite this success, the Brewers aren't a superteam with a long window for success, in the model of those 2016 Cubs or 2017 Astros: They were easily the weakest postseason team last year, and they project to be somewhere around .500 this year.

Indeed, of the five teams we just ran down, none projects to be a superteam. The ZiPS projections for 2020, at FanGraphs, have the Padres, Brewers, White Sox, Phillies and Reds averaging 82 wins this year; the PECOTA projections at Baseball Prospectus offer an average of 81. None of the five teams projects at either site to win more than 87 games. Three years after these teams all hit a clear trough, none -- not even the big-market Phillies -- is all that good.

3. What I wrote then: "In fact, this decade there has been no statistical correlation between the standings in one season and the standings three years later; everything gets totally reshuffled as teams swap spots in the Success Cycle. In a league in which economics has so often been destiny, that's an extraordinary achievement, and it has arguably saved competitive baseball in small markets."

Where we stand now: That fact -- that there was no statistical correlation between the standings in one season and the standings three years later -- served two purposes. First, it provided some proof that the tanking strategy was successful. It was evidence that the benefits of being bad really did show up in the future and that teams embracing terribleness were, in fact, using that terribleness effectively, to reset the standings that were otherwise unfavorable to them.

It was also an argument in favor of tanking being, in at least one way, positive for the game. Rather than bad teams sinking into literally decades of losing -- as the Pirates, Royals, Tigers and Rays had done in the 1990s and 2000s -- teams that found themselves at the bottom could now find their way back. Failing franchises are bad for the sport, but failing franchises had become quite rare. (There are, of course, many arguments against tanking being good for the game.)

That trend -- the three-year reshuffle -- held true for the next two years. Last year's standings had no correlation to the 2016 standings, and five no-good 2016 teams -- the Brewers, Twins, Braves, A's and Rays -- made up half the playoff entrants in 2019.

However, 2020 looks poised to thwart that. The correlation between 2017 records and 2020 projected records is substantial, as nearly every good team from 2017 remains good and most bad teams from 2017 remain bad, or at least mediocre. If PECOTA's projections for 2020 were all to come true, the change from 2017 to 2020 would be the smallest three-year turnaround this century. Even with the ascendance and acceptance of tanking, the bad teams over the past three years have stayed stuck in ruts, rather than ascending gloriously from them.

4. What I wrote then: "... a place agent Scott Boras described this winter as 'destructive to our sport.'"

Where we stand now: More fans go to baseball games when they think those games matter. In MLB's ideal world, the standings would show two kinds of balance:

• Parity within seasons, i.e. most teams in the race late into the season, with few outright disasters who are 20 games out by mid-May.

• Parity across seasons, i.e. most teams can offer their fans a few playoff appearances each decade and consistent hope in at least the mid-term.

Tanking is the imperfect compromise. As we noted, it costs baseball a lot of in-season parity, creating worse bad teams and more lopsided standings. (Over the past two years, 40% of team games have been played with playoff odds below 5%, a spike from previous seasons.) But as we noted, it has over the past decade coincided with -- and perhaps caused -- across-season parity.

However, if the 2020 projections come true, MLB is going to be in a worst-of-both-worlds scenario. A bunch of teams are going into the season with practically no hope of competing: Eight teams enter the year with a less than 1% chance of making the playoffs, according to PECOTA, with six of those teams' odds rounding down to 0. And the year-to-year parity that tanking has provided is also breaking down, perhaps heralding a new underclass of teams that get really bad with no promise they'll claw back up.

The bottom line is that it costs baseball a lot of attendance. At Baseball Prospectus, Rob Arthur built a model that estimates each day's attendance based on weather, ballpark, day of the week, month and each team's likelihood of making the playoffs. Arthur writes, "Teams with low playoff odds -- specifically, those below about 10 percent -- see exponentially lower attendance, on a per-game basis, than those that are in contention. The difference is fairly massive, with an impact approaching 8,000 fans per game going from playoff odds of 0 percent to 50 percent." Attendance leaguewide has dropped by nearly 5 million fans since 2015. According to Arthur's model, about one-third of that dip is due to there being more teams playing more games with no playoff chances.

