DrungoHazewood

Terry Crowley spent 15 years in the majors as a player. He never had 300 PAs in a season and he never played 500 innings in the field (1400-odd is a full season). The last 10 years of his carer he was mostly a 150 PA PH/DH who'd occasionally play a little first or LF. That type of player is completely extinct. But would have suited Stewart.

Promotion/relegation is a non-starter in a closed league. Owners bought into the league with the expectation that they could suck for 20 years and have no real hit to their franchise value.

I'm pretty sure the Mexican League has two shorter seasons a year, and a winter league. (Okay, looking it up I confused Mexican baseball and soccer - the baseball league has a 120-ish game summer league, and there's also a winter league in Mexico. The soccer league has the Apertura and Clausura, two separate seasons each year.)

There's some truth there, but it's changing. I don't know the TV ratings situation, but in-person attendance is pretty solid. MLB drew over 20k a game in 2019. Several teams like Atlanta and Seattle are among the top 20 or 30 highest-attended teams in world soccer. They're slowly building. DC United has been a thing for 25 years, they're older than the Rays or the D'backs, they now have second generation fans. I think many or most US fans root differently than in baseball, football, basketball. They usually have a European team or two (or sometimes Mexican or wherever their family is from), and an MLS team, too. And they follow the USMNT and often the USWNT. I pretty closely follow DC United, Tottenham Hotspur, 1860 Munich and the US national teams.

Latest FIFA rankings we've moved up to 10th. The horror of '18 is (hopefully) behind us. All kinds of exciting young kids on the team, and they've beaten Mexico twice in a little over a month, including once with our C team.

It's very American to look at how others have solved problems we've deemed intractable and say "yea, that'll never work here."

They can't. So you need to give teams more than the World Series to play for. Make the regular season 100 games, and then every third or fourth week you're playing a number of regional tournaments and international competitions. Maybe you finish 40-60 in the league, but you win the Eastern Championship Cup, or the US-Japan Showdown.

Salaries have gone up. But at least pre-COVID the players' percentage of revenues had fallen from nearly 50% 15-20 years ago to 42ish percent.

That's not true at all. There are ways to incentivize winning throughout the year. The problem is that there are 30 teams and one trophy. Everyone is playing for one thing, and when that one thing is out of reach they pack it in and fake it the rest of the year. You have to have other incentives. In most soccer leagues there's promotion/relegation. I've seen games where there are teams that go down swinging in front of 50,000 rabid fans for a game to see if they get relegated from the 2nd tier to the 3rd tier. Obviously promotion/relegation is a non-starter in closed North American sports leagues. You can have competitions outside the league. For example, you could have a tournament like the WBC where the O's are way out of it in the league, but still fighting for the WBC club trophy. You can use a reverse-order draft, as mentioned in the article, where the best team that doesn't make the playoffs gets the #1 pick in each round. You'll probably try harder if finishing with 50 wins gets you the 18th pick in the draft. We in the US are so used to single-trophy closed leagues that we can't imagine teams like the O's trying in August in September. But that's just our tiny little slice of the world, and its poorly thought out structures.

The 2012 Orioles' bullpen was over +13 in WPA, highest in MLB history up to that date. Meaning it was the most effectively leveraged bullpen in history through 2012. It would be pretty accurate to say the entire reason the '12 Orioles won 93 games and made the postseason for the first time in 15 years instead of winning 80 being forgotten was the pen and how Buck managed it. But yea, Buck was terrible.

Stewart would be a lot better off if it was 1979 and teams had like eight position players on the bench. Earl might have turned him into a Jim Dwyer. Or Terry Crowley. Pat Kelly. Today with all the pitchers it's really hard to keep a guy whose only positive skill is hitting some righties.

So they should have seven, really have four?

If my kids don't get that 17th Bugatti Chiron and three summer homes in Tuscany, Austria, and Mauritius I have failed as a father.

They're on pace for 54 wins, .336 winning percentage. Their lowest mark before this year is 47 wins in 2018. They'd have to go 10-39 (.204) the rest of the way to be the worst team in modern O's history. The 2002 team finished the year 4-32, so something like that is plausible if unlikely. The very first league team called the Orioles was the American Association club of 1882. They finished 19-54-1. If you ignore the draw that's a 42-win pace over 162 games. So the current squad would have to go 3-46 (.061) the rest of the way to eclipse that mark.

