DrungoHazewood

You put Ventura in the 1884 Union Association and he wins 57 games just that year. Well, except being a mentally unstable member of a minority group in a less enlightened era, with what was probably a limited grasp of English, I'm thinking he gets shot in a bar the evening after opening day...

On the other hand, @Sports Guy's take isn't uncommon because Nick had a 7.4 win season at the age of 24. Following a really good season at 23, and a solid rookie season at 22 after he skipped AA. If you look hard enough in the archives here you can find a post I made in 2009 or 2010 saying Nick had about a 1-in-3 chance of being a Hall of Famer. 14 wins through three seasons and age 24 is a heck of a foundation to build on. Lots of Hall of Famers were behind that pace. But unfortunately he never had another 3-win season, much less a seven. Age 27 peak is just an average, it's not destiny. But it's pretty rare to have Nick's first three years and then not have much more career value from age 25-36, total. Injuries or whatever reason, he was worth 14 wins from 22-24, and 20 from 25-36. And as much as I wanted him to stay, his years in Atlanta were just treading water, piling up base hits, but a cumulative value above replacement in six years about equal to his 2008 season. Nick was almost certainly not a difference-maker the large majority of his last 8-9 years in the league.

98% of everyone doesn't end up with the career they "shoulda" had. Pete Stanicek shoulda been a 20-year major leaguer. Scott Erickson shoulda won 300 games. Luis Matos and Larry Bigbie shoulda been Kevin McReynolds and Darryl Strawberry (who shoulda been Willie Mays). Basically everyone who was ever on a BA top 100 list should have been a Hall of Famer, but life doesn't work that way. And it's mostly not the fault of the player, or really anyone.

C'mon, this the O's HOF. You get a bunch of old dudes together for lunch and make up the rules based on whatever they want.

Well, my Dad has a 350-lb buddy who takes his four-wheeler a grueling 3/4th of mile across flat terrain and then laboriously climbs up in the tree stand and sits motionless for four hours. I guess, minus 175 lbs, that could be Nick...

Basallo is basically on the Machado track. No, he doesn't have the defensive chops, maybe he doesn't stick at catcher. But nevertheless, he's holding his own in AA at 19. Mayo was 20 in AA and hit about as well as Basallo has so far. I'm with @Sports Guy, I can't really imagine a real scenario where I'm trading him for anything less than an established All Star at a position of dire need. And even then I'd think twice since he has the upside of somewhere in the ballpark of Carlos Delgado or something.

If he and his Dad actually cared about winning at golf he would have been out there at 2am hitting buckets of balls at the age of 3, instead of the 4am and age 4 that actually happened.

But you once paid $11 for a beer at OPACY, and Nick made a lot of cash, so he shoulda been doing some kind of Navy Seal training and hit 8 points higher for the fans.

2012 sticks out in my mind because he got hurt and missed the playoffs. But he was exceptionally healthy and played almost every day for 15 years. He's one of only 23 players who had 11 more seasons of 650 PAs. And tied for 6th all time with 11 seasons of at least 154 games played. That list is Rose, Cal, Raffy, Eddie, Billy Williams, and then some guys tied with Nick, including Pujols, Ichiro, Brooks, Miguel Tejada, Gehrig, and Garvey. I hate those "six Hall of Famers and some guy" lists, but if you set your mind to it you could put Nick on a lot of those.

We all knew Hayden Penn wasn't a major leaguer on draft day, reading that name. Seriously, what kind of baseball name is Hayden Penn? When did Nick sit the bench while Jay Gibbons played? They were only teammates in 2006-07, and Nick played 308 of 324 possible games those two years.

Yea, but in should-have world Luis Hernandez is still the O's shortstop with 18 Gold Gloves.

I think it's more impressive that he's 8th in games played in RF. The seven ahead of him on the list are either in the Hall, or is Dwight Evans, who should be. Also 6th in career putouts in RF. 36th in assists, which tends to be biased towards players from 100+ years ago who could play shallower.

You can always speculate that if he'd done more hard-core workouts and training in the offseason and less hunting and fishing that he'd have done better. My own take is that injuries sapped him of the power that might have taken him from above-average guy to possible HOFer. But I have a hard time calling one of the 500-ish best non-pitchers of all time an underachiever who could have done more. 15 years in the majors. 33 rWAR. $116M. Zero drama. He's a good guy, I really liked watching him. Even if he's not Gold Glove caliber like Curt Blefary.

Ohh, ohh, can we use this opportunity to dredge up some very old threads about how it's all Terry Crowley's fault that Felix Pie and Freddy Bynum have no plate discipline and never developed right? And how he should be fired just on general principles?

So, O'Hearn is a great story, and I'm glad he's an Oriole, and I don't want to talk at all badly about him. But... the headline here is silly. And the article kind of glosses over a few things to make the headline look less silly if you don't peek behind the curtain. Yes, if you look at xwOBA O'Hearn has great numbers in a tiny sampling of 2024 data. But you have to consider that he's being platooned so strictly that I have to glance at the dugout to see if Earl's come back from the dead. He's 0-for-5 against lefties. Because of this he doesn't have 3.1 PA/G, so he really doesn't even qualify for the batting title or other rate-stat leader boards. Like, presumably, xwOBA. Most of the players he's being compared to in any xwOBA leaderboards have the disadvantage of facing at least a some same-sided pitchers. Example... he's tied in OPS+ with Colton Cowser. But Cowser has an OPS vs RHP 100 points higher than O'Hearn, dragged down overall by a more pedestrian showing in 28 PAs vs. lefties. I'm glad O'Hearn is currently 18th in the majors in OPS+, good for him and the O's. But it doesn't need to be faked into more than it is.