DrungoHazewood

That's important, but I think the bigger contextual difference is that Ripken was a 21-year-old shortstop, while Mountcastle is a 24-year-old 1B/DH. I don't want to sound too down on Mountcastle, because I'm not, but those are epochal differences.

Maybe scrub is not the most flattering term, but you're not going to win many games if you base your team around 1 WAR players. Mountcastle has a 113 OPS+ and has had little defensive value, and has DH'd 40 times. He has promise, he could be a fairly valuable player if he can manage to hit for a higher average and/or draw more walks while playing a decent first base. He really needs to play first and OPS 125 or 130 or so. But, yea, the bar is high for a 1B/DH. It's really not hard to find a guy with little or no defensive value who can OPS+ 110 or so. That's Pedro Alvarez as an Oriole, or Larry Sheets, Mark Reynolds, Javy Lopez, Aubrey Huff. Guys who're willing to come to Baltimore for a couple years and $6-8M.

I was going to say that Harvey's 6.27 ERA was close to historically ridiculous for someone who pitched over 100 innings, but then I looked and, whatta you know, he's not even in the bottom 100 since WWII. Even among Orioles he's only 7th. Rk Player ERA IP Year Age Tm Lg G GS CG SHO GF W L W-L% SV H R ER BB SO 1 Doug Drabek 7.29 108.2 1998 35 BAL AL 23 21 1 0 1 6 11 .353 0 138 90 88 29 55 2 Jason Johnson 7.02 107.2 2000 26 BAL AL 25 13 0 0 3 1 10 .091 0 119 95 84 61 79 3 Ubaldo Jimenez 6.81 142.2 2017 33 BAL AL 31 25 0 0 2 6 11 .353 0 169 109 108 58 139 4 Garrett Olson 6.65 132.2 2008 24 BAL AL 26 26 0 0 0 9 10 .474 0 168 100 98 62 83 5 Jason Berken 6.54 119.2 2009 25 BAL AL 24 24 0 0 0 6 12 .333 0 164 92 87 44 66 6 Ken Dixon 6.43 105.0 1987 26 BAL AL 34 15 0 0 13 7 10 .412 5 128 81 75 27 91 7 Matt Harvey 6.27 127.2 2021 32 BAL AL 28 28 0 0 0 6 14 .300 0 160 96 89 37 95 8 Sidney Ponson 6.21 130.1 2005 28 BAL AL 23 23 1 0 0 7 11 .389 0 177 97 90 48 68 9 Jake Arrieta 6.20 114.2 2012 26 BAL AL 24 18 0 0 1 3 9 .250 0 122 82 79 35 109 10 Jorge Lopez 6.07 121.2 2021 28 BAL AL 33 25 0 0 2 3 14 .176 0 142 83 82 56 112

When you don't care about the quality of said innings...

I don't expect the Orioles to be in actual contention for a playoff spot next year, and the year after could be a stretch. But at some point you have to field a real team and start winning 65, 70, 75 games, and next year is as good as any.

I think the ump would have had to submit to years of therapy if he had to umpire a game from 100+ years ago.

Why were we glossing over everything in 2011? 1. The Yanks, Red Sox and Rays all won 90+ games. 2. The Blue Jays were at .500 but their whole rotation was 26 or younger, they had Bautista, Encarnacion, a good amount of talent. 3. Boston and the Yanks were two of the three biggest spenders in MLB every year. They hadn't played a meaningful game since 1997. Machado was probably a few years away. The cavalry of Matusz, Arrieta, Bergeson, Tillman, etc were a trainwreck. Duquette was something like their 6th choice for a new GM, because the first five rejected them. They were running out retreads like Derrek Lee and 36-year-old Vlad every day. Britton looked like a decent 4th starter, Schoop and Bundy were probably 2-3 years away. Clearly they needed to trade Markakis, Hardy, Jim Johnson, Reynolds, and maybe even Wieters or Jones for the right package because there was no way this team was competing for 3, 4, 5 years.

