DrungoHazewood

You're going to need to walk that one back. How can you not like Mel Proctor? Proctor and Lowenstein were like Jerry and Kramer, the straight man and his comic foil. It was beautiful.

Roy, your opinion is clearly and obviously correct since it agrees with mine.

I like Kevin Brown. Hope he stays with the Orioles for a long time. His pairing with McDonald and/or Palmer is enjoyable. But I can totally see how some people pine for the nostalgic feeling of listening to baseball announcers from some long-past era when all was good and right with the world and girls still liked them and anything was possible.

Random variation. The 2012 Orioles were 29-9 in one-run games. They returned most of the players, managers, and coaching staff and in 2013 were 20-31.

Depends, do you want to win the bidding? Then something (well) north of $200M.

Hint: He's 29 and has a .641 career OPS in over 1200 plate appearances spanning five seasons. Good chance it'll be around .641.

I lost the installation CD but that's okay, another one will come in the mail tomorrow.

Probably because baseball. What, did you expect that every inning is a microcosm of each player's career numbers?

Hitters tend to pull the ball more than go the other way, and about 2/3rds of MLB batters are right-handed. Which is why SS's tend to have more chances than 2B, and 3B get more balls hit to them than 1B.

He had three seasons where he was clearly above average: 2013, 2015, 2016. '13 he was one of the better players in baseball. He had a bunch of seasons where he wasn't particularly productive and/or didn't play a lot. And he had about four years where he played over 100 games and was clearly below replacement. I don't know if mediocre is the right word. He had wild variations in his level of performance.

Another observation supporting my prior conclusion: a large majority of teams who hit into very few double plays are not good offensive teams. Only six of the 20 hardest-to-double up teams since 1950 had an OPS+ over 100. If nobody's on base you can't be doubled up.

All good points. Although they are 24th in the Majors in strikeouts, and it's hard to ground into a double play if you don't put the ball in play. The O's do put it in play a lot, but managed to avoid the twin killings. The Yanks lead the league in OBP and are below-average in striking out, and have hit into 30 more double plays than the O's in just 48 games. The Orioles are hitting into a double play just once every 2.58 games. The full-season record for fewest GIDP is the '21 Rays' 75, or once every 2.16 games. I'll hazard a guess that the O's are going to hit into more as the season progresses. Otherwise they'll break the record by 13 GIDP, essentially lapping the field.

Unfortunately GIDP wasn't recorded regularly prior to 1950, so neither High Pockets nor the 1884 Union Assocation (or the Federal League, for that matter) give us much to work with on this topic. Although, weirdly, someone went back through all the accounts of the old National Association and found both GIDP and caught stealing data for that proto-league. So we know that Dickey Pearce (who I often confuse with Davy Force, doesn't everyone?) grounded into a league-leading 7 DPs in 1873, whilst being caught stealing not at all in three attempts. I have no idea if the stolen base data for the NA was using the 1886-1898 definition or the 1899-present one.

It is nonsense, nobody would do it if given a choice. If someone told you that you have a choice between scoring 5.1 runs/game and 5.2 you'll always take 5.2. But in the end that 1/10th of a run per game isn't that big of a deal.

If I had to choose between OAA and DRS I'm taking OAA 100% of the time, even if it looks less favorably on Ryan Mountcastle. DRS is taking play-by-play data and kind of squinting and guesstimating. OAA is more-or-less directly measuring defensive ability. If UZR and DRS agree and OAA doesn't, I assume the same biases skewed the former two. To me it's like measuring the length of a grain of rice with a school ruler, a yardstick, and a good digital caliper. I don't really care what number the ruler and the yardstick give me.

See, I was all prepared with the response that teams that have a ton of people on base are more likely to hit into double plays because there are so many more opportunities. A corollary to the fact that bad teams often turn more double plays than good teams, again more opportunities. But the O's are so good that they not only have a ton of runners on, they somehow avoid the GIDPs, too.

