DrungoHazewood

1) The win rule is a holdover from a long time ago, and they didn't really put too much thought into the starter goes five/reliever can get a single out thing because relievers in 1913 were mostly some random guy who came in when the starter was either hurt or gave up nine runs in 2/3rds of an inning. The details of the rule have mostly been out-of-step with reality since long before any of us were born. 2) Here's a list of several hundred players who hit at least .300, qualified for the batting title, yet had an OPS+ under 100. Patsy Tebeau hit .302 in 1894 and had a 75 OPS+, or lower than Ryan McKenna's career mark. The Mariner's Felix Fermin once hit .317 in a season where he had 11 walks and one homer, and had an 85 OPS+. Hall of Famer Lloyd Waner (perhaps only because the committee got his files mixed up with his brother Paul's) hit .316 yet had just a 99 OPS+, and was a below-average hitter for his whole career.

The IL is walking 4.7 per nine, which is kind of astronomical. Across the minors walks are over 4.0 per nine everywhere except the AA Southern League. That was the case last year, too. Was a little lower in '22. But if you go back to '19 everyone (except a couple rookie leagues) were under 4.0. Is this because of the auto ball/strike system? I think I haven't been paying close enough attention to know. For comparison, the Majors have been over 4.0 walks per nine just twice and just barely, in 1949-50. And in the last 60-70 years have only been over 3.5 a very small handful of times. So the International League sees more walks this year than any year in MLB history, and it's not close. They're walking 44% more batters than the Majors are in '24. It would be nice if some aspiring analyst went and looked to see if AAA pitchers walk rates fall upon promotion to the majors, and vice versa.

It's Ben's Chili Bowl, which is half-smoke sausages that you can get chili on. I don't know if the stadium versions are the same, but the original Ben's is a DC institution.

That's miserable. The food situation at any sports stadium is often ridiculous. The prices outrageous, and anytime during the game it takes 10, 15, 20+ minutes to go through the line, and the whole time you're thinking I'm supposed to be here watching the friggin' game not in line! My boys and I went to a hockey game in Chicago in March and two of us missed a good 10 minutes of the game getting some wildly overpriced chicken tenders. The area around Nats' Park and Audi field is not great for vehicle access. I didn't have your experience, but was at DC United on Saturday and even 1.5 hours before kickoff it's a bit of a mess. Luckily I have a CAC card and can park on Ft. McNair for free. But getting out is a 30+ minute ordeal. I would have lost my mind if I lost my cell phone at the game.

Remember when expansion supposedly diluted pitching? When I'd ask why expansion didn't dilute hitting just as much the answer was usually something along the lines of "well, it's obvious that there are all kinds of effects that the scarcity of pitching shows that there's just more hitters in the pipeline and kids these days can't see that the training and stuff isn't like the ways that the people did it back in the 50s and all that... yea." Until someone shows me relevant data confirming Rosenthal's hypothesis I'm going to assume he has no idea if it's true or not. But his article will now be cited as evidence by any number of people who claim it is.

I haven't read the article, just the snippets in the original post. But I'm guessing there's no study to accompany this, where they show a bunch of statistically significant samples of rookie performance in their first X games in, say, the 1970s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, and then compare the data to the 2020s with a clear trend line that it really is more difficult to break in today? Because without that, this is more-or-less a fluff piece speculating on the causes of an effect that nobody has shown to actually be true.

Of course it is. While it's possible he lost the ability to hit overnight, it's much more likely that he's still a 100 OPS+ guy, +/- a few points. It would be somewhat unusual for a player to just lose it before his 30th birthday unless there's an underlying injury.

If I had one reason to trade him it would be the injury risk for Miller is about 30 times higher than for a non-pitcher.

300 wins has always been a automatic threshold, but only about 1/3rd of HOF starting pitchers have 300+ wins. If you want a long-career rule of thumb 50-60 WAR is a good place to start. Setting aside active players and PED cases there are less than 10 pitchers over 60 rWAR who aren't in the Hall. And five of them are from the 1800s when pitcher's jobs and expectations were very different.

I'm a bigger fan of game-tying runs scored.

On 17 different occasions Greg Maddux got a win in a game where he allowed five or more runs. Another 38 times he took the loss in a game where he allowed two or fewer runs.

