DrungoHazewood

In backyard baseball in 1982 I kept stats for the whole neighborhood on graph paper that I attached to my family fridge. The graph paper is long gone, but I will forever remember that I hit .951 with 120 homers.

We know that Aaron had 786 homers as a non-Negro League professional, and Wikipedia references a Howe Sports Bureau line that says he hit another five homers for the Indianapolis Clowns in what we might call the Negro minor leagues. So a total of 791. Bonds had a professional total of 782. But then he also had 45 more with Arizona State, which I could argue was higher quality of play than the 1884 Union Association... But all of that pales in comparison to Sadaharu Oh's 868.

I assume that's true to some degree. But why draw a hard line? Why make that choice to (essentially) say that 1948 Negro Leagues are the same as the majors today, but 1949 Negro Leagues really don't count and we're going to make you work a little bit to even find that information? Were the 1949 Negro Leagues really lower quality than the 1876 National League? If I were a betting man I'd put good money that they weren't. We really need to move towards a place where everyone understands the world is a continuum of baseball at all kinds of levels, and just because you're not playing in the very top league doesn't mean your numbers don't count.

If it were up to me I'd put all professional baseball on the front page of every player's Baseball Reference page. Essentially default to the Minor/Black/Mexican/Japan/Indy view that's already there. So you'd see all of Ichiro's career in one spot. Or all of Satchel Paige's (or at least all that wasn't random barnstoming against town teams where they didn't even keep stats), instead of having to click a couple extra clicks to find all the holes in stuff we're currently not designating MLB. Add a column for estimated league quality with 1.00 being today's MLB. Show us everything, right up front and put it in context.

Yea, the committees that did the research decided that 1920 and 1948 were the cutoff points for what they were willing to call Major League. I really need to read the SABR book called The Negro Leagues Were Major Leagues, I'm sure that gives some insight. But I'm a bit skeptical that 1919 and 1949 were dramatically different from 1920 and 1948. I always go back to the other decisions like this somebody made, like calling all the years of the American Association (1882-1892, not the later minor league) Major, none of the National Association, yes on the very clearly not MLB Union Association, yes on the Player's League, no on the 1910-1930 PCL or IL, etc. And currently no on the NPB or KBO. I could make some strong arguments that there are many years where leagues we call minor were much stronger than leagues/years that are designated major. The most egregious being the 1884 Union Association, which would be like calling the Atlantic League a Major League today.

That seems like a very 1980s Yankee move. What's the biggest name we can get for the stretch drive? Perry went 4-4, 4.44 in 50 innings, never pitched in the postseason, and became a free agent. Related observation: Perry pitched 22 years in the majors, two Cy Youngs, 314 wins, is in the Hall. He played in two postseason games, both in the 1971 NLCS.

I can't speak for anyone else, but if the O's win 105 and the Yanks 108, I'll tip my cap to them, and be happy the Orioles won the most games they had since 1970, and 26th-most in all of Major League history. Almost by definition you can't claim a team didn't do enough and yet still won 105 games. The 2021 Dodgers are the only team in history to have won 105+ games and didn't finish first. And they beat the team they finished behind in the NLDS.

