DrungoHazewood

Hey, it's legitimate to ask questions. The OP wasn't declaring him the Orioles' backup catcher of the future, just asking. Like you can ask if perhaps the sun won't come up tomorrow? Or if today is the day I learn to levitate things with my mind? Or if people will be colonizing Neptune in a couple years? Will Luxembourg invade Russia on Saturday? They're all just questions, stimulating discussions and the exchange of ideas.

Yes, absolutely. I'll be stunned if he's not a 10/5 guy with the Orioles eventually. Not that he'd using those 10/5 rights to vetoing a trade after becoming a fan favorite and a key member of countless excellent teams, the Orioles would never dream of trading him. He could be the new Jeff Mathis, but instead of playing for five teams it's just the Rays and then 15-20 years with the O's.

If you know that your ceiling isn't competitive why make an offer? So fans can say "oooh look, the O's pulled out Syd's confederate money again!"?

Which means less friendly to the posting team. Which lowers the incentives to post anyone. Imagine a scenario where the Orioles wanted to post Trey Mancini so he could go sign with a rich Japanese or Korean team, and they changed to rules to limit how much the O's could get out of the process because the foreign league(s) didn't want to pay so much.

I think some of the opposition to posting fees in the past was a failure to understand or care that posted players are under contract to foreign teams, and if you want that contract and player you have to pay for that value. I don't know if the Orioles were philosophically opposed to compensating teams for the players they control, or if they just couldn't afford the players being offered.

@AZRon, you didn't need me, you pretty much have it covered! I'm sure I could take an hour and dig up some more, but you got the gist of it. Lots and lots of Marylanders played for the Orioles and other local professional teams prior to 1954. Grove and Ruth are two of the obvious omissions since they're Marylanders and inner circle HOFers. One player I would like to point out is Baltimore's own Bobby Mathews. Listed at 5' 5", 140, I think his mustache was about 35 pounds of that. He played for the National Association Baltimore Canaries, the city's first professional league team, in 1872. Prior to that he played for the Fort Wayne Kekiongas in '71, and the semi-pro Marylands before that. On May 4th, 1871 he threw the first pitch in National Association history, arguably the first pitch in Major League history. On bb-ref they list each player's debut and what number they are in MLB history, for example Trey Mancini was the 18,913th player in MLB history. Under Mathews it's this: Debut: May 4, 1871 (Age 19-164d, 1st in MLB history)

Also seems wrong to dock them credit for things that they could reasonably and logically be staying out of on purpose.

Cummings was inducted in the Hall in 1939 for his contributions as a pioneer, not as a player. Although I think you could make a semi-reasonable case for his induction as a player. He was 23 when the National Association (the first professional league) was founded in 1871 and had been pitching on amateur and semi-pro teams for at least six years prior to that. Including the famous Excelsior club of Brooklyn. He was one of the best pitchers of the '71 NA, and continued to be a good pitcher through 1876. But even throwing underhanded his arm was shot averaging over 400 innings a season by the age of 28. It's claimed he never weighed over 120 pounds in his life. He was one of the early adopters of the curveball, although with any Genesis stories there's some dispute as to whether or not he actually did the inventing. It's likely multiple pitchers independently figured out how to throw a curve, and he was just one of the people who helped popularize it. In 1873 he pitched for the Baltimore Canaries, going 28-14 in 382 innings. The Canaries finished 3rd, and were Baltimore's first professional league team. They had a number of players recognizable to a fan of the 1870s, including Cal McVey (early slugger on best teams of the 1870s), Davy Force (5'4" SS who regularly jumped teams in the pre-reserve clause era), Lip Pike (led the league in homers four times with totals of 4, 7, 4, and 4), George Hall (first NL homer champ, banned in the '77 Louisville scandal), Cummings and Asa Brainard (primary pitcher for the 1869 Reds).

I think Rodrigo Lopez should be in the O's Hall of Fame. Anybody who willingly signed with the 2002 Orioles should be recognized for service above and beyond the call of duty.

The real Hall shifted from inner circle guys to something else about 1945, so if you're mad at it being watered down you need to be mad at folks who've been dead for 50 years. The O's Hall of Fame inducted Gene Woodling almost 30 years ago, and Woodling played the equivalent of three non-playoff years for the O's in his mid-30s. Both Halls of Fame have their critics who think the bars are waaaay too low, but they've been about where they are today for a long time. If anything the standards applied to today's players are much higher than they were 50 years ago (at least for the Cooperstown Hall).

Oh, now I see, you're still on that nothing has changed and it's still Big Pete's 2008 thing. Okay, at least I understand.