You can be nostalgic about anything you want. I still want to see somebody hit .400 in my lifetime. But that doesn't mean that's best way to assess runs and wins. I only get a little upset when people turn their nostalgia into "We knew better in the old days than they do now, stop all this xwOBA, WAR gobbeldygook and go back to stuff that matters like pitcher wins and RBI!"

I'd be surprised if they didn't. But I would be surprised if they traded one of the big prospects (and perhaps it would take more) for a closer.

I have a question. Why would the A's trade Miller? Why would the A's trade Miller for another player who has five years of control left, when they could just keep the high-performing young guy they have locked up through 2028? If you're a team that is looking to build for the future don't you build around players like Miller? And if you're waiting for some point in the future where you're the Las Vegas A's, I'm still not sure you're making any moves because there are no very young players who're likely to be both more valuable than Miller and need 3-4 years in the minors.

I think this is unlikely. How often do you see successful closers transition back to the rotation? How often does that succeed? You often see starters move to the pen, but the other way? Very unusual. I'm trying to think of an example in the last 30-40 years... there were some in the 80s-90s. Like David Wells, Kenny Rogers, Curt Schilling, Derek Lowe. Smoltz moved to the pen and back after an injury. But very infrequent in the last 20-30 years. Jeff Samardzija, I guess. I have my doubts that someone who throws 103 is going to be more valuable/healthy going five innings every five days, and probably having to throw a wider variety of pitches and maybe try to not throw as hard.

The 2021 Rays won 100 games and 14 different pitchers had saves, no one with more than 14. The 2022 Rays won 86 games and nobody had 10 saves. The 2020 Rays, in just 60 games, had 12 pitchers get saves in 40 wins and they had a .667 winning percentage. You don't have to have one guy be the closer.

Urias is an average MLB player. On the free agent market he'd likely get 2/20 or 2/15 or something like that. I think it's unlikely that Elias releases an average MLB player and gets nothing out of the deal. If they're thinking about making a move I have to assume they're trying to find a trade.

1) Mayo appears to be a better player, and would likely do more for the major league team. 2) It's entirely plausible that he goes through an adjustment period. Unless he doesn't. Or he's hot to start, then pitchers adjust and he slumps in June. 3) Yes, it's likely Urias comes back to his career averages. 4) I would be careful risking losing an asset for nothing, especially as a panic reaction to one or two games.

Miller isn't the only reliever in the world. And any one player is no more than a piece of a contribution to a potential title. If the O's have a 8% chance at winning the Series right now (or 92% chance of not, which is actually very good), the addition of Miller and subtraction of whatever it takes to get him might make that 8.5%.

What if I told you that he's going to be an elite high-level reliever for three of the next five years, but also out with a torn UCL for 18 months, and sort of hurt/rehabbing/not very effective for the other six months? To me that's the mostly likely case, although the exact time periods could change.

Yes (they should be starting).

Ha! I knew you weren't actually a real person. Has ChatGPT just been using you as a test platform for years?

Yes, in the way you always do: Luis Hernandez is five for his last 16. We should monitor the situation closely to see if he's really going to be a .312 hitter over the rest of his career (despite no other evidence that this is in any way likely).

Run scoring consistency is pretty easy: either a team's standard deviation of runs scored, or maybe coefficient of variation of runs scored. Take all the O's runs scored for the year and dump them into a spreadsheet and run the STDEV calculation. The O's this year have scored 5.1 runs/game, and the standard deviation of their runs scored is 3.3. The coefficient of variation or variance (3.3/5.1) is 0.64. One standard deviation of O's runs is between 1.8 runs and 8.4 runs. The Astros, with the fewest Ks in the league, average 4.4 runs/game, with almost exactly the same standard deviation as the O's at 3.3. Their variance therefore is higher at 0.75. One standard deviation of Astros runs is between 1.1 runs and 7.7 runs. So with this very small sample of just two teams (which you should never use to draw any broad conclusions), you could argue that the Orioles and all their strikeouts have been more consistent in scoring runs than the relatively contact-prone Astros.

Given enough time almost everyone ends up with a platoon split that's roughly average. I would bet that Mountcastle is no different, and when all is said and done his career splits will be something like his career marks right now: around .850 against lefties, .750 against righties. Year to year that will be influenced by random variation.