Tony-OH

So it appears the following 40-man roster players are not on the initial list: Pitchers: Keegan Akin Dean Kremer Evan Phillips Infielders: Ryan Mountcastle Ramon Urias Outfielers: Ryan McKenna Cedric Mullins (edited after more information was found): Not all 40-man players need to be on the 60-man list and it seems the Orioles are playing a waiting game with the "prospects" on the 40-man who were not going to make the original 25-man. Phillips and Kremer were hurt this spring so maybe that has something to do with them.

They announced other players will be added. The Orioles may be waiting to see how MLB is going to handle the "taxi squad" and the what the Fall League will look like for minor leaguers. This is why guys like Mountcastle, Akin, Zimmerman, and Kremer are in limbo a bit. (though strangely, only Zimmerman is not on the 40-man) Another reason is that players can be easily added to the roster, but must be put on waivers if they are taken off so there's no reason to put all 60 on there until they know how everything is going to be handled. If a player makes the 30-man roster, they accrue major league service time like any other year, but apparently there may be something about if you hold back a player for seven games it won't count as a season, which could mean we see Mountcastle and maybe some others shortly after the rosters get down to 28 players two weeks in the season. Still not 100 percent sure on this but it's what I'm hearing.

Aha, now you see how the Baltimore media worked back then and really over the last 30 years (A few of the new guys may be changing things though, but we'll see). This is why I've been directly contacted by people in or previously with the organization for things that led up to my "behind the scenes articles on the organization." One former GM told me directly, "I tried to get them to write this but no one wanted to write it because they feared blowback." He knew I had no problem ruffling the whole thing if need be, which I did. It cost me though. The Orioles pulled their advertising from us and I became a pariah among most of the local media and with some within the warehouse. Since the Hangout never was my bread and butter for occupation, it never really mattered to me though. But, if this was my livelihood, I might have thought twice considering how things had worked in the organization. So at the end of the day, can you really blame Britt for not saying anything back then? Would you had wanted to get on the bad side of Showalter for some reason? She literally worked for MLB, so how hard do you think it would be for her to be replaced if the Orioles wanted her gone? The local media have enjoyed a friendly relationship with whoever the manager is and whoever in the warehouse they could because it made things easy on all of them. Unfortunately though, it meant a lot of behind the scenes things that have caused this organization to be dysfunctional for so many years (before Elias) went unreported to the fans.

I'm pretty sure that was the plan as well. Angelos, at the urging of Showalter from what I heard, directly made that signing without much input from Duquette.

Although not as big a fan of Markakis as your were (I thought his defense was hurting the team), I felt the same way. I was not favor of resigning him to a 4yr contract at $11mil/yr. In retrospect, considering the disaster RF has been since, probably was not the right call, but one based on the information at hand I would have made again as well. Heck, I remember thinking that Travis Snider might outperform Markakis for a fraction of his price. I was certainly wrong about that one.

There you go, common ground! Enjoy your day.

Yep, I get it you're a close the world down and hide until this is all (maybe never) kind of person. I get it, because I've seen some of the skewed information getting pushed lately by the media. We are just going to have to disagree. I think it will be completely fine to have these camps and for the ones that end up getting COVID, few will have any kind of symptoms that will cause any problems past a few weeks. Honestly though, I believe MLB will end up not doing this because almost all corporations are either pandering or taking the least risk as possible right now. I gotta be completely honest though and say I just don't care enough anymore to get upset. You could tell me tomorrow that the MLB season was cancelled once again and I'd be ambivalent. I'd rather see baseball this year, but if it doesn't happen for either COVID or safety reasons (since most cities are violent, unsafe hellholes right now) I'm not going to lose any sleep.

Haha. I'll vote for Hyde myself. Honestly, with all the trades I made I basically had a 40% different team then he will have. It ended up being rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, but I like the future of the players I brought in and knew this year would be a disaster.

I agree, there would be no danger in opening up camps in Florida and Arizona for the minor leaguers and they could play well into Fall and get in close to 90 games.

I didn't even notice that until you said that. I would not be surprised if that record is about right.

The fact that people can't help but get political on this stuff is why I want to limit the conversation about it. I know some people don't think that politics and sports need to be separate, that's their right, but it WILL ALWAYS be separate here at the Hangout.

I really don't say any reason they can't be in Florida or Arizona and do the games like they do in spring training. Let them play on the camp fields, hire official scorers, maybe even find a way to televise some games.

The only issue I have with the new rules is the extra innings rule. Having a runner on second base to start extras is dumb. Who gets the runs scored? Does the pitcher get an earned run when the runner scores from second even though he didn't allow him there? Love adding the universal DH an hope that stays, but count me against the extra innings. I'd honestly rather just say you can play up to 12 innings then it's a tie.

This is literally the best thing about this season because this team was going to be quite horrid and could have possibly been the worse Orioles team ever by record.

I know one thing, OOTP in just about every sim does not like John Means' chances of repeating. He's been pretty horrid in most sims so let's hope he can overcome their predictions.

I'm in the under category for 20 wins, but you never know.

Anymore discussion of COVID and I'll close this thread down. I can see already the misinformation being spread that already borders on the political here. We are going to stay away from this even if we got to start closing all threads that end up with people throwing their opinions around on COVID and how and why things "they think" things are spread.

Stick to baseball before we start to have issues again. I'm about to shut this thread down if we want to start spreading more panic and start blaming "outbreaks" on one thing vs another. Then we go down that rabbit hole of politics and I don't want that to happen here.

I actually went and researched this because of the absurdity of this statement. This is fake news and we have a rule against that. Please don't spread that here at the Hangout. Feel free to think the world will collapse before the MLB season starts or all of the players will die if they play, that's your opinion and that's welcome regardless of the absurdity, but don't spread information that's not true.

I don't know, but I imagine they are going to work to get rid of the service clock games teams play that require them to keep MLB-ready prospects in the minors for a few weeks at a start of a season in order to gain an extra year of control.

Honestly, with the collective bargaining agreement going to most likely affect service time, and with no apparent solution for any kind of minor league games at this point, it doesn't make a lot of sense to not start the season with Mountcastle or Akin or maybe even Kremer and Zimmerman on the major league team. At least they can get some development time in and maybe help them be ready to help the team earlier in the future when it might matter. Now if they do come up with some kind of minor league games down in Florida/Arizona then maybe it makes more sense for them stay down there, but I'm thinking this unique situation may actually help some of our closer prospects see big league time this year.

Nice research Frobby, but I think you may have a typo in the first record. I agree with the sentiments. My sim and evaluation of the current talent on hand suggests this team will be absolutely awful, but the one wildcard in all all of this is the uniqueness of going to a camp and then starting games. I'm sure the Orioles will have intra squad games and such, but it will be interesting to see how teams get their player ready for the short burst of a season.

It's a 60 game season, Cobb has much better chance of making it through the entire season now!

Wonder how they will work partial years. Say if a player only plays 10 games, how does that count?

Have they addressed service time for this season?