DrungoHazewood

In any case, trading Mullins seems unlikely if we expect to get a haul for him. All the other teams have the same skepticism we do over 200 PAs that are well above his prior performances. Yet another "well, we're not planning on trading him but if someone offers up a fantastically unlikely and illogical package... sure."

I usually use about 75 or 100 points per level. Of course modify that based on circumstances. In the old pre-2019 days I'd assume the Norfolk-Baltimore translation was somewhere between 0-50 points because of Harbor Park. And you have to take into account age and repeating levels. Mullins is an odd case in that we can directly point to a major change he's made. It's hard to look up his career minor league platoon splits, but they're large, much larger than typical. So maybe you can assume ditching switch hitting would add 25 or perhaps even 50 points to his projection. Instead of .650-.700 maybe he's now .700-750. Or something. Quick sanity check... JJ Hardy and Luke Scott dropped 70 or 80 points from AAA to the majors. Adam Jones 120 or so. Mark Trumbo 180. Joey Rickard 200. Steve Pearce about 75. Chris Davis about 180 prior to falling off the cliff. Renato Nunez lost four points. Trey Mancini has gained 50 points from his old-school Norfolk OPS.

Belanger was great, but once you won 3-4 in a row you were almost guaranteed to keep winning them until you missed half the year with injury or it was a year or two after you got obviously worse. I'm convinced Jim Kaat won 16 gold gloves because the voters didn't have a clue as to who else should win. They voted for Kaat the year he fielded .826. It actually looks like Belanger's GGs tracked pretty well to his performance based on retroactive runs saved numbers. Except his first full year when he was a +27 shortstop, but the GG went to Jim Fregosi (+2) because he hit .290. Also 1970 when they gave it to 36-year-old Luis Aparicio (+0) over a +9 Belanger.

Clearly targeted at a demographic that's different from 99.99% of baseball fans. Also perhaps humans in general. That was probably the point. Someone in MLB's front office suggested that New Era make some hats that will appeal to the youths, maybe even those urban kids that listen to that rap music. Need more of them as baseball fans.

I wonder what info Earl had on Ayala. Dimmel was a dud, .663 OPS in AAA. But Ayala was 27 and also stuck in AAA and his overall numbers weren't impressive. I want to know if he somehow got some splits, or scouting reports, or just got lucky.

I want to see a real game from 1880. No, one of those recreations doesn't count, because we just don't know things. How hard did Ol' Hoss or Matt Kilroy throw? And how often? Obviously they weren't throwing anything like today or their arms would have fallen off. But also they didn't really care about your arm falling off, so often they'd just let pitchers throw until it really hurt enough to quit and go back to a factory where people fell into a threshing machine and died twice a day. If you let 100 pitchers throw until a ligament snaps some of them will go on for a long time. That's still true, some of today's pitchers could throw 350 innings, at least at 1970 levels of effort and opponent. But we don't let them try because 93 of the 100 would break.

Is there such thing as an undervalued guy when you can get spin rates and launch angles for guys in the Midwest League (or whatever they're calling the Midwest League this year)? It's tremendously harder to find your Benny Ayalas in this era where everyone knows everything about everyone. In 1978 Earl knew Ayala could hit lefties but the Mets probably didn't, so they went out and got him.

Actually by 1884 they'd legalized the overhand pitch, although it was still from a box on flat ground with the front edge 50' from the diamond-shaped plate. And the catcher stood a good 10' behind the plate until there were two strikes to try to keep from getting killed. But I have a sneaking suspicion that Ol' Hoss wasn't going max effort in all of his 678 innings.

Pretty much the only way to learn to walk more is to hit a lot better and have pitchers be afraid to throw you strikes. I'm not convinced working on plate discipline while holding other abilities constant is really a thing. Almost everyone I know of who's seen a dramatic increase in their walk rate only got there by hitting 50 homers. See: Sammy Sosa and Chris Davis. There's also Jimmy Sheckard, but that was a very long time ago.

Mountcastle has struggled before. Look at his minor league splits, almost every year except 2019 he had a bad month or two and always recovered. April of 2016 at Delmarva he went 11-for-68 (.162) with a .515 OPS. .930 and .853 the next two months. He had a .727 OPS in May, let him work through it. My general opinion is you can't ruin a player by asking him to work through a tough patch, and you don't learn to hit MLB pitching in AAA.

