DrungoHazewood

I don't think Adam had a particularly high peak or a particularly long career. He never had a five-win season, and he was done as a productive MLB player at 31. I doubt Hays has Jones' peak, and he's started much later. But it's not crazy to think he could still be a decent player into his mid-30s. He'll need to develop some more plate discipline as he ages, and maybe keep his speed longer than normal.

His career OBP is .310. Last few years the league is .316-.325. So not quite like a .310 from 20 or 30 years ago when league was .330-.350.

That's an interesting thing. I don't know why fewer batters are qualifying. I need to think this through.

Severino will be non-tendered. Mancini is a nice story and a good guy and everyone roots for him. But he turns 30 in March and is a first baseman with a 115 OPS+. He's going to have to age very well to have a productive career going forward.

You don't normally project someone to hit 120 points below their career marks. His three prior years were .780, .705 and .778. Then he coughs up a .609. Anthony Santander's last three are going to be .774, .890, and something like .720. Do you project him to .625 next year? Sometimes stuff just happens and no one saw it coming. Although they knew all along he's not a good third baseman.

I wish I had a dollar for every post that infers exactly how our A-ball outfielders should be doing their pre-game routine, based on a vague statement from the GM about organizational philosophy. Elias: "We are following a model not too dissimilar from the Astros" Internet: "My God, do you know what that does to our 2025 mock draft 4th round?!? We have to change the entire projection!"

This isn't going to be systematic, and we'll be eyeballing league changes but: Carl Yastrzemski struck out 14.7% as a rookie, then in his 30s had years in the 6-7% range. Frank Robinson had fairly similar K rates throughout his career. Eddie Murray's highest rate was as a rookie, but was up and down between 9-14%. Rick Dempsey's K rate went up as he aged. Russell Branyan started off K'ing 35%+ and later on got down just under 30%. Jack Cust was a regular from 2007-11 and started off around 33%, but did have a couple years right around 30%. According to Tom Tango's component aging curves strikeouts are like anything else... start off higher, dip down to a low around 27, then slowly increase through one's 30s. I don't know... if I had to bet I'd say Stowers starts out between 35-40% and if he can establish himself could get that down into the low 30s before ticking back up. All dependent on MLB not messing too much with current strike zone and trends. I wouldn't rule out today's young players seeing a mound relocation at some point.

Now I'm curious if that actually happens. How many players strike out a ton when they're young and consistently improve as they go along? To do such a study you'd also have to adjust for league rates. Especially in the last 20-30 years. If you debuted in 2000 and played until 2020 you'd witness 34% rise in K rates, so someone with 100 K per 600 PA would be holding steady if they struck out 134 times in 2020.

So to jinx them I'll call it exceptionally unlikely. They're on pace for 954, which would be the 52nd-worst total of all time. 25th-worst since 1900. In context adjusted terms their 80 ERA+ is something like 30th-worst among AL/NL/FL teams since 1900. Worst team since 1900 was the 1915 A's with a 68, meaning their whole staff was the equivalent of 2021 Adam Plutko. There have only been 11 teams since 1900 to allow 1000+ runs, surprisingly only one Colorado team. The 1996 Tigers allowed 1103. The '30 Phils 1199 in just 154 games. Baker Bowl was a bloodbath for Phillies' pitchers, allowing almost 8.5 runs a game there.

Stanicek's '86 Hagerstown team went 91-48, were nine games better than any other Carolina League team that year. Won the Northern Division by 16.5 games, probably clinched in early August. But nobody on that team had a particularly good MLB career. Best was probably Craig Worthington, who had a pretty good rookie season in '89 that he never came close to replicating. Ballard and Bob Milacki were on the team for part of the year, and that was pretty much it aside from a few bit players and Storm Davis on a rehab start. Sherwin Cijntje stole 51 bases and Greg Talamantez won 12 games, both had great names, but neither made the majors.

The game has changed a lot, but I don't think it's changed so much that you shouldn't be concerned about a 32% strikeout rate in the minors. This year Stowers is hitting .276, but with his strikeout rate his BABIP is .383, if I've done the math right. Nobody consistently hits .383 on balls in play. And he's likely to strike out more often in the majors. Let's say he strikes out 36% of the time in the majors and has a still excellent .333 BABIP. That means he'll hit about .235. If his BABIP is .300 he'll hit .218; Ryan Mountcastle currently has a .302 and is hitting .258 because he's striking out in "only" 27% of PAs. That's the downside of striking out that much: you have to have an elite hit tool or just a ton of power and plate discipline to still be productive.

That's fine, but I've never gone to OPACY and thought "this slightly too small video board has negatively impacted my experience."

The Orioles' video board fits the architecture of the stadium. It doesn't need to be any bigger. The whole idea of a video board space race is silly. You're going to watch a baseball game at a ballpark, it's not a movie theater. The scoreboard is for ancillary information.

