DrungoHazewood

You don't like the practice, so you would use a term like "only the Orioles".

In the end you do the math and figure out the discounted odds of those things happening and you assign a monetary value to that, then you ask the question "would you like that amount of money in the budget 4, 5, 6 years from now, or not?" You don't care, you think it's negligible, a lot of teams disagree.

Right. How do you sign Iglesias to a two-year deal at $6M if you're terrified that $100k or $200k in coaching salaries is going to kill you? Did the COVID situation really put the team on the edge of solvency? Not to fans or industry, to the coach. Like that. Is it really the simplest explanation? In a normal year this would be saving something like one tenth of one percent of the budget. Tony's right, if this is really about money they're going to decline Iglesias' option and trade or non-tender Mancini, Alberto, and everyone else due even a small raise. Each of those has far more impact than a coaching spot.

Every pick has better odds than every pick behind it, but the drop between any two picks outside of the very top few (without 20/20 hindsight) is almost too small to measure.

If they wouldn't call up little Yaz because he was a light on the resume, I would be very surprised and a bit disappointed if they called up Ryan Ripken after not hitting in AA at 26. He's a complete non-prospect.

I think we have a deposit down on a 2022 Ferrari. Hopefully it all works out when it's finally delivered, but we ain't driving it yet. The other four are 2018 Camry someone backed into a pole, a 2018 Skoda Yeti, a 2015 Nissan Versa, and a 2016 Mitsubishi Mirage with a primer colored fender. They'll probably get us to work, but we're not taking them to Cars and Coffee.

Okay, thanks. Not sure how much of those two years he'll be an effective player.

(Sorry for the weird formatting) 30-some years ago Bill James published a list of six indicators that helped discuss which way a team was heading the next season:

The issue with this assessment is projecting growth out 3-4 years in the future, after a position switch that we don't know how he'll handle. It's premature to call him a stellar third baseman when all he has on his resume is high school/rookie ball shortstop. Right now he's something like a 25 current/55 potential. He might be great, but a lot of guys might be great if everything works out.

At first you have a guy attempting a comeback from cancer with a year left under team control in Mancini. Mountcastle could go there, but currently he's an outfielder. In '19 Tyler Nevin hit .251 with a .744 OPS in AA. He's more of a 1B than a 3B, so he'll have to hit more than that. Nunez is a DH. Valaika a utility player. At third we have Rio Ruiz, who is 26 and has a .667 career MLB OPS. Gunnar Henderson just turned 19 and hasn't played above rookie ball. Bannon might not be a third baseman, and his best hitting numbers in the minors are in rather extreme hitter's parks. Mayo hasn't appeared in a pro game yet, and Welk is 23 and hasn't been above low-A. The rest of the players of note look like org guys. The presence of Ryan Ripken indicates the depth here is pretty shallow, he's 27 and barely gotten to AA. C/C+.

OPACY is a hitter's park and The Big A is neutral, so yea, he'll get some benefit. This year, strangely, he only pitched four road games, three in Oakland/Seattle's pitcher's parks.

My assumption is that he's still the same pitcher who has done very similar things in 50 or 75 innings before.

I wish the league would tell batters who hang out with their bodies essentially in the strike zone that they're going to enforce the rules that say if you don't make an attempt to avoid the HBP you don't get first base. Or maybe they just make the rule that the batter's box is three dimensional, and if you set up your stance with any part of your body outside the box it's illegal. Punishment: any HBP anywhere on the batter is a strike. Would have been awesome if they'd done that when Jose Bautista was still playing.

Their ranking in HBP actually went down from 2018-19 to 2020. It's like Bob Gibson, you know, the guy who hit every 4th batter just for intimidation? John Means hit waaaaaaaaay more batters per PA this year than Gibson ever did. HBP rhetoric almost always is far worse than reality.

The top 12 seasons in all time HBP rate are from the last three years, and the 1890s. 2020 was 0.02 HBP/game from being the highest ever.

Getting hit by a 75 mph fastball is absorbing most of 79 Joules of energy. A 92 mph pitch is 118 Joules. What's the equation to translate kinetic energy to pain? Google isn't particularly helpful.

I will be very interested to see how Bundy does going forward. His fastball velocity was off about a mph in '20, his BABIP was down 20 points and his HR/FB rate was less than half of the past two years, and his FB/GB numbers were pretty much the same. Ks, BB were nearly identical. So the primary thing was a lot fewer homers on a very similar number of FBs. It too early to tell if that even has a causal source.

Ron Hunt averaged 26 per 162 games, but NL Oriole Hughie Jennings was at 36. Jennings once had a season where he hit .401 with 36 HBP and 19 walks. And another where he was hit by 51 pitches in 130 games.

Kremer is a former 14th round pick who's thrown less than 40 innings above AA, and I don't think he's made any top 100 prospect lists. Although he has potential he's not an established MLB starter yet. Akin has 25 MLB innings, had a 4.73 ERA last year in Norfolk, and has less than 400 professional innings on his resume. He is not an established MLB starter yet. I like his strikeout rate, although he does not throw particularly hard. The Orioles have a lot more potential and optimism than they do fully- (or even mostly-) formed pitchers.

How do the Orioles' pitchers compare to the other 29 organizations? It's fine to give them an A, I suppose. But would that mean that 14 other organizations also get A's?

The rankings appear to be based on ceiling without much consideration for the likelihood of getting there. Meaning that the average grade across all MLB would be something like a B+. Most teams have someone at each position who could, potentially, be a good MLB player if everything worked out in their favor.

It's mostly the talent, not the coach.

We'll sometimes talk about how a rookie will get 56 plate appearances and hit .188 and that kind of dooms him, or at least forces him back to the minors for a long time. Even though it was mostly noise and bad luck. I'm sure that happens on the back end of careers, too. Decision makers and the player himself can get confirmation bias that SSS slumps are reality.

I am always skeptical of breaking down already relatively small samples into smaller samples and trying to discern trends and make projections based on a 100 PAs here, 200 PAs there. You're almost always better off assuming that career marks will be where the player ends up. Also, if consistent playing time drives better performances, in the minors Valaika played 136 games/589 PAs in 2016 split between AA and AAA. He OPS'd .722 with a .297 OBP. In 2015 in AA he played 124 games/512 PAs, .642 OPS.

What numbers would those be? Valaika had 583 MLB PAs and a .691 OPS, but a 72 OPS+ because much of that was in Colorado. He's a -7 fielder overall. All that adds up to about a win below replacement. He's 28. Alberto has 973 MLB PAs and a .678 OPS, good for an 81 OPS+. He's a +7 fielder overall, and totals 2.9 WAR. He turns 28 in a few weeks. Seems pretty clear to me that neither are stars, or even regulars on a good team, but Alberto has a very good case for being the better player. The only case I see for Valaika is if you put almost all your weight on the last 200-300 ABs... ahh... now I get it.