He had a 5.4:1 at AAA Norfolk the year he was the IL MVP. 8:1 in the majors is kind of what I expect.

For me Tango has a very high trust factor, but I don't get this one. He explicitly puts Galvis into an elite fielding category, even though the last few years his Statcast data is below average, his DRS is just okay the last three, and his UZR is good-but-not-great. Perhaps he's referencing prior to 2019 when he was pretty elite at least for a few years? But he does say "is one the of the best" not was.

I'm reasonably sure that from Tuesday September 9th, 1884 through Tuesday September 16th Old Hoss Radbourn threw 63 innings, or thereabouts. bb-ref and retrosheet don't have the box scores back that far, but we know Radbourn agreed to pitch every game after Providence released Charlie Sweeney. And Radbourne completed all 73 of his starts. Retrosheet lists him as the starter in each game from August 21st through September 24th, and over that stretch they went 18-3. So maybe it's a problem of Hyde not expecting enough out of Means.

Went to Tiger Stadium once before it closed. Paint peeling off the roof, falling on my head. A post obscured my view of the pitcher. The walkways under the stands, especially around the concession stands, were crowded and claustrophobic and dark. Was in Detroit. Maintenance had a late-stage RFK kind of vibe. I guess it could have been better from a lower box seat, or perhaps the front row of the RF overhang. I think much ballpark nostalgia comes from the games played there, while ignoring the poor design choices/necessities that made things uncomfortable for fans. Sitting in an old wooden seat with no cupholder and 12" of legroom is an endearing quirk unless you're actually sitting there for a 3:44 minute modern game.

We do need a lot more parks that are 461' to LC. With random plaques of Miller Huggins in play.

He'll give us at least 3-4 weeks before going back on the IL.

I think the tax revenue part is almost always disingenuous. It's just shifting money from one part of the city/state to another. And if you're from Minnesota and you won't go to a playoff game because it's a little chilly don't people laugh at you? Domes and retractable domes are like SUVs. They don't look good, they're expensive, and huge. They're aesthetically blah, can never have that classic look. But they're somewhat more functional. The Metrodome was the stadium equivalent of buying a RAV4 instead of a Supra. Soulless, joy-less, but slightly more functional.

Someone pushed the brightness and saturation sliders about three stops on that picture. Every game from the Metrodome looked like it was in a cave.

There's a certain lack of creativity inherent in making every ballpark your own city's Camden Yards. It's why I have an appreciation for SkyDome. It's unapologetically a giant futuristic space orb with what used to be the tallest freestanding building in the world right next door. But I wouldn't go so far as getting all nostalgic and weepy for the Metrodome. I was never there, in part because I chose to go to the St. Paul Saints* game at Midway Park instead. The Metrodome was a multipurpose sports area with with 1980s turf, seats folded up behind the RF baggie, hockey plexiglass in LF, and a roof the color of baseballs so frequently balls just got lost and would fall in random places in the outfield. It has to be one of the 10 worst MLB stadiums of the past century. * when they were still loveable indy league outsiders, rather than the craven sellouts who became the Twins' AAA team.

I mean, if you're going to blackmail Minneapolis into giving you $800M, why not just go for $1B? Just tell them you have a better offer from Portland or Austin.

Hyde is managing for 2022 and 2023. It's like if you have a team of 10 year olds, and you're playing the kid who never played baseball before most of the time because you know with experience he'll be a good player, better than the guy who'd be playing in his place. But the parents are yelling at you because you lost today's game. It's not about today's game.

If you're online with no insight into the strategic management, scouting and other aspects of the team and no influence into the team's decision making it's your duty to call all controversial decisions firing offenses.

The Cardinals play in the NL Central and in 2019 had revenues about $130M more than the Orioles. And they had a functioning farm and amateur acquisition system for the past 40 years, unlike the Orioles.

I have no idea whatsoever. Are they related to the old Leiter and Rocker? If the new ones walked into a room I wouldn't be able to tell them from a lacrosse player or a curling star.

So was that the '84 or the '93 draft?