DrungoHazewood

What, the drown the witch method of determining how many pitches a pitcher can handle? Let a guy throw 200 pitches to see if his arm falls off when you let him throw 200 pitches. Look, I understand wanting to have star pitchers who can throw nine innings all the time. But pitchers used to pace. They knew that if they threw 110% they would break, so they backed it off, and nobody had ever heard of Driveline or wipeout sweepers or anything like that. Many still got hurt. Robin Roberts made a HOF career by throwing mostly decent fastballs, spotting them well. If you throw at 80-90% effort you can throw 300 innings. But good luck on a major league team today throwing 80-90%, even if you're pretty good the pressure to be better by throwing at 110% would be overwhelming. And at 110% you cannot throw nine innings and 130+ pitches on a regular basis, and you will eventually break even at today's workloads.

Yes, ballparks today are built on relatively huge lots, without any of the constraints of earlier eras when resources were more scarce. Fenway is 300-ish to LF because Landsdowne St. is maybe 320' from home plate. Ebbets was just like that in RF. Today governments bend over backwards to do anything for their Major League sports status, but 100+ years ago many parks had seemingly odd, asymmetrical fences because that was the shape of the lot they could afford and nobody was moving roads or buildings for them. Boston's South End Grounds, home of their NL team for many years, was just over 250' down the lines, but at least 440 to CF. It was replaced by Braves Field, which when it first opened was 400-415-461-542-369 because that was the size of the grounds. League Park in Cleveland was 290' to RF, probably 330' to RC, and 460' to deepest CF. For 50 years Yankee Stadium was 296' to RF and 461 to deep LC. I know I've told this story several times, but I love it... King Kelly was a HOFer who mostly played in the 1880s. He has some bizarre fielding stats. He played all over, including catcher, but more outfield than anything else. A good example of the weirdness is 1884. When playing the outfield he had 69 putouts, 31 assists and 26 errors in 578 innings (about 64 games) , good for a .794 fielding percentage. Yes, this was before modern gloves, but his fielding percentage was 70 points below average and he had an outfield assist every other game. After some people did some digging, it was clear that while Kelly was listed in the box score as playing the outfield, he'd often just sneak in and play 5th infielder, fielding grounders and throwing people out at first. You clearly can't do that today, but prior to 1920 it wasn't crazy, as most players weren't even trying to hit long fly balls most of the time. Wasn't so hard to hit a triple if the RFer is playing 150' from the plate. Also, prior to 1920 inside-the-park homers were much more common. HOFer Jesse Burkett hit 75 career homers, 55 inside the park, and three bounce homers (prior to roughly 1930 those weren't automatic doubles, but home runs).

They know that if they start doing that he'll start swinging at more of them, and when he's put the first pitch in play over his career he's batting .314 with an .895 OPS. Although that's actually just seven points of OPS higher than the MLB average.

With two strikes the league OPSes hits .168/.246/.258 with a .504 OPS. So either .654 or .547 he's doing better in those situations than most batters. Since the start of 2023 he's 34th in MLB in two-strike OPS out of 300 batters with 100+ PAs in those situations. Our old friend DJ Stewart is 17-for-126 with 78 Ks and a .465 OPS when batting with two strikes. Elly De La Cruz is OPSing .471 with two strikes, with 215 strikeouts in 373 PAs.

