DrungoHazewood

That makes me think of this recent "Hey Bill" question on Bill James site about the effect of salary restrictions/caps, remembering that he was very recently in the employ of these Red Sox: " I think you underestimate the effects of money in different forms. Paying $20 million salaries to attract star players is a fools game. That's what the Angels do; you wind up attracting Albert Pujols and Josh Hamilton. The real effect of money is the money you spend in other ways." I don't know that the Sox are limiting what they spend in any way but on current player salaries.

Could be. But the standards have clearly changed a lot. When I was a kid in the 80s it was common for announcers to say someone throwing 86 had an average MLB fastball. At the end of his career I bet Scott McGregor wasn't much over 80. Now if someone is sitting under 90 mph you assume he's hurt or he's going to get shelled. Almost every team has multiple guys on the staff who throw in the high 90s. Mediocre starters like Kevin Gausman occasionally hit 98 or even 100. This is how Dalkowski or Walter Johnson legends took hold. They'd sometimes throw as hard as a modern pitcher, and compared to the high 70s, low 80s stuff batters were used to it was mind-boggling.

Boston is a team with nearly unlimited revenues. They will sometimes have down periods, but are never more than a year or two from a potential 100-win season. You have to assume that some of their down years are more-or-less gaming the system in seasons where they don't think they'll be great by retrenching and getting good draft position and saving resources. Like I think they threw last year to save money and get a higher pick than the Orioles. That's why I think the draft order should be based primarily on market size, not record. The concept that they're helping to level the playing field by giving the #4 overall pick to a team with $550M in annual revenues is comical.

Yes, that's the gist of it. The Orioles have been a poor team recently, with pitchers seemingly found under rocks and hitchhiking on I-695, and even they have half the bullpen that can throw 95+. In 1990 if you had one guy who could throw 97 he'd be a demigod. Remember Colt Griffin? The Royals took him #9 overall in 2001, mainly on the strength of him hitting 100 mph once on a radar gun in a workout after his senior year in high school. His arm disintegrated about 25 minutes later, and I don't think he even really knew how to pitch. But today... would it even be a big deal if a kid once hit 100? Every single team has some guys who've done that, and many of them on a regular basis. In my lifetime an average fastball has to be up six mph or more.

If I were to find out that my recurring sinus issues were a wheat allergy I'd just chalk it up as a small price to pay for having pretzels in my life.

I have a recurring nightmare that I get a gluten allergy. I'd almost rather go blind than never eat pizza, bread, pretzels, drink beer... Whenever I see something talking up how it's gluten free, my reaction is "I can't eat that, I'm trying to maximize gluten in my diet." And for beer, I'd be perfectly fine if I could only drink Belgian and German beers. No need for anything else.

I think I sometimes have a reaction like that, too. Occasionally I'll drink a beer and very quickly get very congested sinuses and a headache. But if I drink German beer it almost never happens. So I stick with Ayinger, Paulaner, Franziskaner, Erdinger, Hacker-Pschorr, etc and I'm usually fine. Not a bad trade off.

There are soccer players debuting with some of the English teams I follow at 16 or 17 in some cup competitions. I think soccer players may peak earlier than baseball players, and they also don't have MLB's peculiar free agency system that incentivizes keeping players in the minors. My oldest kid is 14, so almost the same age. My kid seems far, far removed from being on his own as a professional athlete. Eddie had some of the most 70s hair ever, and a C2 Corvette may be the most 70s car. Aren't they all IPAs now? It's almost like the Blues Brothers scene at the honky tonk bar, where they play both kinds of music, country and western. You go to a bar today and they have regular IPAs, and also really bitter IPAs.

Is there that much overlap in their Venn diagrams? Martin's reason for existence is that he's theoretically going to become a pretty good defensive shortstop. I don't know that anyone really wants Valaika to be anything but a backup to the backup shortstop.

Just doing his part to keep the O's from being one of those boring three-true-outcomes teams. He doesn't walk, doesn't hit for power, so just that one true outcome of 161 strikeouts per 600 PAs.

Eddie was a major leaguer when I was six, so I always saw him as being much older than me, clearly a different generation. But 65 doesn't seem that much older than 49.

I never had quite that experience, I never traveled overseas until the late 90s. I was a freshman at Virginia Tech in '89, and followed the last month of the season by newspapers and highlights. I saw Olson bounce the curve in Toronto 15 minutes after the fact on Headline News because the Tech cable package didn't have HTS. But at least the book store in the little mall by Kroger carried Baseball America. The internet didn't really become a thing until after I'd graduated. In middle/high school, probably into college, I had a Sporting News subscription. But that was the era they went from the baseball paper of record to more multi-sport and tabloid-y.

