DrungoHazewood

Is there any reason to think that's indicative of anything besides a slightly unusual coincidence?

I think that's very speculative.

I think it's more likely that 92-year-old Peter Angelos is in no shape to make rational (even prior Peter Angelos "rational") decisions on things like that. When someone of that age has been avoiding public appearances for years it's often because they're not altogether in control of their faculties.

It reduces the Orioles 2022 payroll by roughly $15M, depending on how the MLB treats deferred payments.

Peter Angelos and the Baltimore Orioles offered Chris Davis a contract that guaranteed him approximately $160M no matter what production he was able to give them on the field. Nobody forced them to do that, and at the time it was announced most people seemed to think the contract was somewhere between risky and flat-out stupid. But, yea, it's Chris Davis' fault for not giving up tens of millions of dollars the Orioles willingly, contractually agreed to pay him no matter what.

That first great year in '13 was something. I've never seen anyone, not even during the height of the 1990s-early 2000s, who could so effortlessly swing and hit a pitch 450' the other way.

Do we know there is a payout? Through now he's been paid something like $164M, the O's still owe him $30ish plus deferred payments. But if he just retired he forfeits the $30M.

I'm all good with our guys having fun, celebrating, being happy about winning. It's a sport, it's a game, it's supposed to be fun. But if Jose Bautista or some other opponent does it I'm fine with Rougned Odor'ing him.

I think that most of our draft analyses are ham-fisted. Do we grade based in picks vs consensus? Then what of differing strategies like going below-slot to pick better players later? The consensus is attempting to rank players solely on how good they are. If we grade based on who comes up with the most MLB production you're not grading the draft, you're grading a combination of (draft + development + injuries + luck + situation). I tend to grade by asking if the player picked seemed reasonable on the day of the draft based on the publicly information we have. But we don't even have all of the information to make that meaningful.

In other words, Olney is mad that he doesn't live in another universe where the financial realities of MLB, the CBA, and circumstances of history conspire to incentivize a lot of teams to not win now in the hopes of winning later. Wouldn't it be beautiful if everyone were all in all the time and that was sustainable and realistic? Sure. We all have dreams.

I think you'd be hard pressed to find any MLB team that didn't give 50 or 100 PAs to several players who'd be comfortable OPSing .700 in AAA. The 2001 Mariners won 116 games. They gave Charles Gipson (.638 career OPS) 100 PAs. They let Jose Paniagua give up 35 runs in 66 innings. Their LFer was Al Martin, who had 7 WAR in 11 MLB seasons. Luis Sojo had 153 PAs for the 114-win 1998 Yankees. OPS'd .515. They also let Mike Buddie give up 29 runs in 41 innings. Every team has fringy MLB players.

It's hard to say, since they have the resources to watch that for three weeks, then go trade a bag of balls for an average outfielder with 5/105 left on his deal to fill the hole because the offering team just wants to be out from under the contract. Of course the team with $650M in average revenues and a $200M payroll has a long list of options the Orioles or the Pirates or the Marlins don't.

I was just saying me comparing Stewart to Traber might be a little negative for Stewart. Traber did have that one hot streak, but was fairly awful overall, especially in '89.

You seem awfully sure that Stewart was predestined to fail and should never have been given an opportunity. I'm guessing every fanbase has their own fortune tellers who say the same thing about their Stewarts.

Has Tyler Wade been with the Yanks for five years OPSing .584? Yep. Did Jace Peterson get 1220 PAs for the Braves? Yep. Has Tyler Austin gotten as many MLB PAs as Stewart despite being a DH/1B with a .740 OPS? Yep, mostly with the Yanks and Giants. Did Rob Refsnyder get three years on the Yanks roster to stumble about the OF and OPS .643. Yep? There's no such thing as an organization that never gives chances to players that don't work out.

This may be a little harsh, but he's the new Jim Traber.

Okay.

Carpet brushes.

When the O's had Hill his arm was completely wrecked. He looked as done as anyone, flinging up 88mph junkballs and getting absolutely hammered. He's made a remarkable turn-around, I applaud him, he's also had a lot of personal tragedy. But he's never been someone you could write in the rotation in pen for 30 starts. He's always on the edge of breaking down. If Rich Hill had this same career starting in 1950 he'd have been selling stuff door-to-door by '58 or '59.

He's the kind of guy who could go to Korea or possibly Japan and make $1M a year and hit .300 with 25 homers. But I don't know if he has the willingness or the personality to go live for years in a different culture.

But that's influenced, maybe heavily influenced, by service time. I'd bet setting a fixed age for free agency would reduce that median debut age by a year or two.

The upside is that you're getting him exposed to MLB pitching and he's ready to contribute to a good team sooner. You don't plan for the rebuild to fail and Rutschman to have to stick around 6-7 years to play on a good team. If a major part of your planning is that they won't be any good until 2027 you might as well trade him now before he has a chance to disappoint, so we can reload for six years from now. As a 30-year-old catcher he may not have a lot of value left.

I am a big advocate of something like you're talking about because in the pre-draft/free agency/service time era it was far more common to get players to the majors whenever they could play a productive role. Today it's "are you ready to be a top caliber MLB player before we start your clock?" In 1940 or 1960 it was more like "can you play a role for us?" Earl famously would start starters out pitching long relief, but that died because who wastes service time on long relievers? Without service time stuff Rutschman could almost have come to the majors straight from college and learned on the job. Jim Palmer went from pitching not so well in A ball to the majors at 19 and never looked back. If he'd come up 20 or 30 years later he probably misses 25 MLB wins. Brooks debuted at 18, Boog at 19. Milt Pappas threw nine innings of one-run ball at 18.

He has a .797 OPS in AAA. He's a AAA player.

He now has about a full season's worth of plate appearances in the majors, and is slashing .212/.326/.388. And is a -12 fielder, and is 27. Of course that's not written in stone as his career numbers, but probably his most likely path. There's a pretty small difference between productive regular and replacement level commodity. He looks like he just didn't quite get there.