I think that appreciating the past is fine, I'm a huge fan of baseball history, especially the early game. But it's hard to say any era is objectively better than any other. Most of the strategic and tactical changes to the game over the past 50 years or so are driven by the desire (need?) to win more games and keep up with the innovations every other team constantly makes. The information revolution has changed baseball by giving teams the tools to optimize what used to be mostly hunches and traditions. Much of what is often thought of as going backwards (no bat control!) is mostly a side-effect of other advancements, like the knowledge that power is unambiguously more valuable than place-hitting, and that wall-to-wall max effort pitchers with wipeout sweepers are the driving factor for the strikeout increases (not batters who don't care if they K). If Joe DiMaggio played today he'd strike out 75 or 100 times a year. Mickey Mantle faced a pitcher a 4th time in a game 1000 times more than Mike Trout. Complete games are dead because pitchers typically throw at 110% effort all the time, and if they threw nine innings a start they'd break down even more quickly than today. I saw people on social media complaining that Bradish wasn't allowed to try to get his no-hitter. That's a great idea if you really don't care if Bradish's elbow makes it through Father's Day in one piece. This isn't 1980, when you could throw an 88 mph Major League Fastball and get people out without jeopardizing your UCL on every pitch. If you want to see what happens when a team stays stuck in the past, clinging to ways of running the team and using analytics and developing players like it's 40 years ago just look at the 1998-2011 Orioles. I've always thought they were a pretty cutting-edge team for 1975. If you sit still you will lose, and often badly. If the fans as a whole really want strategies like complete games to come back there are certainly ways to do that, from incentives and indirect pressure (say, limiting teams to eight or nine pitchers on the roster and very few minor league transactions) to the more direct (the starter has to go seven innings unless he's given up 7+ runs, or is hurt, and if he comes out injured he can't pitch for three weeks). But baseball has traditionally been very, very reluctant to change rules. The DH is 50 years old and some people still moan and whine about that. The pitch clock is really just enforcing rules that have been on the books forever, and some people seem to hate that. Since baseball hasn't changed the environment to make the game more like 1960, I have to think the general opinion is that the way the game is today is thought of more favorably than the rules changes that would be necessary to bring back some of the things Greg talks about above. Also, the trend for increasing homers and decreasing triples is over a century old (triples and homers per game): 1871: 0.94, 0.19 1881: 0.45, 0.11 1891: 0.57, 0.26 1901: 0.56, 0.21 1911: 0.53, 0.21 1921: 0.55, 0.36 1931: 0.43, 0.42 1941: 0.37, 0.51 1951: 0.29, 0.75 1961: 0.26, 0.95 1971: 0.21, 0.74 1981: 0.24, 0.64 1991: 0.21, 0.80 2001: 0.19, 1.19 2011: 0.18, 0.94 2021: 0.14, 1.22 By WWII you could have noticed a long-standing trend of triples fading away and homers steadily increasing. Smaller parks play a role, but probably a more important factor is better outfielders. And doubles are actually down a bit from a high in the mid 2000s. Most doubles ever were 2007, followed by 2006, 2008, 2004, and 2000. We're down from almost two doubles a game to 1.6 this year, which is right in line with the live ball era (1920-present) average.

People would get on Mike Mussina for answering questions in some kind of sarcastic, snarky way. But I swear after hearing questions like that more than once or twice I'd just be making up some ludicrous stuff. One game I'd be talking about how we only won because Jupiter was entering Sagittarius, the next I'd go on some rambling monologue about bigfoot alien super-soliders, then the next day I'd just do the whole interview in broken German.

Ah, the problems we face in modern society. I mean it could be like when I was a kid, and like 40 games were on a Baltimore station that I could usually pick up if we turned the antenna the right way, a few were on Channel 20 from DC, and the rest were on AM 920 radio.

I'm not going to pass judgment on the guy, but he's just a guy on the internet. If he really did all these things he can tell us who he is and there are ways of validating that. I'm a little skeptical when he says things like his Dad was a Big 10 coach who worked with Mike Schmidt, who went to Ohio U, not Big 10 school Ohio State. But maybe he ran across Schmidt somewhere else. I think most people here know my real name from when I was a writer on the site years ago, and it would take about five minutes of Googling to verify that I, in fact, am not the King of Liechtenstein. Everyone knows I was deposed in that coup back in '13.

I think we should all open up a little. You can go ahead and admit you're the Prime Minister of Moldova, won the javelin Gold Medal at the '76 Olympics, and are married to Gal Gadot's hotter, younger sister. It's not really boasting if it's true.

The Orioles' front office knows as well as anyone that performance across 44 sporadic at bats, including seven as a pinch hitter, is mostly random and borderline meaningless. His .649 career MLB OPS adds almost nothing to our body of knowledge of Heston Kjerstad. Cal Ripken started his career 12-for-99. But the O's knew he could play and stuck with him. David Newhan is the poster boy for how even a .690 OPS player can play out of his mind for a month, or the other way around.

It's a little odd that a team that is made up overwhelmingly of home grown players never wants to play their homegrown talent in the majors.

People with good baseball sense and patience.

You mean the same guys who decided to let Baylor, Grich, Reggie and every other free agent walk? Of course they did, they couldn't care a bit about winning, just filling their pocketbooks!