On May 31st, 1980 the Yankees were 28-16, 4.5 games ahead of the 2nd place Brewers and 7.0 games ahead of the 22-24 Orioles. The Orioles were coming off a Division Championship and an AL Pennant, having gone to the 1979 World Series. They were the favorites to win the Division once again, but were under .500 as they went into June. Mark Belanger was hitting .172 with a .380 OPS, and was 36 years old. Ken Singleton was hitting .238. Reigning Cy Young winner Mike Flanagan was 5-3, 3.78... meh. Kiko Garcia was playing almost everyday and hitting .162. Rich Dauer had a .611 OPS. Closer Tim Stoddard had three blown saves already. After leading the league in innings in '79, Dennis Martinez had pitched in just six games so far with an 8.22 ERA. Clearly this is a team with some holes, some problems. And they had a few guys on the farm they could have dealt for help, like Cal Ripken (25 homers in AA that year), Mike Boddicker (2.18 ERA in AAA), Drungo Hazewood (28 homers in AA). You know what they did to get back on track and try to catch the streaking Yankees, while ending up with 100 wins? Not a single thing. Literally, the entire season, they didn't make a single transaction that had an impact on the Major League roster. They made one trade, and neither player they received in the deal ever played for the major league Orioles. What they did is trusted the decisions they'd made in the past, in the offseason, and in the spring. They had a very solid team, and they let the players work through problems. And they won 100 games, 2nd best in all of Major League baseball. Sure, in 1980 that meant no postseason, but they had a plan to win as many games as they could and they stuck to it. And they continued to have a very, very good team for the next three years, at least in part because nobody panicked, nobody traded Cal or Boddicker or anybody else. In their World Championship season in '83 they stuck to the same plan: they made one minor trade (Rayford for Landrum) the whole year. Despite being in 3rd place on May 31st.

The Orioles should make reasonable upgrades when it appears they would have a meaningful impact on their success, both now and in the future, regardless of the performance of other teams in the division or league. It would be ill-advised to look at the Yankees playing better than expected in late May and decide to make more aggressively short-term acquisitions (which almost by definition are potentially more damaging long-term) to try to catch up. When the more likely solution is to just keep playing good baseball, not over-reacting to short-term fluctuations, and making solid decisions.

My Bobby Thomson remark was kind of off-the-cuff, so I went and looked up about how far it traveled (perhaps 320'), and used the Google Maps distance measuring function to compare to OPACY. Yep, perhaps the most famous homer in history would have been a medium-deep fly ball in Baltimore today, landing in the LFer's glove approximately 60 feet in front of Walltimore. I don't think it would be a homer in any current MLB park. Perhaps hitting the Green Monster in Fenway for a double, but just being a medium-deep flyout in most or all other current parks. Note that Babe Ruth hit 86 homers in the Polo Grounds, Mel Ott 323. Both were lefties, and it was actually shorter to RF (258') than to LF (279'). If you measure 258' to RF at OPACY that's before you get to the little garage door triangle. The Polo Grounds' wall would have started somewhere around the front of the railing on the top of the wall in this photo.

By your criteria, last year's Rangers, D'backs, Phillies, Marlins, Rays, Jays, and Astros all had flaws in their roster that never got adequately addressed. And yet two of those teams were in the World Series, including the eventual champs. And what happens when the Yanks address their four lineup spots that are OPSing .591, .677, .639, and .638, and replace their 4th- and 5th-most used relievers who've given up 25 runs in 39.2 innings? They may never lose again, right? Even though they're not terribly different from the team that won 82 games last year... I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that the Yanks don't end up playing .672 ball the whole year.

I mean, I wouldn't fight that. Just think that the Polo grounds were significantly shorter down each line than the RF line at OPACY. So was old Yankee. League Park in Cleveland was kind of like if you took Oriole Park's RF area and moved it in 30-50'. Bobby Thomson's shot heard 'round the world would have been short of the warning track in Baltimore today.

Here's a link to a now 25-year-old (!) Baseball Prospectus article that references Alan Roth, the Dodgers' statistician from 1947-64, keeping meticulous pitch count data. And it's mostly as I remembered, the average Dodger start from that era saw 94 pitches. But with a much wider distribution than we'd see today. 17% of starts were less than 60 pitches, about 16% were 71-90, 12% from 101-110, 10% 121-130, and about 11% 130+. Koufax once had a 205-pitch start, Drysdale maxed out at 182. But as I alluded to earlier, Koufax also had 28 career starts (or about 9% of his career total) where he got six outs or fewer. Drysdale had 18, with 10% of his total career starts lasting four innings or less. Koufax had 52 starts of 314 (16.5%) where he lasted four innings or less. For comparison, Max Scherzer has failed to get past the 4th in just 6% of his career starts, and has exited after six or fewer outs just six times. So in a broad sense, today's pitchers throw about as many pitches per start as pitchers from 1950 or 1960. Or at least did 5-10 years ago. But they're almost never pulled very early unless hurt, and almost never go much past 100 pitches.