Fact of the day: the median OPS of all catchers in modern Oriole history is .603. Median, not average. "Catcher" defined as played at least 50% of their games for the Orioles as a catcher. 102 players meet that criteria. #51 is Ernie Whitt, who OPS'd .603 in his 35 games as an Oriole in 1991. The average would be much higher, everyone meeting this criteria with 1000+ PAs had at least a .623 OPS. (Caleb Joseph). The median if you set the qualifier to 1000 PAs is .741 (Earl Williams).

So that gives him a C- bat to go with the D- glove? I think you'd get as much or more production out of one of the many freely available B gloves with D bats.

You don't trade a player of value because you're worried that the rookie catcher needs to play 20-30 games at DH and that might slightly impact his playing time. You trade Mancini because you think you can get good value for him. Rutschman has almost nothing to do with it.

WPA is good for telling stories. My problem is that stories become legends, legends become tied to how good someone was, and then you get stories on Bleacher Report about how great Mark Trumbo was in the clutch because of that one year he hit 50 points better with RISP, then in 2040 someone is trying to drum up a HOF case for him because of his unmatched intangibles he's screwed out of by the WAR disciples.

You could ask all the Orioles' 24-year-old outfielders who couldn't hit. They've actually had a fair number who looked like busts until they kind of inexplicably started to hit. Brady, Steve Finley, in that era where a lot of people inexplicably started to hit. Dave May for a few years. But the other list is longer. Gene Kingsale, Tim Raines, Jr, Keith Hughes, Curtis Goodwin, Jim Fuller, Xavier Avery, Andres Mora. Also Tito Francona. Anyone know his story? I really don't. Came up with the Orioles in '56, didn't hit much but played almost every day in RF and finished 2nd in the ROY voting, presumably because there were no good rookies that year (Aparicio won because of his unheard-of total of 21 steals). Didn't hit in '57, was traded to the Tigers, then the White Sox, then the Indians in space of about a year. In '59 in Cleveland he hit .363 with 20 homers, in 2/3rds play. Per-game he was one of the best players in the league. Wasn't bad the next two years, and although he played to age 36 he was never close to that '59-61 peak again.

If you want to give credit for value by leverage and situation then use WPA. But actually... he was just +1.33 in WPA in 2016, with a Clutch rating of -0.25. WAR doesn't reflect "real" baseball if you believe that players have a persistent ability to hit better in some situations than others, and should get credit for that. As we've discussed many times, there is a small element of clutch performance that appears to be tied to ability, but most of any player's differences in performances across varying situations is just randomness. Giving full value to someone for their clutchiness is like rewarding someone for their ability to flip a coin and get four heads in a row.

Why don't they eliminate divisions, eliminate leagues, have full revenue sharing, and have one 32-team table? Balanced schedule, whomever wins the most games is the Major League Champion, and everyone on the Champs' roster gets a $5M bonus whether you make Machado money or league minimum. Then they have this big 16-team playoff tournament for the World Series trophy.

This year the Orioles are abysmal and have 14 homers from their catchers, 28 at first, 9 at second, 13 at third, 16 at short, 26 in LF, 28 in CF, 23 in RF and 26 at DH. They're going to hit about 200 homers as a team. This is the 68th modern Orioles season, and the 2021 Orioles will probably finish with the 13th-best HR total in team history. The 2018 Orioles are 16th, soon to be 17th, and they were the worst O's team since '54. If you're my age you take what you used to think the standard was for homers for a player or a team and add about 50%, and that's probably still inadequate.

Put in appropriate context minor league numbers are very meaningful. If viewed through an appropriate lens a player who really can hit in the minors will almost always hit given enough time in the majors. But people will often take small samples or extreme contexts and use that of examples why minor league numbers are meaningless. A problem with McKenna's is that he's been bipolar. His OPSes as a pro at each stop have always been .712 or lower or over 1.000. Just enough crushing the ball to give you a little hope, but his overall mark is .755. That tells me he won't hit enough to be a MLB regular, but maybe the long stretches of poor-to-mediocre have some explanation like injury.

He's the new King Kelly, just kind of in reverse. I've probably told this story before because it's fun, but King Kelly was a star in the 1880s and averaged more than one assist in the outfield per three games. Even for that time that was dramatically higher than average. It's almost unbelievable. Until you realize that some significant percentage of the time he would sneak in and play 5th infielder when he was listed as an outfielder. I want no part of any rules change that bans King Kelly shenanigans.

It depends. If it's a guy like Mountcastle who is still pretty young and has a lot of upside beyond one win, sure, that's not accurate. But if you're a 27-year-old nearly full time player who's posting a 0.7 win season you probably aren't destined for anything but bench play or a long career in Japan or an indy league. By 1988 or 1989 Larry Sheets was definitely a scrub, although by then he'd sunk below replacement level.

Yep, that's right. I just find it funny that a modern ump loses his stuff over a few members of the grounds crew sitting behind the tarp, when it used to be common for fans to stand several rows deep all around the field during big games, even World Series games.