DrungoHazewood

I think the issue will always be that throwing 89 with an okay slider means Rich Dauer hits .256 with 8 homers, and throwing 100 with a wipeout sweeper means Rich Dauer hits .221 with 4 homers. Pitchers will almost always take .221 with 4 homers because hurt means you're rehabbing, bad means you're selling insurance.

I think no matter what solutions are attempted, it's going to be vexingly hard to fix because most pitchers will continue to throw as hard and with as much break as possible to get more outs. Even if the ball is dead, throwing hard and with max spin will mean your ERA is 2.00 instead of 3.00. Half joking, but blame all this on the decision in 1884 to legalize overhand pitching. I suppose this is anecdotal, but underhand pitchers don't seem to get hurt at nearly the rate of overhand. Today's women's college softball pitchers' numbers look like Walter Johnson or Kid Nichols.

The genie is out of the bottle, you're not putting it back in. Re-legalize sticky stuff and pitchers will concentrate on throwing sweepers that break eight feet. There is no incentive to not go for 100% effective 100% of the time. Listen to pitchers themselves talk - it's I'm going to do everything I possibly can to succeed in the majors, if I break that's just the risk I'm willing to take. Somehow they have to incentivize throwing most pitches at 80% effort. The only thing I can think of is limit teams to eight pitchers on the active roster, and very few minor league transactions a year. Then an average starter has to throw 200+ innings, and that can't happen with today's approaches.

I think a good start would be to ban anyone from pitching until they turn 24. It's coach pitch until you get out of college... Obviously that's not going to happen. But I think some forward-thinking organization might take some halfway decent pitching prospects drafted at 18 or 22 but with clean bills of health and have them just not pitch for three years, maybe mess around as outfielders or whatever, and see what happens when they go back to pitching when their UCLs are mature at 25-26.

I think that's probably right, and also utterly and completely ineffective and missing the point. It couldn't be more clear that essentially the entire root cause is pitchers throwing every pitch like it's their last. Until they can incentivize pitchers and teams to not do that there will be no solution to the problem.

There have actually been fairly long periods in the game's history where teams more-or-less ignored the requirement that a leadoff hitter be able to get on base. So much of the period before and during my youth (born '71) involved guys like Omar Moreno making almost 600 outs a season but he batted leadoff because he stole 70 bases. But that was okay because they'd have a little second baseman bat 2nd, and each of the handful of times Moreno reached base he could bunt him over to third after he stole second. The Orioles' prime example was Luis Aparicio, who led the AL in steals for nine straight years but never scored 100 runs in a season because he hit .262, had no power and walked 35 times a year. Nothing against little Louie, he was a great fielder and overall a valuable player. But today he'd hit 8th or 9th. His career OPS is within 20 points of Jorge Mateo's.

I don't see why being skeptical about the future value of Bradfield has anything to do with my evaluation of or trust in Elias. He took the player he thought was most valuable when the O's pick came up. That doesn't mean that the guy is automatically going to have a 30-win career. Bradfield was a #17 overall pick. If you look at all #17 picks the median value for their entire career is something like 2 rWAR. The draft has been going on since 1964 and just 10 #17 picks have had a 10-WAR career. While 17 of them who were drafted in 2016 or earlier never played in the majors. Jerry Don Gleaton and Eduardo Perez are typical #17s. Roy Halladay and Cole Hamels were drafted #17, but so were Josh Sale, Rick Asadoorian, Ricky Barlow, and Ken Plesha. The Orioles' only #17 pick prior to Bradfield was the immortal Don Hood. If Bradfield has a 5 or 10-win career Elias and his development team have done better than expected.

Are they? 2023 saw the 5th-most home runs per game in history. While steals were up from recent seasons, they're only about as frequent as they were in the 1990s. I guess we'll see, but I didn't notice a spike in Juan Pierre and Willie McGee types in the last year+.

But what about non-analytically speaking? How good a play is it if you're just making stuff up and telling stories?

I don't think you can describe anyone who's still in A ball with 133 career pro PAs at age 22 as having a floor of three wins a season. At this point it's an open question as to whether he tops three wins in any MLB season. If you look for comparable players, say .310-.330 OBP, little power, plus-plus basestealing and CF defense, I think the archetype in recent baseball is Michael Bourn. Who did top out with some really good 5-6 win seasons, but tailed off quickly and only had 5-6 seasons as an above-average regular. Beyond him you're looking at guys like Jarrod Dyson, Dee Strange-Gordon, Ben Revere. But only a handful of years each as average to average-plus MLB regulars. And then lots and lots of players who didn't even reach that kind of level. I think we have a few years before we figure out where on that spectrum Bradfield falls.

I agree that it's easy for fans and announcers to come up with narratives that, after the fact, describe outcomes as being a result of comfort or mental state or belief in a higher deity or any number of things that are probably just random variation. But, on the off chance that all this stuff isn't completely made up post facto rationalizations, Gunnar has a career OPS of 1.249 when batting 8th. So just to be safe Hyde should bat him 8th for the next 3-4 years to see how it plays out.

Actually, the analytics say that the difference (over an entire season) between the most and least logical batting lineups is on the order of one or two dozen runs. So the gains from switching between any halfway reasonable lineups are too small to measure. Literally all of the hand-wringing about lineup construction is much to do about nothing.

Can we please stop making judgments about anything in baseball before Labor Day? And making any kind of tactical or strategic changes based on 12 PAs is pretty much like using a 20-sided dice and some chicken entrails to decide where to invest your life savings. Also, Henderson's career OPS leading off is .823, which is higher than his overall .810 OPS.

Last year I went to a meeting for work in Luxembourg, and flew in/out of Brussels. The last night I had a Chimay and a Lindemans' Kriek with some Flemish carbonnade at dinner, then a Cantillon Gueuze later on. Can't really go wrong with any of that. I love German beer, but the Belgians are doing a lot right.

If I were him I might have done the same thing. The movie netted something like $30M in the theaters, and has probably made some significant fraction of that again in video, DVD, streaming, etc. If he had done a dark and bitter movie staying true to the book I don't know if it breaks even. Not that depressing, quasi-nihilistic movies can't make money, but it's probably more of a challenge.