You are reading far too much into less than 200 PAs. I guarantee you that virtually no MLB GM is going to assess that Santander, Hays, Mullins and the rest are washed up and need to be jettisoned out the nearest airlock. Coming into 2024 Anthony Santander's career OPS was .766. Add in this supposedly career-threatening six-week down stretch and it's fallen all the way to .761. Eddie Murray had 13 different months with 100+ PAs and an OPS lower than Santanders' current .695. Cal had 17. In August of 1995 Cal had a .606 OPS. I'm sure if social media had existed then the calls for him to be tossed overboard would have been deafening.

I didn't say that at all. I just said most (perhaps all) fanbases, this one included, are reactionary and far, far, far less patient than the people paid to make decisions. I've been on the Hangout for over 20 years, and every three-game losing streak, like clockwork, brings out the Holy Crap Why Haven't They Made These Five Very Obvious Moves?! Like I said in that other post, I'd love to have seen the constructive criticism that Joe Altobelli and Hank Peters would have gotten during the two 7-game losing streaks they had in 1983. "Can you believe that these half-wits are still playing 36-year-old Al Bumbry and his .643 OPS on May 23rd!!!! Why are they still playing this guy who clearly isn't a Major Leaguer anymore? Have they forgotten they have Mike Young and Drungo Hazewood at Rochester? Do we need to remind them? Glenn Gulliver has a .464 OBP and they're still running Leo Hernandez out there?"

I don't know, did the '83 Orioles settle for being just good and not elite by continuing to play over-the-hill has beens who won't get any better like Al Bumbry, Todd Cruz, Rich Dauer, Benny Ayala, Tim Stoddard, Rick Dempsey and Jim Palmer? None of them were particularly good that year, and most were more-or-less done when they were fitted for their rings. And you could make a good case that the 2024 Orioles have more talent than the '83ers.

I tend to think that OPSing 1.132 in AAA is about as much as a guy can do to force himself onto a roster. Without a barrel of East German Oral-Turinabol, that is.

How could you even tell since he only has 34 MLB PAs? And it's not like everyone in AAA is way worse than everyone in the majors. They're still playing the same game, there are plenty of good pitchers in AAA. If you can hit in the high minors at 20, you can hit in the majors.

I would have called him up for Opening Day and kept him in the lineup until Memorial Day unless he was hitting .103 in 175 PAs. You don't work out the kinks in your Major League swing by going back to the league wide Coors Field that is the International League.

It would be pretty challenging to write a more stereotypical overreacting fan on a messageboard post than this. Do you guys realized that this poorly-managed team of over-the-hill chumps currently has a 94% chance at making the post-season, and the 3rd-best odds of anyone in MLB of winning the World Series?

Not really. Most numbers don't become more signal than noise for hundreds of PAs. Also, the front office and field staff are paid to not panic after a three-game sweep in May. I'd love to have seen this board after each of the two 7-game losing streaks the that 1983 Orioles had. Basically the only moves the Orioles made during the '83 season were trading Floyd Rayford (who hadn't been out of the minors yet that year) for Tito Landrum (who played 26 games and had just 44 PAs for the Orioles before the playoffs), and buying Todd Cruz (.558 OPS) from the Mariners. Neither of those had anything to do with their two 7-game skids.

Sorry! I just pretty regularly see posts here and (mostly) elsewhere that are of the form "Ryan O'Hearn had a miraculous transformation when he came to the O's. Either they're awesome, or the Royals are idiots, probably both!" But the truth is (mostly) that O'Hearn was wiped out by the shift.

Much of O'Hearn's "improvement" is because of the shift ban. O'Hearn's wOBA in non-shift/non-shade configuration from 2021-2024: .432, .350, .358, .529. In 2023-24 his shade (the mild shift that's still legal) wOBA is .329 and .318, while from 2019-2022 when the shift was legal his wOBA into the shift was .278, .267, .243, .249. I think the Statcast data is pretty clear-cut: he was destroyed by the more extreme shifts. Good on the Orioles for identifying that ahead of the shift ban last year. I don't think anything like this applies to Mateo.

That would be nice. But whenever a player has some success, especially in modern baseball with ubiquitous data, everyone in the league is pouring over all the video and Statcast info to find a weakness, and they'll attack him in different ways. He'll have to adjust to that. In the past that hasn't gone over so well. It's not just a case of Mateo fixing some flaw, it's usually him having to adjust to being pitched differently by doing things differently (and often not so successfully) as well.

Yea, yea, yea, girls still like you...