They grew Bedard, saw that he had value and durability issues, then flipped him for Adam Jones, Chris Tillman, and others, laying the groundwork for the successes of 2012-16.

More tangible things to latch onto during Twitter rants calling for his firing.

My choice would be to give the regular season champion in each league (one division, balanced schedule) a big pennant, a 5' tall trophy, and $20M to divide up as they see fit. Then have a playoff tournament with 12 or 16 teams or whatever to decide the World Series champ.

Sure it is. The Yanks have not made the playoffs four times since 1995. The Dodgers have had eight losing records in my 50 years of life. The Sox 39 winning years in the last 50 including 17 playoff appearances. The randomizing effect of multiple rounds of playoffs helps mask this. And yes the Rays are something of an outlier. But a team with $500M in revenues probably has an average of over 90 wins a year. Team with $250M is probably under .500.

Why would we want to hand more rewards to the Yanks, Sox, and Dodgers for having far more resources than anyone else? Back in the 1920s-60s when there were just two teams in the playoffs the Yanks were one of those teams about 75% of the time. I think that's a primary contributing factor to other sports exploding in popularity about that time, if you're a Senators or Indians fan and you're 24 games out of first on June 15th and you have to finish first to go anywhere, football's looking pretty good.

Makes perfect sense that the Orioles would set up an elaborate sign stealing system, risking punishment and scandal, because they want to win 50 games just that badly.

I know I'm late to this thread, but the stock answer for all 50-win teams is "a lot higher than what makes sense".

Peter Angelos would sometimes spend, but usually stupidly. On Chris Davis and a bunch of zeros trying to prop up 75-win teams. But then he'd seem to take away that spending was useless, and he'd hold the line for years. He'd say idiotic things like no pitcher was worth a long contract or Mike Mussina money. And the league-leading payroll of $80M in 1998 became the 15th or 20th-highest $80M payroll 10 years later. We don't know what the boys will do. Sometimes sons mirror their fathers, sometimes they Costanza their old man and do the opposite, and sometimes it's a mix. But I am somewhat optimistic that they've let Elias do his thing so far. Peter would not have.

I didn't notice for a month, not a huge deal. There's occasionally some worthwhile insight, but not nearly as much as on his web site (much of that not from him). I'd be much more disappointed if Tango blocked me.

That would surprise me. In other news about irritating sabermetic icons, I recently discovered that I've been blocked on Twitter by Bill James. I essentially never tweet anything, I just follow others. And my twitter handle is obscure and nobody would know it's me. But one day I was feeling chippy and Bill posted something that I disagreed with while also using an acronym I didn't recognize. One of Bill's pet peeves is people who use acronyms without spelling them out, so I tweeted back "please spell out all acronyms". And he blocked me.

So I asked Tango on another site and his response was to chastise me for using "stabilize" instead of "become reliable". I'd still like to know the answer, it might have been buried in the hundreds of tweets telling people to never use stabilize.

Who wouldn't have a 10-WAR season when the population was 5' 3", 110 lbs and thought pork fatback and unfiltered Camels was good nutrition?

Two things that might mute that effect: 1) Mass dumping of veterans by poor teams at the deadline has been much more prevalent recently. Essentially didn't happen before free agency. Also at some point the trade deadline was earlier, like June 15th. 2) There were more bad teams the farther you go back in time, although that's started to reverse with the number of teams recently rebuilding/tanking. So the terrible old Phillies, Browns, A's, etc didn't make deadline deals.

And the ROY is pretty random, some years just don't have a good candidate and they give it to John Castino. Like the year McCovey slugged .650 for 50 games and they gave it to him.

Gibbons never had a single season with an OPS+ equal to Mountcastle's career mark of 122, and Mountcastle was a year younger than Gibbons when he came up.

No I think Garcia has a solid WAR total because he's been a valuable player. He's a very solid outfielder with an above-average bat. Realistically Mountcastle isn't in the running for ROY unless he just destroys September. He's hitting well now, but didn't early, and he has no positive defensive value.

Mountcastle got a single ROY the vote last year. But how often does the ROY go to someone who missed 42% of the season?