5. What I wrote then: "Losing no longer counts as losing; it is a vehicle for hope. It took decades, but baseball beat that terrible, honest feeling that comes from losing."

Where we stand now: The argument we made in 2018 was that widespread tanking represented not just a strategic shift but a philosophical one: Losing no longer felt bad because it could be rebranded as part of a smart process. If there was no shame in losing 105 games -- or some other strong incentive -- then we would continue to see teams embrace it as a nearly foolproof path to glory.

There's some evidence that we didn't reach that point and that teams in the past few years have seen tanking not as an obvious step on the way to success but something to be avoided, to be planned around and to be embraced only when disaster has already struck. It's clear the Royals, Orioles and Tigers have been actively noncompetitive over the past two seasons and will be this year as well, but none of the three tore down to get terrible. They got terrible organically, while they were still mostly trying, when their constructed rosters simply collapsed. Then they decided they had no choice but to accept their failures and make some use of them.

Meanwhile, we've seen the middle- and middle-front of the pack take previously unprecedented steps to either resist the siren song of tanking or preempt the need for it. In some cases, this has been good for competition: Last year, the Reds, Giants and Diamondbacks were all sellers at the trade deadline, with single-digit playoff odds. But none of the three tore everything down. Rather, they sold and bought, keeping credible rosters on the field in case a miracle landed on them. Instead of following the tanking-to-win philosophy by seeking the pole closest to them -- the bad one, as the Mariners did following a pretty good 2018 season -- they sought a middle ground and a basic competitiveness.

The less encouraging side of this might be observed in the strange behavior of three borderline playoff teams. This offseason, the efforts of the Red Sox, Cubs and Indians have each been focused on unloading a superstar. The Red Sox, despite projecting to be a fringe playoff team, traded Mookie Betts (and David Price) to save money and get a little bit younger. The Cubs have been reportedly shopping Kris Bryant, and the Indians have been shopping Francisco Lindor, even though each club projects to have about a 50-50 chance of making the playoffs. The efforts are framed around saving money but could also be seen as these teams wanting to ensure they stay in the upper half of the league -- if not the tippy top -- rather than be forced eventually into the long and ugly rebuild. It's a fairly boorish means of staying permanently competitive, and arguably wrong on the logic -- the Nationals were in a similar situation after 2018 and held firm, and they went on to win the 2019 World Series -- but it might at least reassure us about one point: Teams do dread the shame of a full teardown. They recognize it comes at a great cost.

In short:

1. When teams get bad in 2020, they get really, really bad. As bad as bad teams have ever been, and by all appearances they do it with some intentionality. That's tanking!

2. But they can't count on emerging like the sort of superteams that won the 2016 (Cubs) and 2017 (Astros) World Series. Tanking is not, as one might have feared after 2017, a cheat code. For every Braves there's a Phillies, for every Twins there's a White Sox.

3. Indeed, the one industry benefit of teams tanking as a strategy -- giving cities a reliable way out of even longer periods of unintentional terribleness -- might be on the verge of disappearing, if this year's projections are any indication.

4. Overall, it's probably costing the sport a lot of money.

5. And even if tanking offers some hopelike qualities for a hopeless front office, it is still unpleasant and something to be avoided at most costs. Other than the 2018-19 Mariners, we haven't really seen teams in the past two years rushing headlong at last place, at least until they were already there.

In shorter: Tanking's still real, but everybody's a lot less giddy about it.

Britain's Katie Boulter has beaten world number 60 Anna Blinkova in a Challenger Series event at Indian Wells, California, her first victory over a player ranked in the top 100 for more than a year.

Boulter, 23, beat second seed Blinkova 6-4 3-6 6-3 in the second round.

The former British number two was out for six months last year due to a stress fracture in her back.

She will play Lesia Tsurenko of the Ukraine in the third round.

It was Boulter's first top 100 ranking win since beating American Bernarda Pera, then world number 85, in qualifying for the St Petersburg Ladies Trophy in February 2019.

Boulter reached a career-high 82 in the world rankings later that month, but has since slipped to 396 due to her injury absence.