DrungoHazewood

Whelp, he's right. Them whippersnappers and their book learnin' have ruined it all. It was best when scientific baseball meant a lot of bunts and hitting-and-running six times a game. Not, you know, actual science.

Do submariners or low sidearmers pitch longer than other pitchers? Frohwirth was done at 33. Quiz' last good year was at 36. Bradford done at 34. Tekulve pitched until he was 42. Carl Mays 37. Mark Eichhorn 35. Steve Olin... doesn't really count because of the boat accident. Byung-Hyun Kim left the majors at 28 but kept pitching into his mid 30s in foreign leagues. Brad Zeigler lasted to 38. I don't know. Maybe.

I will not sleep a wink until Don Welchel has been suitably honored by the Baltimore Orioles.

So... in your perfect world there wouldn't be exciting bang-bang plays at the plate to end the game? I guess I'm missing something here.

If only Swanson was fast.

They would have won it without Norris, but that's easy to say in retrospect. They won the division by 12 games, but on July 31st they were only up a game and a half and webbrick was on his knees begging Duquette to sell it all before it crashed down. Also, Hader was a 19th-round pick striking out less than a batter an inning at Delmarva.

According to this they didn't induct anyone in '14, '16, '17 or '19.

Gotta give Rich Hill some props. His career was basically done in 2009, when his barely-attached arm was lobbing up junk for the Orioles. Now he's 40, has pitched in 19 pro seasons, something like 30 teams including minors. And he also had some personal tragedy mixed in there.

The Orioles have years where they don't induct anyone. I think they should recruit some of us to be a Vet's Committee. I'll get right on my justifications for Pete Stanicek, Jim Dwyer, and a whole truckload of obscure 19th century and International League guys.

When the O's picked up Smith his career AAA OPS in 800 PAs was about .750. At the same time Yaz' was just about the same, and he was two years older.

And what would that have changed? If he went 6-for-20 do you pencil him in the lineup for 2019? Corn is spot on. If his name had been Floyd Jones or Mason Williams nobody would really have cared. If you sort the 2018 Tides by OPS you get Andrew Susac, Stevie Wilkerson, Renato Nunez, Mike Yastrzemski, Pedro Alvarez, Joe Rickard, and Cedric Mullins. That's less than a 100-point spread and Yaz is in the middle, basically the same player/age/OPS as Joey Rickard, who people couldn't wait to be done with.

It's a little funny to see Joe Medwick called a poor HOFer. He had a legit peak, lots of black ink from '34-38. Got MVP votes in eight different years, all star 10 straight years when they had normal rosters. A 6, 7, and 8-win season on his record, plus another four or five 4-win seasons. Part of the Gashouse Gang. 134 OPS+. Markakis isn't close to that except for the doubles. I always thought Perez was a stretch. Played a lot longer than Medwick but with same career value. Never led the league in anything as an offense-first 1B/3B. I think he got a lot of extra credit for having Bench, Morgan and Rose as teammates.

The bar is set somewhere around Rich Dauer, who was a competent second baseman on some good teams. 14-win career that peaked out at 2.9 WAR in a season. Both Jones and Markakis passed the Dauer Threshold circa 2013. I think they go in along with Machado, Tejada, Wieters, Hardy, Schoop, Guthrie, O'Day, Britton, and of course Lew Ford. Here's an interesting case: Chris Davis. After 2016 he'd had an 18-win Oriole career. He's now sitting on 11.

Unless he has a great month of September the O's will have to eat at least part of his contract. He's signed for $15M next year, and during his time with the O's he's been hurt half the time, and when not hurt has a FIP of 5.25. Nobody's trading for him and taking on contract on the basis of a 3.73 ERA in six starts when all his peripherals are shaky. I think best case is random org guy for (2021 Cobb + $8M)

They could just stick with reverse order of record and perhaps give the $500M revenue Red Sox a top pick and the Rays (who hadn't noticed anything different with the crowds) the 28th.

If you really get the yips they stop playing you. Knoblauch was -15 in '99, but -10 in 2000 with the yips because they stopped putting him at second. Disagree with the second statement, but whatever.

I looked up the normal day/night splits. In the early days of lights there was a consistent 30-40 point OPS advantage to day games. I'm sure the lights in MLB parks in 1940 wouldn't pass muster in the Sally League today. But by 1980 or so that has mostly washed out, and today it's only a few points of OPS. Consistently in favor of day, but pretty far down in the noise. I bet Gross had vision problems.

I say 20% this year's record, 40% last year's, 20% reverse order of Nielsen Media Market size, and 20% reverse order of average household income of metro area.

First thought was George Scott, but he went .839, .473, .716, .821. Oh, yea, Adam Dunn. I think he was mentally injured. In any case, the number of guys like that could be counted on your fingers. And I don't think you can slump three wins in the field. Unless maybe you have money on the other team.

I assume they have zero issues tanking the rest of the way for the draft pick, since they know with their resources they could win the Series next year.

There were people then who thought that was an inherent flaw. Might have contributed to the end of his career. He'd hit .216 and .235 for the O's, and had that RBI thing in '85, but had a 120 OPS+ both seasons. Followed up a nearly .800 OPS season with a .369 OBP with getting released, spending most of the year in AAA and then retiring.

There is no going for it. They're very obviously not going to sacrifice even the smallest asset for more wins this year. And they'll trade whomever brings back a decent return. They currently have somewhere between a 0.1% and 0.3% chance of winning the Series. Sacrificing anything to slightly move that needle is crack smoking craziness. And there's nothing even halfway rational they could do that would move it more than slightly.

Since I/we have already derailed this I'll make one more off-topic observation. In '99 Bichette is credited with being a -34 fielder. That's the 3rd-worst mark of all time in the bb-ref database*. In '98 he was -4, in '00 he was -2. There's two explanations I know of for something like that: 1) He was injured or 2) the metrics conspired to give us an unrealistic picture of his defense. No healthy player is going to go from basically average to historically bad in one year, and the back again. It would be like a hitter having an OPS of .850 one year, .512 the next, and .875 the next. Unless he was hurt it can't be 100% right. * at some point the metrics switch from using DRS for more modern players to Total Zone for those without as much or any play-by-play data available. I don't know the exact date, but maybe in the 90s or early 2000s. Generally you get wider spreads in the more recent DRS data, the TZ is more conservative. So a large percentage of defensive runs saved/allowed records are recent. It's entirely possible, I think quite likely, that the worst fielders of all time weren't Adam Dunn and Dante Bichette, but instead players from 100+ years ago.

I doubt Roberto Clemente could have thrown out the runner at the plate. He had to be 360-370 feet from the plate when he caught the ball, going back. And a 25-year-old Brady Anderson was running.

Not only was Bichette seen as a very poor fielder, but almost all of his good years were in pre-humidor Denver, in Mile High Stadium. The average OPS there in the late 90s was something like .850. In 1997 he was a well below average player who slashed .308/.343/.510. In 1998 he led the league in hits and hit .331 but was a 1-win player because he walked 28 times, grounded into 22 double plays, and the Rockies and their opponents scored 5.2 runs/game. I've told this before, but Bichette had the craziest throw I've ever seen. In a game against the O's in '91 or '92 the winning run was on third in the 9th. Someone hit a long fly to right that Bichette caught on the edge of the warning track. He took a step or two and winged it to the plate, it got to the plate about the same time as the runner. Only it was 25' over the catcher's head and hit the backstop on the fly. O's win! (Tracer alert: I think I was off by a few years, it was probably this game in '89).