DrungoHazewood

In the 1950s teams were terrified of television. If you could sit in your Lazy Boy with a TV dinner and watch the game on a 12" black-and-white screen why would you ever come to the park? Must keep all games off TV! Just guessing, but it was probably the 80s before game-day revenues dropped below 80% of overall revenues.

No.

Exactly what I was going to say. Hire Andy MacPhail and your rebuild might take like 12 years. Does he still believe that all methods of player acquisition (besides maybe at-slot June draft picks) have too low an ROI to use?

Ty Cobb maybe wasn't a completely terrible person, or no worse than some of his peers. But he wasn't exactly a great guy. He did some things that got him relative slaps on the wrist that would probably have resulted in jail sentences today.

Interesting, Piazza was apparently a first baseman in high school and college. But was converted to catcher as soon as he turned pro.

Ah, Cal Pickering and Willis Otanez! What could have been... The Tommy Davis thing was pretty weird. I remember watching him on many occasions at Bowie, and couldn't ever figure out why anyone thought converting him to catcher was going to work out. He'd never played there in four years in the minors and had been drafted as a first baseman. Has anyone ever heard of a first-to-catcher conversion working out?

It's $3 a month. I think it's worth it for access to Bill's writing, although a lot of his analytical stuff is... weird. Like a 14-part essay on establishing a zero-level for MLBers instead of a replacement level. Okay, whatever, he's still a very good writer and he's not always on perplexing tangents. His Hey Bill column where he just answers random questions is sometimes enlightening, sometimes just rude and dismissive. The messageboard is all over the place like a lot of messageboards. This week is peak BJOL messageboard with tons of awesome stuff from Tango and Guy and others. There used to be 3-4 jerks who'd constantly post insulting and demeaning political stuff (no ban on politics), but most of them have gone away. You might think James' site would be a hotbed of analytical discussion, but a surprising number of the regulars are somewhere between ambivalent and antagonistic towards modern analysis. At least a handful of Win Shares disciples who openly disparage and mock other systems, IMO because they grew up reading the Baseball Abstract 35 years ago and don't care to or don't have the aptitude to keep up. There's one old crank who posts in every analytical thread that the world went to hell when we stopped believing in pitcher wins and batting average. You'd probably be the youngest regular poster.

I thought most other teams had local streaming options. The O's, Nats and a few others are the outliers.

Here's one example.

If Cal had been an average SS he'd have been a 78-win player instead of 96.

Sure. But from 2015-2019 he was mostly the same player, with OPS+s in the 74-99 range, with the 99 being five years ago. In 2020 his BABIP was .407, 100 points higher than his career mark. So either he was performing at a wildly unsustainable level or he gained like 15 mph in exit velocity. I'm not even going to look up the exit velocity, it's not worth the 30 seconds.

I'll say that if Iglesias gets more than 20 PAs in 2021 there's a 98% chance his OPS+ is lower than the 160 it was in 2020. His most likely OPS+ is probably 85.

By bb-ref his defensive numbers in Baltimore were +14 and +7, so really good, and above average. Also, I had some interactions with Tom Tango on Bill James' site, and he pointed out that oWAR (which I have regularly disparaged) has some utility. You can look at it as "how valuable is this guy if he was an average defender at his position?" For Izturis he would have been below replacement, instead of +6 wins for his career. For Brooks, he would have been a 48-win player instead of a 78-win player if his glove had just been average. If you think about it that way oWAR has some use, instead of just confusing most folks. And I have to post this somewhere, even if it's both vain and nerdy. But Tango has been on James' site's messageboard the last few days in a big discussion on WAR and Win Shares and related things. If you don't know he's kind of on the Mount Rushmore of sabermetrics, currently a lead statistical/database guy for MLB. Co-author of The Book. Anyway, he complimented 3-4 of my recent posts, so it's like being a kid on Christmas, or having Neil deGrasse Tyson compliment your science skills.

Whose numbers are in a freefall. Even me, nearly 50-year-old guy who's been a Directv subscriber for 20+ years is probably going to cut the cord (okay, the cord to the dish...) soon and be without any (legal) way to get to MASN. For many people live sports was the reason to keep cable and keep paying those MASN fees, but now you can stream all kinds of stuff... except the O's and Nats in market. If I cut the cord I can literally watch more 3rd division German soccer than I can Orioles games without doing shady VPN stuff. Pandemic, no O's games on much of the year and when they come back they're got good. It's astonishing they haven't worked out a streaming deal, and for now the revenues have to be off significantly from a couple years ago.

I know he's your favorite player, but Valaika started 10 games and got 64 plate appearances from the start of the '18 season through the 5th of May. He was 6-for-58 with no homers and one RBI. In Colorado. That's why his playing time decreased. Eventually he found himself back in Albuquerque where he put up a .683 OPS on a 63-77 team that OPS'd .817. Life isn't fair, everyone doesn't get a 50-game stretch of regular play to prove their worth. Valaika didn't hit in 2018. And a .759 OPS in his minor league career doesn't point towards someone who's going to hit much.

What's Cesar Izturis up to?

When the O's/Nats aren't on you can count MASN viewers on your fingers and toes.

English soccer teams usually have more open books, many are publicly traded and file financial reports so I think we can trust their numbers. Tottenham Hotspur went from a 2019 profit of $92M to a 2020 loss of $86M. And that's their fiscal year, which ends June 30th. So it doesn't even include the losses from playing games without spectators from July-on. Manchester United is reporting 2020 losses of over 100m pounds, or something like $130M. Chelsea is reporting 91m pounds ($123M) in lost revenue due to COVID, so far.

Eventually the boy who cried wolf got eaten by the wolf.

There needs to be consideration for playing 2020 with no fans, and the assumption that at least part of 2021 will be played with no fans. I'm guessing advertisers and other revenue sources have worked out concessions for shortened schedules and games with no spectators. You can argue about how cheap they need to be, but revenue has gone down and a lot.

Back in the day there were players who spent years in the PCL or with some Class C ball team where they hit .355 and won championships and had fan clubs and I can imagine life being pretty good even if they weren't in the majors. Now you have to go overseas to do that, and people mock you from their Cheeto-littered couch for not being a Major Leaguer.

Cue @Old#5fan defending Luis Hernandez and the all-glove model of shortstop.

I think the Steamer projection is pretty good. I also think that in other eras Mountcastle could have been a .320 hitter, but nobody does that any more.

How does anyone get a psychological boost from being left in long enough to get hit around? He was up 6-0, in line for a win, coming off 42 pitches just three days prior, it was April 1st. And literally the last two batters he faced were liner to short, and liner to first. They took him out because he could go to the showers knowing that he pitched six very strong innings and was in line for the win. That was the psychological boost, not leaving him out there gassed to give up a bunch of hits and runs.

Twin paradox. The effect of putting Minnesota Twin Nelson Cruz in a spaceship traveling near the speed of light, and when he returns he's still in his prime and all of his peers are long since retired.