DrungoHazewood

If I got a time machine the first place I'd go would be Union Park in Baltimore circa 1894. So many questions about little details that are almost impossible to figure out without motion pictures, and even the stills are hard to come by and almost never of action. Clearly the 500 innings were because they were pitching in ways far less destructive to arms than a modern pitcher, but how did that look in reality? But not so much of a fan of sitting in the Baltimore summer heat in day games in a bowler hat and a suit. I'm definitely paying the extra 75 cents to sit under cover. Don't know if Von Der Horst's beer is going to be either cold, or any good to modern taste buds.

I think that one contributing factor is that the size of the talent pool has outpaced expansion (there's only been one expansion in the last 25 years when the US population has increased by about 20%, and other pipelines like Asia have ramped up), so fewer young/old players are good enough to play in the majors under the current free agency system. The more difficult a league, in general, the fewer teenagers and 35+ players who can compete. If you look at 19th century baseball you see 18, 19 year olds pitching 500 innings in a season, and Cap Anson hit .330 at the age of 44.

Except now 11 or 15 of the houses in your neighborhood have cut the cord and use Hulu, Neflix, or YouTube or whatever to watch what they want without paying monthly RSN fees.

Well, that's pretty clear cut. Either we can have peak Zach Britton, or collapse-stage Brian Matusz.

I think it could lead to more competitive balance. Who are the teams trying to eek out every last dollar of value from prospects by holding them back? Small market teams. The Yanks don't usually play these games because the money the Orioles and Pirates and others are trying to save is a rounding error in their budget. What's a more competitive Orioles team, the one with a random waiver wire guy as the backup catcher, or Adley Rutschman as the backup instead of spending 125 games at Bowie?

Remember that the definition of "capable of playing" has been very skewed in the free agency era by the necessity of maximizing returns during the player's six years under team control. If you have a 19-year-old that you know will be all yours until he's 28 you don't care so much if he's near his peak. You care that he's better than the 26th guy on the roster. Sure, there's some developmental concerns. But I've long thought that much of what's called development is actually messing around in the minors until you're ready to start the clock. Players aren't learning to hit MLB sliders and all the other things they need to do by playing a full year in AA at 22. Instead they're marking time, physically maturing, etc until the team thinks they're ready to step into a starting job and fully contribute. In 1965 the Orioles put Jim Palmer in the Majors at the age of 19 following an age 18 season in A ball where he walked a batter an inning. Why were they comfortable doing this? Because there was no such thing as six years of team control, they had him as long as they wanted him (or so they thought at the time). There was almost no financial impact to putting him in the majors at 19 despite probably not being completely ready to start every 4th day. If all high school draftees were free agents at 28 many, many more of them would come to the majors earlier than today.

I think injuries are as much to blame for that as anything. His rookie year he hit three homers in a game. In 2015 he hit three homers.

Nick had some injuries in the 2011-13 period, including the Sabathia HBP, that really changed him as a player. Took away his power. And I think he really was hurt by the transition to the current all power/all power pitcher game. bb-ref says he had an OPS 80 points higher against finesse pitchers than power pitchers. I don't know what the typical split is, but I see Nick as a guy who in an earlier era could have been a Paul Waner or maybe even a George Brett kind of player who hit .330 or .350 with 50 doubles. But in 2015 facing wall to wall power pitchers and LOOGYs with an average 9 K/9 nobody hits like that any more. In a full season nobody's hit .350 in 11 years.

My uncle talked all the time about this great play Curt Blefary made in 1965. Nick could never make a play like that! Don't know why you idiots keep saying he's Gold Glove caliber!! Dumber than tarnation to trade Curt Blefary.

Here's the ultimate Nick snub from that 2008 season. He was a 7+ win player with a .400 OBP, a 143 wRC+. He was the 25-year-old up-and-coming star. But even Baltimore sportswriters gave the Most Valuable Oriole award to Aubrey Huff. Who had the same offensive performance as Nick as a 31-year-old DH with no defensive value and who once called Baltimore a "horse**** town". Can we retroactively give Nick some kind of award for being both a better player and a better person than Aubrey Huff?

Incomplete spot check... but looks like Arky Vaughn led the NL in WAR in '36 and didn't get any votes. Graig Nettles led the league in WAR twice, and finished 16th and 28th in the MVP voting. It would take a while to look at all the WAR leaders in the past 90 years across two leagues, but eyeballing it I wouldn't be surprised if it's just Markakis and Vaughn.

