DrungoHazewood

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.

Yes, but what five years, as it's more-or-less inevitable that he'll be out roughly 18 months for UCL surgery. And perhaps a 2nd after that. What is are TJ surgery odds in any given season for someone that touches 102? 25%? 33%? Basallo has a fair shot at getting 8,000, 10,000 or more MLB plate appearances. Miller might not face 2000 batters before his arm is wrecked.

Also, has anyone determined whether Coby is related to Eddie, who played nine years for a number of MLB teams from 1936-48?

I don't know that this is particularly unusual. It's hard to search on things like that, Stathead doesn't do minor leagues. So I'd have to kind of randomly pick likely cases and check them out. The first player that came to mind was Don Baylor, who had 42 homers, nearly a 1.000 OPS and over 1200 PAs at AAA Rochester before he turned 23. Joe DiMaggio played parts of four years for the San Francisco Seals before the Yanks bought him. The PCL was called AA back then, but it was certainly just a step down from the majors. From ages 17-20 DiMaggio hit 74 homers for the Seals. In 1935 at the age of 20 he hit 34 homers, no one else on the team had more than 11, and the median age of the team was 26. That same year in the PCL Gene Lillard was 21 and hit 56 homers. He had 131 homers at that level by the time he turned 22. Lillard played professionally from 1932-54, missed three years due to WWII, hit 345 minor legaue homers, but went just 8-for-44 in the majors.

Right now on StubHub there are tickets for $10.

I mean, you could park in a garage for less and walk a little farther, bring your own food/drink, and take SportsGuy's advice and buy $12 bleacher seats. The costs are ludicrous if you let them be, but there are cheaper options if you take advantage of them. You can go to the movies and pay $10 for a ticket and $27 for the cubic yard of popcorn and a gallon of soda. But really the popcorn and soda are optional...

If people are saying "$24 for a beer is insane, but I can always just lump that in with the rest of my crippling credit card debt" the situation may be more dire than I thought. But then again, I've also read the the average new car transaction in 2023 was $47k, and 10-year loans are not uncommon. So I guess a lot of people figure they can just roll the loans over until they die...

For most of baseball history there were weird, idiosyncratic things players did and for the most part they were left alone. Because whatever strange stance, windup, delivery or technique that they had, they were in the majors. Clearly it was working. HOFer Al Simmons was known as Bucketfoot Al because he stepped towards 3rd when batting. If the internet had existed in 1924, the first time he went into a slump the screaming and gnashing of teeth would have been unrelenting. Send this idiot back to the minors, he's never going to hit like that against real pitchers! Mel Ott, another HOFer, 2nd guy to get to 500 homers, had a leg kick that puts Holliday to shame. Disco Dan Ford batted with his back to the pitcher. He was so oddly situated in the box that teams would play him (a RHH) like a left-handed pull hitter. Luis Tiant had that windup that ended up with his back to the batter in mid-delivery. The internet coaches would have savaged all of them at the first 3-game slump. I'm half convinced that all those kind of things mostly disappeared just to stop the wailing from the peanut gallery.

Wait... you're telling me the Nats charge $24 for a single craft beer? A few years ago I was in LA and I got a Dodger dog and a beer (I forget what kind) and it was $20 and I thought that was extortionist. I was kind of shocked when the Angels were charging $14 for a beer, and FedEx was long infamous for $11 cans of Miller Light. $24 should make the Nats owners cower in shame. That's basically like a soda machine where a Dr. Pepper is $11. They might as well have some kind of huge goon standing next to the concessions yelling out "hey yous, the beers are $24. If you don't like it, get the hell out of my stadium!" I have heard that Atlanta is great for food prices. The Mercedes dome... thing... has the cheapest food and drink in MLS. I suppose the Braves are copying them. Good for them. Aside from Atlanta, this feeds into the narrative that American sports are for upper and upper-middle-class people. Others need not come. Which is fine in a vacuum, fine for some kind of economics class experiment, fine for owners whose primary goal is short-term profits. But what happens down the road when the fanbase doesn't really include people who're not making six figures? Or since nearly all US sports are doing this, that a significant percentage of the population just doesn't regularly go to live sports because it's outrageously expensive? Like I mentioned, me, the wife, and two kids going to DC United on Saturday and the total bill will probably be $350, and that's with discounted tickets and if I can park at Ft. McNair next to the stadium for free.

If (doing something slightly different) then (clearly this is why is MLB career is off the rails and it must be fixed and clearly the Orioles professional coaches and scouts totally missed it for the past several years and AAA pitchers are helpless to exploit this glaring flaw).

You wouldn't believe the spirited tussles they get into at the 1879 Syracuse Stars fan club meetings. If not for the more gentlemanly rules being adhered to you'd often get into fisticuffs after a long debate about the relative merits of Purcell vs. Kick Kelly.

All I know is that the people in charge picked McKenna, and I'm reasonably sure they also know that the marginal value of one player in the the 26th roster spot vs. another is little bits of a win hidden down in the noise floor.

I mean, for all of Ryan McKenna's virtues he's no Blondie Purcell.

There's a Twitter/Instagram channel/feed called FootieScran, I don't know if I'm mentioned it before. It encourages people to post photos of food from soccer matches around the world along with prices, and you vote if it's "scran" or not. Scran being some kind of English slang for good food. Whenever something from the US is posted 99% of the time the comments are like "yea, that looks good, but why does it cost more than my house?" It really looks like that if you go to a match in Europe, South America, Asia you can expect to pay 20-50% of the cost of US stadium food. Most places outside of US/Canada you can get something like a sausage and a beer for $5-10. At Borussia Dortmund you can get 5-6 beers (German bier!) for the cost of a single beer at most US stadiums. I'm going to see DC United on Saturday and fully expect to pay well over $100 for food for my family of four.

Ryan McKenna has played 284 MLB games, all under Hyde. 161 of them, or 57%, have been in substitute roles where he was either a defensive replacement, PH or PR. The majority of those involve McKenna playing defense in the late innings. If Hyde doesn't trust him to come in late games and play defense, then why has he used him in that role in most of his appearances?

When you say "no scientific study to conclude that for sure" I think the reality is closer to "there's really no evidence that the pitch clock is anything but a minor contributing factor." I think it's quite obvious that the root cause of pitching injuries is almost every pitcher trying to throw almost every pitch at 110% of their reasonable capacity. Sure, wildly over-straining your arm might be slightly more dangerous if you do it a bit more quickly, but that doesn't change the fact that the wildly over-straining part is the overwhelming cause. It's like saying you broke your hand punching the brick wall, but saying the real problem was how quickly you repeated the punching. Of course that didn't stop people like Tony Clark from issuing knee-jerk, reactionary, baseless statements blaming the pitch clock. He's paid to look out for his current members, and only slightly cares that the product on the field is immensely more enjoyable with a clock.

I still am somewhat in disbelief that Major League Baseball saw an obvious problem, recognized this as a problem, stopped the nonsense of trying to convince everyone that a bug was actually a feature, and then implemented a straightforward and effective solution. For my entire life MLB had a terrible habit of trying to sell problems as benefits, often to placate what they saw as traditionalists and older fans who wouldn't like any changes to the game at all. With game times they basically said enough, we're implementing a pitch clock, if you don't like it, sorry. And the results have been wonderful. A baseball game now typically ends before a normal, working (or school-attending) person's bedtime. A baseball game isn't much different in length than a basketball or hockey game or soccer match. It's the length it was, more-or-less, for most of history. Baseball is a normal sport again, not a marathon where half the audience falls asleep in the 7th inning, or just gives up because they have to go to work in six hours.