DrungoHazewood

Have you ever watched a Tony LaRussa game? If there wasn't a rule about a pitcher having to face a full batter he would have carved out a role for a LOOGY who only pitched the first half of the count to a batter. The problem with trying to solve game times is that it's not one thing. Every single thing you fix is only going to shave off a few minutes. But when you spend a century adding a minute here and a minute there suddenly you look up and a standard issue, nine-inning Yanks-Sox game goes 11 hours and they break for tea after the bowler throws the 45th over.

Rio Ruiz hit well through 14 games. He is what he is. He's 26 and he has a career OPS of .664. In AAA he had a .744. He's basically the 2020 version of Craig Worthington.

Part of being an armchair GM is believing that if you do this one weird thing that your team will win all the trades and never let anyone go who will then have some success somewhere else. Every team has players who leave and go on to success elsewhere. Look at the 2020 Orioles. Santander was left unprotected in the Rule 5 and the O's scooped him up. Severino was waived by the Nats. Anyone in baseball could have had Iglesias for $3M. Alberto was waived by the Yanks and the Giants (and Orioles!) in the space of a few months. The Braves waived Rio Ruiz. The O's picked up Paul Fry for international slot money from Seattle (who happen to have a 6.30 bullpen ERA this year). I think that the Orioles of the last 20 odd years have had relatively few players leave and then go on to success elsewhere because they've had relatively little talent in general for much of that period.

I made that point the other day. Bundy has pitched like this for the Orioles in the past, including long enough ago that he still threw hard. I'll believe the O's failed him if he keeps this up for like 200 more innings.

I like the trade, but I know that's wrong because opinions on the internet aren't valid unless they're hypercritical.

I see a guy who was mostly a bad starter, then moved to the pen in AAA last year. His overall numbers weren't good, but he had a step change in K rate from 8-something to over 13. They probably see some glimmer of something that he changed when he finally was told he was a reliever going forward. He's free, and he may have some plausible path to being a decent pitcher. I think that's more sane and reasonable than assuming the front office is cheap, stupid, and devious.

I'll admit to kind of thinking out loud and not looking anything up when I posted this. But now looking it up, the 2019 Orioles starters had a 5.57 ERA and pitched 55% of the team's innings. This year they have a 4.94 and are throwing 49% of the team's innings (Only about four teams have ever gotten more innings from relievers than starters, all recently, all presumably because of openers). The relievers have an ERA nearly 2.00 runs/game better and are pitching quite a bit more. That's basically all of the difference between this year's team and last. This year they're using 3.7 relievers/game, last year 3.2. I can't tie the relievers' effectiveness to anything in particular, but basically the Orioles have hovered around .500 because their starters don't pitch much and the relievers are used more and are much better.

Gerardo Parra and Bud Norris.

I'm going down shortly, I said 17. I think I both got unlucky (in projecting, not for the Orioles) and underestimated the impact of using like 8 fresh pitchers every game because of expanded rosters. Despite two of their primary starters being horrific and several others not exactly lighting the world afire, the team ERA is a run better than last year.

All of that doesn't mean much if it's not in context. Many times I've pointed out that Bundy and Gausman are actually above-average #4 overall picks. There have been about 50 drafts with enough information to judge, and Gausman and Bundy are something like the 15th and 16th-best of the lot. So either the O's didn't fail, or you have to conclude that 80% or 90% of all high draft picks are failures. You can take your pick. You want a real kicker... Brian Matusz had just about an average career for a #4 pick.

If the O's signed a 17-year-old Dominican and didn't put him in the lineup in Baltimore that night CoC would start a hunger strike. If they did put him in the lineup but batted him 8th he'd still be grumpy.

I didn't get it. But I don't think anything is too obscure. It's up to us to keep up or just not care.

Almost every pitcher in history is battling to figure everything out before his fastball loses four mph. The very best are the ones with stuff so good they don't have to know what they're doing, ones who just naturally know how to pitch when they're 20, or the Nolan Ryan freaks (or is he just the one freak?) who throw 94 at 45.

Almost certainly.

He has a 2.50 ERA in 42 innings. In 2017 he had a 1.65 in April and a 2.00 in August. In 2018 he had a 1.98 in June and a 2.97 in April. In '19 he had a 2.64 in May. When he came up he was averaging 94 on the fastball, now he's sitting at 90. If he throws his next 200 innings to a 3.00 I'll concede your point.

That's way over the top. As @Can_of_corn said, '21 is not the year where anyone is expecting 80 wins. There will still be numerous holes, you can't fill all of them at once. There will be some guys like Valaika marking time until a better player comes along. Lost in this thread's hyperbole is that Valaika isn't a terrible player. He's just very unlikely to be a regular on a good team. He's about as good as a Ryan Flaherty or Lenn Sakata or Jeff Reboulet or something. Almost every team has players like that.

He needs to be in the tier above Trumbo and Mancini, where you're always looking for a way to move him to first.

If all you're saying is that Valaika may fall into more-or-less a starting gig for the 2020 Orioles as they play out the string and work around some injuries, I agree. In 2021 and beyond it's very unlikely his role on a good MLB team is anything but a utility player.

Some of it is probably related to short-term strategies for survival that break down when you're old. 100 years ago the average lifespan was 45, 300 years ago probably 35. Evolution over many millennia optimized for that, not 80.

Eeek. Yes, agree.

Weirder things have happened. Don Leppert was an All Star. So were Bryan LaHair, Dan Vogelbach, Ken Harvey, and Frankie Zak. Valaika and Wigginton are/were probably better than all of them. Biff Pocoroba was an all star, not even in his one good half-season!

Evolution failed us in sinus design.

I know this is blasphemy in some circles, but Mussina was as good as Palmer. If Palmer had pitched in a five-man rotation he may have never won 20.

WHY DO THE ORIOLES RELEASE PLAYERS AND THEN THEY BECOME SUPERSTARS SOMEWHERE ELSE!~?!>!?!? From May 1st 2018 through the end of the year Flaherty hit .136.

Here's a partial list of Orioles who have OPS'd 1.000 or better in a month of 40+ plate appearances since 2000: David Newhan Brian Roberts Jimmy Paredes Larry Bigbie Wellington Castillo Tim Beckham Jay Gibbons Felix Pie Mike Bordick Craig Gentry Chance Sisco Nick Johnson Ty Wigginton Chris Parmelee Chris Singleton Wilson Betemit Chris Richard Nolan Reimold Jerry Hairston Kevin Millar