I don't know, and I'll have to investigate how hard it'll be to find out. Obviously pre-1930ish it happened with a lot of players because there was no MVP award most years, and none at all prior to 1910ish. But for years where there was a vote... let me see if that's easily searchable. Oh, also there was the unwritten rule in the early MVP voting that you couldn't win twice, started when Chalmers would give away a car with the award and they didn't want Ty Cobb to end up with six cars. So I'm sure there were years where Cobb or Ruth or something had a 10-win season and didn't get a vote.

I expected the first post here to be "how could you tell?"

He's currently 127th all time in MLB hits. 20,000+ MLBers, 100,000+ minor leaguers, millions who've played below that level, and Nick ended up 127th. That's a pretty awesome achievement. He could walk down the street and bump into Ryne Sandberg, Alan Trammell, Barry Larkin, Jim Thome, Jeff Bagwell and say "yep, I had more hits than any of you guys." He won some Gold Gloves, selected for an All Star team, played in the postseason multiple years, led the AL in rWAR in 2008. That last one is a great trivia question: name the player who once led the league in WAR but didn't get a single MVP vote. Not even a 10th place on some Baltimore sportswriter's ballot. Jason Bartlett, who played 128 games and hit one homer with 37 RBI out-polled Markakis who had 7.4 WAR, 48 doubles, 99 walks and was a +22 RFer. Anyway, hope Nick enjoys his retirement. I always enjoyed his time with the O's. I agreed with the decision to not resign him, but I liked and respected him as a player and a person.

I heard that the population decline in Detroit from 1.8M to 670k was mostly in anticipation of this moment.

In baseball, maybe, probably. But Japanese ski jumper Noriaki Kasai has appeared in eight Olympics from 1992-2018. He's still active at 48, and wants to compete in Beijing in 2022.

He spent a little less than half the year at Rochester. But the only player in the IL remotely close to his combination of age and production was Mickey Klutts. Not sure what happened to Klutts, he was sent back to AAA the next year despite his production. Didn't play quite as well, and appears to have been hurt in '78, traded to the A's, never really played well or (apparently?) stayed healthy again. Klutts (21) and Murray (20) where the only ILers in '76 who were under 24 and OPS'd .900+.

Eddie was one of the youngest and one of the best players in the International League in 1976. He had a .921 OPS at the age of 20, with 34 walks and just 27 strikeouts. The '76 Orioles got a .642 OPS out of their first basemen (Lee May and Tony Muser), and a .718 out of their DHs (May, Andres Mora, Tommy Harper and others). They lost Bobby Grich and Reggie to free agency, traded Paul Blair, released Harper and Terry Crowley... At least in retrospect it would have been unfathomable for them to send Murray back to AAA and DH... uhh... Tom Shopay? Larry Harlow?

I'm far more worried about Prince Harry and Megan, and they're at 0.00 worries on a scale of 0 to 10. There's silly worrying about performances on April 15th. And then there's whatever you want to call worrying about spring numbers and observations on 9 March, which is several orders of magnitude less important than April 15th levels of trivial.

Trade him while his value is high? Start rebuild 2.0 (Who replaces Elias? Can we lure MacPhail back from Philly)? Move the team to Nashville, hope for the best in expansion?

1458 divided by 12 is 121 innings a piece. So if you take a modern staff and divide up the workload evenly you just need 12 guys who can get you 121 innings each. That's 2-3 innings once every three games, two innings more often than three. I'd be tempted to try that with a team like the Orioles who have a very long list of guys who could potentially be starters but none yet have the ego and service time to push back against not getting their 5-6 innings once a week. I think it's inevitable that a team will try this, or something very close to it, and be successful. Only then will we have reached the theoretical limit of the progression that's been going on since about 1871.

That's good information, but I still refuse to believe that Scott McGregor's eephus fastball was going over 90 mph.

His average fastball was 85.5 mph last year, so maybe? With that velocity in 2020 I think they need a battery of tests to see if he's throwing with the correct arm.

1) It's only been seven years since Davis fielded .886 at third. I think it's possible he could still field .750 there. Three fourths isn't half bad. 2) In 2017 he played ten innings at third without making an error. Extrapolating that over 162 games gives him a 1.000 fielding percentage. Has Manny or Brooks every done that? Are you completely discounting his 2017 performance, and the idea that he might be the best fielding third baseman ever?