DrungoHazewood

Yes (they should be starting).

Ha! I knew you weren't actually a real person. Has ChatGPT just been using you as a test platform for years?

Yes, in the way you always do: Luis Hernandez is five for his last 16. We should monitor the situation closely to see if he's really going to be a .312 hitter over the rest of his career (despite no other evidence that this is in any way likely).

Run scoring consistency is pretty easy: either a team's standard deviation of runs scored, or maybe coefficient of variation of runs scored. Take all the O's runs scored for the year and dump them into a spreadsheet and run the STDEV calculation. The O's this year have scored 5.1 runs/game, and the standard deviation of their runs scored is 3.3. The coefficient of variation or variance (3.3/5.1) is 0.64. One standard deviation of O's runs is between 1.8 runs and 8.4 runs. The Astros, with the fewest Ks in the league, average 4.4 runs/game, with almost exactly the same standard deviation as the O's at 3.3. Their variance therefore is higher at 0.75. One standard deviation of Astros runs is between 1.1 runs and 7.7 runs. So with this very small sample of just two teams (which you should never use to draw any broad conclusions), you could argue that the Orioles and all their strikeouts have been more consistent in scoring runs than the relatively contact-prone Astros.

Given enough time almost everyone ends up with a platoon split that's roughly average. I would bet that Mountcastle is no different, and when all is said and done his career splits will be something like his career marks right now: around .850 against lefties, .750 against righties. Year to year that will be influenced by random variation.

Hunter Harvey was in the Orioles system for nine years, and he threw a grand total of 23.2 innings in the majors, and 262.1 innings in the minors. That's 32 innings a year for nine years. Maybe he becomes the new Rudy Seanez, and pitches 17 years with his arm held together with bailing wire and chewing gum and sometimes has a year like Seanez did with the Padres in '05. But I don't blame the O's at all for moving on after nine years (!) of almost never being healthy. When Harvey was drafted my oldest kid was in the first grade, and his first 40-inning season in the majors was the year my kid got his driver's license.

Are they? Or is that just something people say? Does anyone have any links to studies that show that teams with more walks/fewer Ks are more consistent (i.e. have a lower standard deviation of runs scored) than teams with less walks/more Ks but similar overall runs scored? I don't know of any such studies, but I'd love to read one. Do we have any aspiring saberists here who'd like to do some data mining?

Sure, you were perhaps absent-mindedly musing about whether a small sample of information should be used to draw wide-ranging conclusions. We'll have to keep track of this before doing anything rash, like suggesting this is a Developing Situation. Similar to how if Dan Hammer's 0.00 ERA for the BaySox were to continue for months or years, then perhaps we've found our closer for the next decade. Or how I'm sure Mike Elias is closely monitoring Ryan McKenna's slugging, and if he keeps it over 1.000, like it is right now, maybe he's the next Barry Bonds. We'll have to keep an eye on all of this before forming any kind of conclusions at all.

Oooh... maybe with robot umpires we could go back to how catchers used to position themselves 100+ years ago. More-or-less standing up, five feet or more behind the plate. In the 1800s they'd stand even farther back, just kind of smothering pitches if there were less than two strikes. Trying to save themselves from pitches and foul tips, since they had primitive protective gear. Might save wear and tear on catchers, especially their knees.

What happens if you're already to the far right of the talent distribution curve and there is a scarcity of people who can perform at the desired level? Don't you just get into a continuous cycle of firing the worst performing X%, and replacing them with similarly- or lower-performing people? Like, for example, if you wanted everyone on the team to hit .330, and you fired everyone who couldn't hit .330. But there's no pool of readily available .330+ hitters to replace them with. So you end up replacing "under-performing" .300 hitters with other .250, .270, .300 hitters, who'll soon also be fired. I'm not convinced that incentives will do much of anything to improve umpire performance, nor that there are a bunch of umps in the minors (or elsewhere) who're better.

I like the try it in the minors approach. Nobody really cares at all how minor league games end up, so you have a perfect testing ground for new ideas. Far better than the old method, which was to pretend nothing is ever wrong with baseball and they never fixed anything. But at some point you have to flip the switch and use it in the games that matter.

Right. Ear piece, buzzer, whatever. And the ump is there for the inevitable but rare occurrence where the system fails or calls a ball 9' off the plate a strike because a pigeon flew by at just the right moment. Why would they not do this, instead of some complicated challenge system where you have to guess when they're wrong in a second or two and hope you don't run out of challenges in the most key moments of the game? Have a challenge system long enough and there will be a very important game decided by an ump calling a ball 6" off the plate a strike and nobody has any challenges left.

I'm convinced it's a bad thing that minor leaguers know balls 3" off the plate are balls, except that when you get to the Majors and then youneverknow.

Roy, we love you and your enthusiasm. But if you propose something after a loss its almost by definition a panic move.

Or instead of challenges, where you'll inevitably run out of challenges in a key spot, you just have the home plate ump with a little hand buzzer that tells him if a pitch was a ball or strike in near-real time?