Since 2010 there have been 189 player-seasons with an OPS of at least .900, qualifying for the batting title. That includes 2020, when you only needed 192 PAs, and so far this year. 30 teams, so six per team. The O's have four, plus Trey Mancini's 2019 at .899. The O's have had losing records in seven of those 12 seasons. So you'd expect them to be a little below average in most categories.

The 2012-2015 Orioles payroll plus the $23M Chris Davis got per year were each lower than the 2017 Orioles' payroll, and they still won. The Orioles were hamstrung by a long series of decisions that led to a very inefficient payroll and an insufficient stream of cheap, young talent. Most teams have dead money, many a lot more than $23M. Davis' contract didn't help, but it wasn't even the primary thing keeping them from winning. If anything it was a symptom of an organization's poor decision making.

Actually, that's an excellent point. Those A's teams played in 154 game schedules and they used to pretty regularly tie games, so they went seven consecutive years winning 55 games or less, and had three years in that span with .283 or lower winning percentages. Olney drew the cutoff at 106 losses instead of winning percentage or something else, and limited it to AL, to make it look as bad as possible. If you include NL teams you bring in teams like the Phillies who from '36-45 lost 100 games seven times in 10 years in 154 game schedules. From 1919-1948 the Phils probably averaged finishing 30 games out of first place. The Astros had their '11-13 run. The Mets averaged 108 losses over their first six years. In the 50s the Pirates lost 112, 104, 101 out of 154 in consecutive years. The Blue Jays lost 107, 102, 105 their first three years and were almost as bad in '80-81. Were the Tigers really trying the years they lost 96, 106, and 119 in consecutive years? But yea, rebuilding for 3, 4, 5 years in the free agency era for a small market team is an abomination.

But that was on purpose. Connie Mack was a very old school owner, in that he didn't have a personal fortune or other businesses to fall back on. The A's were really his only source of income, and there was no backup revenue. So when the Federal League came in and started signing AL/NL players to relatively large contracts Mack decided he couldn't or wouldn't compete. And when he lost several stars he just sold off most of the rest. By 1916 he had a team that had a few real MLB talents left (Wally Schang, Bullet Joe Bush, Amos Strunk), 41-year-old Nap Lajoie, and a bunch of kids he'd signed off sandlots or bought for pennies from independent minor league teams. They went from dynasty to perhaps the worst post-1900 MLB team ever in a couple years. It would be the late 20s before he was able to reconstruct a competitive team, and it was an excellent one. But then after a number of years of taking it to the Ruth/Gehrig Yanks the Depression hit and once again he had a fire sale and the A's were never really competitive for the rest of his life.

Did he retire?

Likely no trades of Machado and Schoop and the others, just letting them all play out their deals or signing some of the lesser players to ill-advised extensions. No focus on development and analytics. No investment in the Dominican. No #7 farm system, instead gutting it to try desperately for a wildcard. In other words, instead of tearing down your decrepit old house and building a new one you slap on some new vinyl siding and a bucket of paint and wonder why the foundation starts listing 10 degrees under the bedroom. Yes, it sucks to have to spend time and money building a new house. But eventually you have a new house.

Or it's that the present value of paying someone $10 today is more than paying them $2 over each of the next five years.

It's a lot simpler than that. He got old for a major league player, shifts killed his batting average, and his skillset wasn't broad-based enough to compensate for lack of hand-eye coordination or focus or whatever. Everyone loses it due to age, he just did it more suddenly than most. He didn't go from 1.000 OPS to .500 overnight. In 2014 he had a .704 OPS then rebounded and the Orioles and many of us chose to look at '14 as the huge outlier. In '16 was serviceable, 110 OPS+, 38 homers, decent defense. 2017 he was below-average, but still hitting at a level like recent Miguel Cabrera or a hundred other aging sluggers. It wasn't until '18, in year three of the deal, that he fell off the cliff. So this idea that he quit being a major league player when the ink was still wet on the contract just isn't correct.

No, it was actually something like the 1935 Boston Braves. Who had a HOF manager, Babe Ruth, Wally Berger and some other talent but declined from 78 wins to 38-115 because sometimes everything goes wrong and snowballs and craters. The 2018 Orioles had 70 or 80 win talent, but it just all imploded at once. We're probably lucky it did, otherwise they may not have hit the reset button and just tried to patch holes like it was 2006.

I'm just hoping that every year we can have a Bonilla-like day when Davis gets his deferred payment and the entire social media-verse can laugh and laugh, and demonstrate that they have no concept of the time value of money.

We all know Davis' contract really ended about three years ago. He got a degenerative hip condition long after he stopped being a major league player.