There was (maybe is?) a rule on the books that said all new parks built after 1957 had to be 330+ down the lines and 400+ to center. They stopped enforcing that sometime in the middle of 1957. I would love a strictly enforced rule that says the sum of LF+LC+CF+RC+RF distances in feet have to add up to at least 1950. But let the teams implement that as they like. Could be 350-400-450-400-350. Or could be 300-375-500-388-388. Or whatever they want. But anything less than 250' is still an automatic double.

If he was that cheap he would have told Elias he could move the LF wall just as soon as he pays for it out of his own pocket. I never really thought Pete or John was cheap, so much as they refused to spend money on the priorities I believed made sense. I mean, there was that season where they probably allocated $75M to Danys Baez, Steve Kline, Jamie Walker, Jay Payton, and Kevin Millar. That's not cheap, it's just foolish.

I had to go look to see what on Earth happened that he threw that many pitches in a complete game, and bb-ref says it was 137 pitches in Game 1. That's a little more believable. 11 hits, four runs, two earned, one walk, seven Ks. Hard to tell cause and effect, but his K rate did drop from 6.4 in '79 to 4.6 in 1980 and his ERA was up over a run a game.

I imagine heavy construction equipment, government authorization to move Landsdowne St., and a lot of money. But I'm not totally opposed to Moose's idea.

That's definitely part of it. Sandy Koufax' OPSv was 80 points higher the 4th time through than the 1st. Palmer's was 87. And that's with them sometimes not getting to the 4th time because they were tired or ineffective, so that understates the effect. It's essentially universal.

a) Why are you trying to jinx him? b) I would be a little concerned about a very expensive long-term deal for a pitcher whose K rates the last four years have been 12.6, 10.8, 9.3 and 8.8.

Perhaps, unless they go back to the old pitcher's box that had a front line about 4.5' closer. Deadening the ball in today's game would result in a lot of batters slugging .360 while striking out 145 times a year. In 2013-15 it's pretty clear they deadened the ball, and ERAs fell under 4.00 for the first time since '92.

I certainly respect Palmer and his opinions, but I'd bet he normally sat at a comfortable 90mph, and almost never threw a pitch with the effort Felix Bautista uses on every pitch. It's a very different game today, and if Jim came up today he'd be taught to maximize velocity and spin, not innings.

In the 1800s they had less than six pitchers on the roster, the minors barely existed, and a typical game took two hours. If you filled the ball with mashed potatoes I bet games would fly along, although many would end up 1-0 with the only run scored on a suicide squeeze of the ghost runner in the 10th.

If Old Hoss Radbourn and Al Spalding could throw 600 innings in a short season I have no doubt whatsoever that someone like Verlander or Scherzer could do that, too. And probably more, since the oldtimers and their teams knew almost nothing of biomechanics or nutrition or orthopedics or any of that. You just have to set up the right conditions. For example, this year 21 NCAA womens softball pitchers threw 200+ innings in a 50-60 game schedule. It comes down to how badly you want pitchers to throw a lot.

Not if everyone was throwing at 85% because MLB mandated a max of six pitchers on the roster, and a total of three minor league transactions a year.

I don't think he did that often. I am sure he threw what would be considered a ludicrous number of pitches compared to today. But he was a freak. Had some kind of super UCL that I don't think you can use as an example for anyone else. Although I suppose today we'd never know he had a genetically superior arm because nobody would let him throw 200 pitches in a game, knowing 99.9% of people who try will break. He also didn't help himself in any way by trying to strike out every single hitter ever, even when he's down 3-0 in the count with the bases loaded and he'd try to get the guy to swing at some unhittable pitch 18" off the plate. Ryan absolutely lapped the field (in a bad way) in walks allowed, steals allowed, errors, etc.