Show you what? That right now they're interested in spending $50M on established international talent? I don't think they've ever indicated that they want to do that at all, at least not today.

How would you value him, and what do you think makes sense for the Orioles? If he's a 2-win player with a little upside but also some risk, what would you pay for that in free agency? Or more importantly, should a team in the Orioles' position be paying free agent rates for a 2-win player? One of my arguments against resigning Nick Markakis in 2015 was that he had an established value of 1.5 wins or so. At $8M a win that's $12M a year, or 3/40 or something. If you're a little bit smart and willing to take on a bit of risk you can find 1-2 win players on the market every offseason without a 3-4 year commitment, often at a small fraction of that longer-term contract. A fair, market-value deal for He-Seong Kim is probably like 4/64. Wouldn't the Orioles be better off signing players like Iglesias or other buy-low options than paying $64M for two wins a year?

Fangraphs' Depth Chart projection has Kim as a .244/.322/.417 hitter, presumably in a neutral MLB context. Also has him as something like an average MLB shortstop, and overall a 2-win player. But I don't know how they came up with the defense. That's what this hinges on: if he can play short in the majors he should be an average regular. If he's forced to 2b/3b he's a glorified Rio Ruiz.

What do you think his projected production is?

I've mentioned some of these things before, but: a. Ha-Seong Kim is 25 and has been playing in a league whose overall quality is probably about AA level, with a wider spread in talent and ages. b. Kim's 2020 was his best season in Korea with a .921 OPS. c. The KBO's run context is about 5 runs/team/game. Kiwoom was right in the middle. About half a run higher than MLB. d. Byung Ho Park has had OPSes in Korea over 1.000 four times. In the majors he hit .191/.275/.409. e. Hyun Soo Kim had almost the same slash line as Ha-Seong Kim in Korea last year and has comparable career numbers. His MLB OPS was .719. f. Jose Miguel Fernandez had a .901 OPS in the KBO last year. His MLB OPS is .697. g. Roberto Ramos had a .954 OPS for LG at 25 last year. He had a .980 OPS at high-altitude Albuquerque in '19 but has never played in the majors. h. Aaron Altherr had an .893 OPS in Korea last year. His MLB OPS is .708. To me this looks like a rough translation for a KBO player is to knock off 200 points of OPS or so. Meaning Ha-Seong Kim is likely a .700ish OPS player. He's started playing some third base the last few years, so I'm not sure he's a MLB SS. So I'd be wary of getting into a $50M bidding war for someone who currently looks a bit better than Rio Ruiz, or maybe like Jurickson Profar or David Fletcher. There may be some upside or growth, but he was about the 11th-best hitter in the KBO in 2020.

One of the enduring challenges to humanity are how we deal with issues that linger today but were created by people who've been dead for a very, very long time. Most of the options we have are partial, flawed solutions.

Yea, but that would involve going to Kansas City. I've already checked off every state but Arkansas, so that seems unlikely. Maybe when I'm retired in the 2030s I'll finally take that cross-country road trip in a completely nonsensical car and stop in on the way.

The first big modern ballpark building craze was the introduction of steel-and-concrete parks around 1910. They just assumed, for good reason, that old wooden ones would eventually burn down so they were never designed as big, permanent monuments to the game. Oriole Park had to have been one of the last major wood parks, starting it's life as Terrapin Park for the Federal League in '14, just after places like Shibe Park in Philly and League Park in Cleveland opened. In the 1890s so many parks burned that a rumor was going around of a serial baseball arsonist.

I think the O's and Jays need to wear 1920 period uniforms for a game commemorating the '20 IL pennant race. On August 28, Toronto had a one game lead over Baltimore, then went 20-2 the rest of the season and finished 2.5 games behind the Orioles who won their last 25 games. There are like six of us history buffs here who'd be really into that. But selling the jerseys, that would bring in the dramatically larger crowd of memorabilia and baseball stuff hoarders. They've worn Black Sox jerseys at some point, haven't they?

From my history posting here I'd say that's a problem that tens of us in the area are clamoring to be fixed, so it needs to be remedied as soon as possible. One problem with displaying memorabilia from the old NL Orioles and the IL Orioles is that a lot of it burned up in the Oriole Park fire in '44. But if they're looking for a minimalist solution painting five extra pennants on the lower deck display would take about eight hours and $30 in material.

