DrungoHazewood

It wouldn't be April if someone wasn't speculating about a career hanging on the edge on the basis of 35 PAs despite BABIP taking 800+ balls in play to stabilize.

I definitely get that. I have a different work-around. So for now I'm not switching to AT&T. We like Hulu, it's cheaper, and it comes with other stuff like Disney and ESPN+. My minor annoyance is that I have to switch over to my media PC to stream MASN since (at least as of last week) they didn't have a Roku app. But I'm used to switching to the PC for streaming obscure third division German soccer so it's not too bad.

Is the concern here a team that's projected to win 60-some games is going to win 60-some games?

I expect the strikeout rate to stay reasonably high, although not this high. K rate stabilizes very fast. But I also expect the other numbers to come up because of both weather and SSS variation.

That's an exaggeration. I'm sure Elias and Hyde expect to win at least fifty games. That's over eight wins a month! The Patriots have never done that.

I think we've passed the point where strikeouts don't really matter because they're correlated positively with power. Almost everyone strikes out a ton compared to the past, and there are advantages to putting the ball in play (notably you can't really hit much over .300 if you strike out 150 times). So now a very large percentage of players have the Alfonso Soriano, Dave Kingman, Sam Horn batting skill set. And no matter how many secondary skills you have (i.e. everything but average) there's kind of cap on how many runs you can create when you hit .220. An average MLB hitter has to hit well north of .350 on balls in play to hit .300. At 9.6 K/9 hitting .350 or higher overall is essentially impossible. More than ever I'm in favor of an alternate major league with a deadened ball, minimum bat sizes, and a 63' 7" pitching distance. And really long fence distances if at all possible.

I think beginning/end of season K rates are little higher so this will probably go down a little. But so far the first week+ is sitting at 9.6 K/9, easily the highest ever. And right at 25% of plate appearances. Edit: and I thought maybe it had to do with NL pitchers batting. But no, it's up about one K/game in both leagues compared to last year.

This shouldn't be in any way surprising, this is a trend that's been going on for a very long time and accelerating across the sport over the last decade-plus. If you extrapolate 2021 numbers so far, the average MLB batter strikes out 151 times per 600 PAs. Prior to 1963 no one had ever struck out that many times in a season.

It's also a record that gets set almost casually since strikeouts are at or near all time highs, and for most of baseball history were half of the current rate or less. It's like quoting obscure home run records in 1928, a few years after the era where you could lead the league in homers with 12. In the first week or so of the 2021 season there have been 36 games with 13 or more strikeouts. In the entire 1940 season there was one. In the entire decade of the 1950s there were 106.

I have my doubts that any organization in professional baseball would give any weight whatsoever to 1 1/3 innings. And by "I have my doubts" I mean I'm 100% certain they wouldn't care about that in any way at all.

If someone else claimed him they would have to keep him on the roster all year, as if they'd drafted him in the Rule 5 themselves. So it's pretty common to have someone returned.

Reading comment sections open to the public is like walking around WalMart and asking people probing questions about the works of Tolstoy. If you're expecting deep and detailed responses you're a little nuts. Yes, I'll concede that people with only the most superficial understanding of baseball analytics might occasionally use WAR on its own, unquestioningly. But those are the same people who 25 years ago would tell you of course Juan Gonzalez was the best player in the league, he won the MVP award twice!

I would take that as 10 PAs is about 100 to few to even begin drawing any kind of conclusions with a basis in fact more than palm reading.

In 2021 max velocity of 93 is closer to crafty than overpowering. Most of the Yanks' pitchers last night had 3-4 mph on him, as well as the O's relievers. Darren O'Day excepted, of course.

Yea, there's an agenda: to try to appeal to people who didn't serve in the Korean war.

Hard to tell exactly, but it would be weird if he did throw 101 and still averaged just 3.6 K/9 in a dramatically inferior league chock full of 80 mph fastballs. If I had to guess I'd say Ruth sat in the 80s. In the Neyer/James guide to pitchers all it says is Ruth threw a fastball and a curve and I can't recall anyone saying he threw particularly hard.

Please show me some examples. Because I hear them talked about every day in the context of the threat they are to civilization, but like bigfoot finding one is terribly challenging.

Let's say I watched yesterday's game streaming through the browser of my media PC in my living room, using a, umm... work-around. I cancelled DirecTV four months ago, and I don't have a cable TV subscription. But I will say it's ridiculous that the official way to stream the Orioles without cable/satellite is to sign up for AT&T's streaming package at nearly $100 a month. If my work-around stops working around I'll go to the radio.

You all are joking, but we're literally three games from @wildcard making a thread saying that the Orioles are legit contenders based on going 3-2 in their first five games without any of their best prospects being called up yet.

Sorry, I was out of internet range for most of the past three days and didn't get a chance. I would have said 68. But that's not really based on much of anything.

If you work out the math on 2.84M people dying in the US annually out of roughly 325M, you can determine that in any Oriole Park at Camden Yards sellout it's likely that two people in attendance will die in the 48 hours following the game.

Approximately 126 million doses of the vaccine were administered from December through March 22nd. Or approximately the equivalent of 1/3rd of the US population. 2.84 million people die in the US in a typical recent year, so in a three-month span you'd expect about 700k. Divide by three for the percentage of population vaccinated and you'd expect 235,000 people out of 126 million to die of whatever cause in a three-month span. It is completely unremarkable that 929 people died within 48 hours of the shot when you've given 126 million people the vaccine. Probably several hundred of them died in car crashes, since every day in the US something like 100 people die that way. Less than five people per million have an allergic reaction to the shot, but that's why you wait 15 minutes at the site, to monitor for that type of reaction. Otherwise there are essentially no known mechanisms for the vaccine to cause death. Quote: "A review of available clinical information including death certificates, autopsy, and medical records revealed no evidence that vaccination contributed to patient deaths." [source: CDC] Also, RFK, Jr. is a well-known anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist from long before COVID 19 was a thing.

I would encourage anyone following links in this thread to investigate the sources to see if perhaps they were linked to conspiracies and pseudoscience. I just hope enough of us get vaccinated in the coming months to allow us to get back to things like seeing baseball in person.

Just once I'd like to read/hear someone say that they only use Total Zone or UZR or Statcast data as the sole, indisputable measure of a player's skills. Just once. Because I've never heard anyone say that, but at least once a day I see someone make a point of saying they don't do that.