You're discounting the multi-million dollar advertising and influence campaign Phillip is setting up right now to ensure his prediction is correct. You're going to see Mountcastle's less-than-stellar play during every ad break on the Bachelorette more often than a David Trone campaign ad.

Of course there's some chance. There's a microscopic-but-not-zero chance that an asteroid strikes the All Star game and we end up with what was otherwise the 44th-best player in the league as the MVP. And that's not even considering that the 44th-best player in the league sometimes wins the MVP without an asteroid.

It's not intuitive, but every single piece of evidence points in that direction. Think of it this way, a player leading off every game might get 700 PAs a year. Batting ninth they'd get something like 25% less, or 525. Over his career, per 700 PAs, Mateo creates 67 runs, Gunnar 107. If you give Gunnar 700 PAs and Mateo 525 the two of them create about 157 runs. Give Mateo 700 and Gunnar 525 and they create about 147. So 10 runs difference over 162 games, or 0.06 runs/game. And that's probably the most extreme lineup switch you can make, every other one for the O's would have less impact, and most of them (say, swapping the 3 and 5 hitters) almost zero. So in the end the difference between any two lineups Brandon Hyde is going to write down is too small to ever worry about.

I don't know about eloquently, but every study, every simulation I've ever seen says the difference between the most and least logical batting orders (given the same nine players) is maybe a couple dozen runs over a whole season. Literally, the difference between batting Mateo leadoff and Gunner 9th is maybe 1/10th of a run a game. You'd be hard pressed to tease out the advantages of any reasonable lineup over any other.

I don't believe that AAA is much different than it's ever been. And if Cal is relying on his 1970-80s experiences he clearly forgot about Yount, Clyde, Gooden, Blyleven, Trammell, Palmer, Jack Clark, Greg Luzinski, Vida Blue, Rick Dempsey, Ted Simmons, Bobby Murcer, Catfish Hunter, Alfredo Griffin, Darrell Porter, Oscar Gamble, Cesar Cedeno, Jose Oquendo, etc, who were all in the majors as teenagers.

Hall of Famer John Ward had pitched 107 games and 921 innings before he turned 20. Possibly a contributing factor to him moving to the field at the age of 24. At 19 Amos Rusie went 29-34, 2.56 with 67 games, 62 starts, 56 complete games, 548 innings and led the league with both 289 walks and 341 strikeouts. The Cubs' Phil Cavarretta had 1145 MLB plate appearances as a teenager. Mel Ott hit .318/.382/.479 in 741 PAs as a teenager. If Ty Cobb had just gotten a reasonable amount of minor league seasoning (he was first up for 165 PAs at 18) maybe he'd have had a little better career.

His summer job between his junior and senior years in high school was ace pitcher for the Cleveland Indians.

I would hope they have enough confidence and faith in their evaluations to not throw them out the window when someone shuffles a bit in their first 10 MLB games. If not for service time considerations I'm confident Holliday makes the team out of spring training and is likely still on the roster.

There's this idea that prospects are rushed nowadays, not like back when everything was good and right with the world and everybody spent a year or two at each level finely honing their craft before getting called up. That's a total fiction. It's always been the case that players were promoted when they were better than the folks ahead of them. And in the past that was often much more quickly than today. A few years before Cal was drafted David Clyde made 18 starts for the Rangers the year he graduated from high school at the age of 18. Al Kaline never played a minute in the minors, neither did Sandy Koufax, or Bob Horner. Griffey Jr and ARod had fewer minor league PAs than Holliday. Robin Yount was starting at short almost the whole year for the Brewers at 18, despite OPSing .622. Ben McDonald had nine minor league innings under his belt when the O's called him up. Babe Ruth played 46 minor league games. Mantle was in the majors at 19, after just 40 games in AAA. Holliday has a minor league OPS of .932, mostly as a teenager facing much older competition. I don't really care what Cal says, the idea he was rushed is hindsight heavily flavored by a poor week-and-a-half worth of ABs. He'll be back shortly and he'll be fine.