It's funny thinking back to that era, and how access to information was like Christmas. The Mazeroski annual, the 5-pound Baseball Encyclopedia, the Sporting News, and the unicorn newsstand that would carry Baseball America... it was like opening a rare present. Unbelievable delights were hidden inside. A lot of people made a good living on the fact that it was impossible to distribute information in even a 2000 or 2010 context. Things I'd look up online in 10 seconds today were literally impossible to find out in 1990.

Dwight Smith Jr had a similar minor league resume, Yaz had spent parts of the prior two seasons in AA, and Smith was two years younger. I know, I know, the Orioles should have employed Puff The Magic Scout who just had a hunch that the guy who's the same age as Joey Rickard and hit the same as Joey Rickard was going to become a star.

When hasn't a 10-start performance spike been a true indicator of lasting change? Both Gausman and Bundy have pitched exactly like this over comparable stints in the past, but it's going to stick this time because Poz needs 4000 words on the Orioles.

Also, I like Poz but don't have a lot of use for veneer-thin analyses of the local team by national writers. He writes well, and some of it is reasonably connected to reality. Weaving together six or seven years of Arrieta, Yaz, Bundy, and Gausman across multiple management teams into a Orioles cultural narrative is fun if you don't care too much if it's true or makes much sense.

To show just how far we are from 1984, Ken Dixon pitched most of that year for AA Charlotte. He struck out 211 batters in 240 innings, which is 7.9 per nine, which would be considerably below average in the majors today. And he had 20 complete games. Only once in the past 35 years have the Orioles, as a team, had more than 20 complete games in a season. Ken Dixon had more complete games in AA in 1984 than the Orioles did in the 2010s. In retrospect it's not surprising that his arm imploded in 1987, he allowed 31 homers in 105 innings and never pitched another inning in the majors. And I think I remember something about a grievance from the Mariners after they traded Mike Morgan for him and then found out he was hurt. They could have just looked at the 20 complete games in '84 and his 6.43 ERA in '87.

Before service time and free agency was a thing teams would pretty routinely call up prospects who weren't remotely dominant in the minors. Jim Palmer walked 130 in 129 innings at the age of 18 in Class A ball. Today that would put him about two or three years from the majors. He spent his age 19 season pitching the whole year for the Baltimore Orioles.

I don't either. But I have a bias that says teams leave players in the minors longer than they really have to for reasons mostly unrelated to performance.

I think you can make the case that getting Rutschman at bats against MLB pitching now, so that he's fully adjusted and approaching peak when the O's should be in contention will add as many or more theoretical championships and playoff appearances as delaying his debut and having an extra year at 31.

By far the biggest reasons for players not debuting by 23 are service time and tradition. With service time being #1. If all players became free agents at a set age instead of after X years of service time, almost all top prospects would be in the majors at 19, 20, 21. Many, many players would spend little or no time in the minors. Someone like Rutschman would go straight from college to the O's almost immediately, with his playing time and role determined by how quickly he adapts to the majors. Because there's a six-year clock teams want to be as sure as they can that players are productive throughout that six years. If instead there was a set age teams would want to maximize MLB value, which would mean getting them up as soon as possible even if they were in a backup or bullpen role.

An average player peaks at 27. It wouldn't be that unusual if an individual peaks several years before or after that. Nick Markakis had his best season at 24. If they don't even let Rutschman get to the majors until 24 because of service time and contention windows and whatever, it's possible they're missing out on part of his peak in exchange for seasons in his 30s when he might be in steep decline.

Once you're granted a title of nobility you need to move to England to fully exercise the benefits therein, so no more MLB career.

When your bullpen is eight or nine guys who you're not sure if they're going to have a 3.75 or a 5.75... just pull some names out of the hat each night. And reminds me of the other underlying assumption here. It's that you clearly have a heirarchy of relievers, a shutdown guy, a second-best guy, maybe a couple of specialists, etc. Is it most important to get teh shutdown guy the 9th, or spot him in other situations? Well.. for the Orioles they have 18 reliever candidates and who the heck knows how we'll rank them tomorrow, in June or in September. You can't yell too much about needing to use Tanner Scott in the clutch situation in the 6th if you're not entirely sure he's really any good.

Yes, l at least implied that there are other theoretical use patterns that could bump up LI higher. But nobody has ever done that. Almost no pre-1980 firemen had really high LIs. No setup men, theoretically freed from save rule constraints, has ever had a big LI. Personally I'd use my best reliever for -1 to +2 situations, mostly in the 9th, occasionally the 8th, before that in bizarro/rare/weird circumstances.