DrungoHazewood

I'll just leave this by saying I'm very glad Tony LaRussa is managing the White Sox and not the Orioles.

The difference between driving drunk and killing your self or others while driving drunk is basically luck. Any time you get in the car there's some chance of dying. But add alcohol into the mix and those odds go up a lot. Maybe orders of magnitude. If all laws just punished people for the consequences instead of being deterrents then you could go 140 on the beltway and get a $60 ticket if you don't kill anyone. I guess that's a philosophical discussion, probably veering pretty close to politics. But there are a lot of people with poor judgment, who will take that risk even if it's 1000 times what a normal driver has. Like 17-year-old boys, and Tony LaRussa.

I have to concur here. Drunk driving is illegal because roughly 10,000 people a year die in alcohol-related crashes in the US. It's somewhat unlikely that you'll kill someone or die driving after a few beers, but still... I try to avoid death whenever possible.

No driving, but a security clearance. Without that I can't do my job. Hard to get or keep a clearance with any kind of a criminal record. Ending a long, successful, reasonably well-paid career in shame is an excellent incentive to not get a DUI.

I would likely be fired for the same offense, especially a 2nd offense. It doesn't look good for a team to hire someone with multiple DUIs on their record. This isn't 1980, although the Sox' actions here make it seem like they think it is.

I don't actually know the full history of the 40-man roster, except that it was apparently enacted in 1921. In the 1800s it was common for teams to have far fewer players than today. The champion 1894 Orioles had a lot of churn and chaos on the pitching staff through the year, and used 10 pitchers. They also used 10 position players. So at any given point in time they probably had about 16 active players. This was driven by precarious finances, couldn't afford to pay more players. And until the early 1890s all substitutes required the consent of the opposing team so most of today's strategies using relievers, platooning, pinch hitting, using defensive replacements, etc were unknown. You'd ask the other manager if you can pinch hit and he'd just say no. You'd ask the other manager if you can replace the LFer who just broke his ankle, and he'd say no. You'd ask if you can remove the starting pitcher who'd allowed 14 runs in 2 1/3 and he'd laugh, and you'd swap him out with the RFer. The '89 Spiders used 16 players all season, including a couple pitchers who threw 18 innings between them. In 1889 Cleveland was in the National League, Cincy in the American Association. In '90 the Reds moved to the NL as the AA started to disintegrate.

This is going to be just like when Bill Veeck brought Paul Richards out of a 15-year-long retirement to manage the White Sox in '76. As a younger man Richards was brilliant, but he apparently let everyone know he was brilliant. By the mid-70s he'd been out of the game forever, he was 67, things passed him by. There are stories of him doing weird stuff like showing up in the press box to grab food set out for the writers before the game, something that maybe was okay in 1955, but not so much in '76. I'm sure he said things that were fine in the 50s, but not fine by the 70s. He's the guy who's responsible for Goose Gossage's one sore thumb season where he went 9-17 with a 91 ERA+ as a starter in the middle of a long string of dominant years as a reliever. I guess LaRussa could stay out of the way and let the Sox get by on their talent. But that so much doesn't seem like what he'll do. I'm sticking with he'll manage the heck out of the team like he half remembers 1990 worked.

Williams was four-for-eight off Hall, with a double, a homer, a walk and a K. All in three games in 1960 when Hall was with the KC A's.

Random observation: Mark Prior is younger than Rich Hill and he hasn't pitched in the majors since 2006.

Well, they did get two of the Braves top 50 farmhands for like a week of Tommy Milone. Milone might be their Keith Moreland. Deadline deal for the stretch run, shore up the rotation... 24 baserunners and 16 runs in 9.2 innings.

I think the MASN issue will be solved when the last cable company stops broadcasting TV and all the RSNs go out of business. That this could have taken eight or nine or more years to resolve is hard evidence that the legal system is broken, perhaps beyond repair. Nats: we think this is unfair. Orioles: no it's not. Court system: we'll tell you one way or the other by 2023. We'd have been FAR better off with Newman telling Kramer and Elaine that he's going to cut the bike in half. We'd have had an absurd conclusion, but it would have been over in 2012.

