DrungoHazewood

It's always good when someone agrees with me and they didn't know they were doing it.

I think it's more accurate to say that there are players in the minors who aren't the guys in the majors. Much like backup quarterbacks behind struggling starters, the narrative becomes that the other guy has to be better. Even when the evidence is scant, if it is there at all. Austin Wynns is probably a better defensive catcher than Sisco or Severino, but just as probably a worse hitter. I don't really know much about Cumberland but I'm guessing the rest of the board doesn't either, and just wants a change.

CERA is like dWAR. You can probably tease something meaningful out of it, but it's usually just not worth it because most people stop listening after seeing the first misleading number and forming unfounded conclusions.

We know beyond any shadow of any doubts that 30-year-old Austin Wynns is a .600 or .650 OPS hitter in the majors. Cumberland is a little harder to gauge, but that's because he's 26 and has never played in the majors and has very limited time above A ball. Which says something by itself. But hey, if you want to make sweeping judgments based on 35 at bats go for it, I know that's your thing.

Do we have that option?

When in doubt, it's always the talent. Remember, Ned Yost won a World Series.

Can't you sum up all of modern pitching theory as "all pitchers get worse the more times through the order, so make all pitchers more effective* by using them more like relievers." *More effective could also be phrased "less failed"

That's mostly true in my gov't organization. We can ask people about vaccine status when planning travel or for restriction of movement purposes. But they can decline to tell us, at which point we treat them as if they're not vaccinated. Basically if you are vaccinated and you come home from a trip, even to a high-transmission area, you're good to come on base the next day. If you aren't, or won't tell us, you get to stay at home for two weeks. And some people can't do their job from home.

What would you expect the Orioles to do? They needed a starter. They have a guy on the staff who was rested and has started 36 prior games in the majors, and another 123 in the minors. Seems like a very obvious choice, and one that I wouldn't even think twice about making. He pitched poorly last night because he's a average-ish MLB pitcher and sometimes they give up runs.

I bet if you graphed out pitcher use patterns over history and projected into the future you'd come to a point somewhere around the year 2500 where each pitcher's career is just a single, magnificent, 136mph pitch that tears every ligament in their arm and cripples them for life.

In 19 days in May he's thrown 141 pitches over seven games, never more than 30 pitches in an outing. Even in today's context if that's overwork we have a problem. John Means threw 113 pitches in his no hitter, and Plutko can't throw 141 spread pretty evenly over 19 days? Not overwork.

Yep, worked.

I guess the 44,992nd Chris Davis joke started to be not funny. At least to me.

He would have some interest. But next year he will be an arb-2 guy who is 30 and averages 2.3 wins per 150 games. We're not looking at an Erik Bedard kind of haul here.

Has Mancini already locked up comeback player of the year?

Do you really have zero WAR if all the components including games played are zero? Shouldn't it be (blank) or undefined? You're not better or worse than anything if you don't participate. I know, funny, ha ha, Chris Davis is bad. But you could also make the same joke about Jennifer Aniston having the same WAR in 1973 as Willie Mays.

C'mon, Frobby, get with the narrative. All things have direct and obvious causes, almost always related to the Orioles making stupid mistakes. A random pitcher pitches poorly, it's because the team had the gall to not keep him on an extremely tight routine and schedule. The trouble in Palestine, directly related to poor decisions Duquette made in 2013. This situation is clearly not because he's Adam Plutko and this was the 25th time in 67 MLB appearances he's allowed three or more runs. Anybody can see that last year he got shelled in a start on August 21st, then relieved and pitched four scoreless innings in his next appearance and I don't know why I'm still typing...

I think all it means is that he doesn't have to go out and buy individual health care at exorbitant rates, but he still has to pay whatever the MLB policy costs.

This is a couple years old, but offers some hints as to how this stuff is funded (through a roughly $3B fund via contributions by the teams). And it looks like you don't get free health care for life for one day the in The Show, but an opportunity to buy into a health care plan at group rates.

Also... Verlander, Scherzer, Greinke, and Kershaw are all in the top 30 in career strikeouts. Depending on how long they pitch they could all reach or pass Walter Johnson, who was the leader for something like 60 years and threw 5900 innings. The other thing I failed to mention in my prior response to @GuidoSarducci is that career marks rely on longevity, and how long you play in the major leagues is dependent on how well you pitch. Strikeouts and quality are very closely tied together. For well over 100 years, if you take the lists of the highest strikeout pitchers it will include 80-90% of the best pitchers in the game. Probably the best single indicator of how long a pitcher will remain effective and in the Majors is strikeout rate relative to league.

Paraphrasing Hans Gruber, Ruiz is an exceptional ballplayer, Ms. McLane. Just not quite exceptional among the very exceptional, in an avocation that employs 780 players at any one moment and in a normal year brings in over $10B.

On a hot streak in the minors at a position where someone in the majors is in a slump, or we just don't like them.

That's the thing about Ryan. He almost did play until he was 51. He finally snapped that ligament at, what, 46? It's not going to be broken by some average guy, it'll be someone at the extremes. A good rule of thumb for career records is how many years of current league-leading performance does the record represent? If it's less than 15 the record is in jeopardy. If it's more than 20 it's safe. The current level of league-leading strikeout performance for a pitcher is roughly 275. That's 20.7 years to get to Ryan's record. It's pretty safe.

I don't really know anything about Cumberland except that he's the same age as Sisco and has all of 10 games in AAA and less than half a season in AA. A little of that is COVID, but most of his hitting has been done as an overaged guy in A ball. I'm guessing he'll be swapped in for Sisco, won't be any better, and someone will pick Sisco up on waivers and turn him into a 1B/DH and relieved of the burden of catching he might actually have a little career.

Unless they change the rules or pitching distance I think it will fall or at least be seriously challenged in the next 5-10 years. In 230 innings a pitcher would have to average 15 K/9 to get to 384. At 200 innings you'd need 17.3. Last year a couple starters averaged over 14 K/9, Randy Johnson did 13+ that back in the day. Relievers have been as high as 17.7 (Chapman, 2014). Extrapolate Shane Bieber's 2020 numbers to 162 games and he's at about 330 strikeouts.