Interesting. I'm sure you can quibble with his assumptions, but it does layout a framework can justify what the O's have been doing. I like that one of his solutions to tanking is to eliminate the draft and go to a bonus pool setup. I've long advocated for a system like that, with the bonus pool being determined by market size and efficiency. Something like reverse order of Nielsen Market size, or metro population times average area income, perhaps with teams bumped one way or the other by performance relative to market. So the O's, Pirates, Brewers, Reds... they get something like $20M to spend on amateurs. The Yanks, Dodgers, Sox, they get like $5M. The Cards would love it, they have about the same market as the O's and Pirates, but have always punched way above their weight in on-field performance.

I should probably know this, but is there any recognition for either the Black Sox and Elite Giants at OPACY? Or for that matter, the 1894-96 NL Champs? All of them should be up there with the pennants below the stands behind home plate.

A long time ago Bill James made a list of criteria to subjectively judge the quality of a league and help judge if it meets major league standards. I think it was part of an article showing that the 1884 Union Association was major league in the same way your local high school team is in the majors. I couldn't find that, but earlier this year I made up my own for some other purpose. I think it would be useful to go through this for the Negro Leagues that have been elevated to MLB status: 1. How well are the players paid compared to an average US worker? Probably okay, but nowhere near a MLB player of that era. 2. Are the stadiums temporary, more permanent, and are they shared with other activities? Are they $billion cathedrals, or bleachers thrown up last Thursday? All over the place. They played in MLB parks like Griffith Stadium and the Polo Grounds, but also little ramshackle places. 3. How organized is scouting compared to 2020? Not well at all. 4. What is the average attendance? All over the place. Some games sold out MLB stadiums. I'm sure others had dozens of fans. 5. What kind of cities does the league represent? The biggest cities, just smaller towns, or a mix? Geographically constrained, or country-wide? Mostly MLB cities in the East. But comparable to the AL/NL in most cases. 6. What population base does the player pool draw from? Do substantial numbers of young people strive to be in this league? Similar to the MLBs, but of course African Americans were 10% of the population. They also drew from Latin America and the Carribbean earlier and more often than the majors. I'd assume young kids wanted badly to play with Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige. 7. How does the league collect, process, and use information technology? Compared to today barely at all. Compared to the majors of the era... somewhat worse due to limited resources? 8. How well does the transportation infrastructure support the league? Pretty well, except that buses and trains were segregated which I'm sure was a limiting factor and it sucked. 9. What is the pipeline from amateur ranks to this league look like? Multiple organized steps, high school kids going straight to the league, or some kind of a mix? I don't think the Negro Leagues had minor league affiliates, or if they did it wasn't nearly to the extent the majors did by the 1940s. It was common for teenagers to sign directly with Negro League teams. 10. Are front offices robust, or threadbare? Trending more towards threadbare. 11. What is the coverage in the media like? In the African American press pretty robust. Some coverage in mainstream papers. 12. What percentage of the best players in the world play in this league? Based on 1960 percentages I'd say 30%, give or take. 13. What is the spread in age? Are there a lot of teenagers and/or 40-somethings in the league? It was commonplace for 18-year-olds to be on the field with 46-year-olds. This is a fairly big hit on Negro League quality of play. There were guys in their mid-to-late-40s hitting over .300 and playing regularly. That's not a sign of a major league as we understand it today. It's what you might see in 1895. Apparently Hank Aaron won the batting title in 1951 at the age of 17, of course after many players had left the league to join the MLBers and affiliates. 14. How long has the league existed? Before 1920 the Negro Leagues were pretty disorganized, with many independent clubs. They lasted in some form or another until about 1960, but really tailed off starting in 1948. Which is probably why they decided to grant MLB status to 1920-48, even if that is an oversimplification. 15. What is the spread in talent? You had inner circle HOFers playing alongside 16-year-old kids, and guys who'd be in A ball in an affiliated setting. So very wide. Similar to the Japanese Leagues, or 19th century baseball. 16. What is the spread in results at a team level? Much wider than today. Picking a random year... 1925 Eastern Colored League. Hilldale went 53-18-1 (.746), Lincoln Giants went 7-41 (.146). 17. What was scheduling like? From my perspective, weird and random. Teams often didn't play nearly the same schedule or number of games in the same league. It appears teams showed up and dropped out in mid-season pretty frequently. Official schedules were 40, 60, 80 games, rarely longer than that. And teams filled in the schedule playing many exhibitions and barnstorming games. Apparently some teams played 200+ games, but only a small percentage were league games. Many similarities to 19th century MLB.

Do we have any facts on what the TV money was like this past season? If teams got everything they were contractually supposed to get, or if it was a discount because of the reduced schedule? What about streaming/MLBAM revenues? Has MLB released anything on how all that fell out?