One more observation. The 2020 KBO scored the same number of runs a game as the 2019 International League (5.18 vs 5.16). If you look at 24-year-olds with a .900ish OPS in the 2019 IL you mainly get players with .600-.700 MLB OPSes. Plus Cavan Biggio who's close to .800. Luis Guillorme, Dawel Lugo, Travis Demeritt, Oscar Mercado, Chance Sisco, Zack Collins, Christian Arroyo, Biggio.

Zips has him as an .820 OPS guy, roughly 120 OPS+. The last three years in Korea his OPS has been something like .875. So that's only losing 50 points in translation. I think that's very aggressive, very optimistic. And I doubt Zips has some magic formula that knows Kim has specific attributes that will translate better. - Dae-ho Lee played 2016 for the Mariners and had a .740 OPS. His prior few years in Korea had a high .800s. So he lost 150 points. - Hyun-soo Kim's three years before coming to Baltimore were .979, .884, .852, and he had a .719. So he lost something like 200 points of OPS. - Byung Ho Park had over 1.000 OPS each of the three years prior to coming to America. Had a .684 here, so he lost over 300 points. - Jae-gyun Hwang had a .964, .870, .864, then went to the SF Giants where he went 8-for-52, got sent to the PCL where he had a .785. Ha-Seong Kim is younger, but he's coming off three years of .926, .880, .832. To me he looks like a .675-725 OPS player, with maybe a little growth potential, but also some risk that he won't hit enough to play at all. And I don't know if he's really a shortstop, since the last two years he's started to play quite a bit of third in a lower-quality league. The Orioles need to approach this as if they're acquiring a guy who might have a .700 OPS and have to play third base, with some upside beyond that. So Rio Ruiz, probably a notch better. He'd immediately become my favorite player, but I don't think the Orioles will be in the bidding with that risk profile.

He hit almost exactly as well as Hyun Soo Kim did this past season. Kim's final MLB OPS is .719. I guess that's quite a bit better than Martin, so far.

As Frobby and Can_of_corn said, that's not remarkable. On average a 24-year-old is probably 80-90% as good as he'll ever be. There is some accounting for circumstances, and perhaps Martin gets a bit of a break for being a Rule 5er, and missing time for COVID. But he turns 26 just before Christmas. His peers are Robert Andino, Manny Alexander, Billy Hunter, Luis Hernandez, Curtis Goodwin. I'd be happy if he had Andino or Alexander's career.

It would be unusual for a someone with a .581 MLB OPS and negative fielding metrics at the age of 26 to become a good player. But I guess we'll see.

BJ Surhoff's career progression makes a lot more sense if you assume that in 1988 he was 16 years old instead of 23.

I'm pretty sure they knew. They all knew.

He was fine. It's the front office that put the team in a position where a going nowhere 70-win team had to give significant at bats to a 40-year-old.

In 2009 Nolan Reimold was 25, Turner 24. They were teammates at Norfolk for a month or two. Reimold had a 1.228 OPS, Turner a .749. Turner and Joey Gathright had similar lines that year for the Tides. Sometimes baseball is weird.

Tanning is the equivalent of trading Josh Hader for Bud Norris. Works okay in the moment, then you kind of regret it for the next 50 years.

Difference is that the O's failed in their earlier attempt to acquire Vlad. With Surhoff, Conine, and Tejada they had them, saw them age and decline, traded them, and then on the cusp of 40 brought them back.

It worked brilliantly to sign Surhoff and Conine years after trading them because they were too old.

When a non-tender boosts the class that bolsters the case that this is a weak free agent group.

Who on the Fangraphs list do you think the O's should sign now with the intent of having them be a major part of the 2023 team? Besides Stroman. Most of the list is 31-year-olds projected to sign for 2/20 deals or less.