DrungoHazewood

Do fans of teams like the Sox think that way? Or do they just look at years like 2011 as one of those weird years they didn't win the World Series and laugh about it? I ask because the last time I rooted for a team that acted like winning was a birthright I was 14.

I didn't think through it very well!

Might be the only time in modern history. But I'd bet back-to-back inside the parkers happened multiple times a year prior to about 1920.

I don't agree with the premise. I think some pitchers who've left the Orioles have become more effective. But many left and really didn't pitch in the majors any more, or continued to pitch about as well. As with everything, I'll become a true believer when I'm shown relevant data. Some of it is context illusion. Pitchers appear to pitch better in parks that aren't as hitter-friendly as OPACY. If you want to fix that then get the Maryland Stadium Authority to renovate the park and move the fences back 50'.

No, that's not it.

No, it's that not a lot has changed with Bundy but he's so far avoided allowing a homer every four innings. I assume Elias was not going to keep any of the old organizational philosophies unless he had a really good reason to.

No error on Bo, just the route taking and risk-reward calculations of a really good running back.

I don't believe in the justification that says making a physical mistake is an error, but making a mental mistake is a nothing. The hitter got credit for a hit on a very routine popout, and there's no accounting for that anywhere. You have to dig through the box score and descriptions to find the odd "single to 3B, pop fly to weak 2B" or you'd assume it was a line drive.

Errors are a huge hole in how baseball accounts for what happened. A single is a single, it puts a guy on first. A strikeout is a strikeout, which is an out 99.9% of the time, and if it's not someone notes that there was a passed ball/WP. But an error... it could be four runs. It could be nothing at all, on a dropped foul pop up. It could be because of a bad hop. But there's no error when a player has a terrible lapse in judgment, so failure to call for a routine fly ball is recorded exactly the same as a lined shot up the gap. There's no differentiation (in the official records) of a throwing error vice a fielding error. I'm guessing the error rate in the late innings of no-hitters is significantly higher than otherwise. Errors and un/earned runs are pretty close to breaking the accounting of box scores, which should tell us what happened so we can reserve judgment for later.

Hey, if they meant for the strike zone to be a literal thing they would have written down its dimensions and definitions somewhere.

That's positively wildcard-ian of you. He hasn't even pitched 30 innings this year and you've handed him the Cy Young. For me, I'm going to need another start or two before I'm sure he can hold off Alex Cobb and Tommy Milone.

Thank you for your strict enforcement of barely considered rules of thumb.

Neon Deion and Bo involved in one, but Bo made an unwise route/dive, and not sure how the play at the plate wasn't an error.

Still not 100% clean, but awesome. Walk off against the Yanks.

Willie Wilson had 13 inside the park homers. He was really fast, he played in the era of old-school concrete-backed Astroturf, and Royals/Kaufmann Stadium is 387 to RC and has that curve at the pole that sometimes keeps balls rolling along the fenceline. Wilson had five inside-the-park homers as a rookie in 1979. That astounding. Seven of his first nine homers were ISTP. George Brett had seven ISTPers. In ancient history ISTP homers were about as common as over-the-fencers. HOFer Jesse Burkett had 75 homers, 55 ISTP, three bounced.

Bonifacio's was probably the cleanest. Those were all pretty good, but every one of them could have been a double or triple if the outfielder had played more conservatively. They all involved leaping or diving for balls with a fairly small chance of success that turned a fairly routine play into a four base adventure. I may never see this in my lifetime, but my dream baseball play is a lined shot over the CFers head, bounces to the 465 sign, and a clean relay has no shot at the guy at the plate. I may be mistaken, but I think the last park with an outfield dimension longer than 440' was Yankee Stadium before the 1973-4 renovations. It was 457' to deepest LC before the renovation, and about 463' to center. Houston was 435' to the hill in CF, but they brought that in to 409 when they ditched the hill because... who knows? Tiger Stadium was 440' to center.

I don't know how you call that an inside-the-park home run. Ellsbury had the ball in his glove and dropped it. Then the relay skips by the catcher when Andino is still five steps from the plate. If the same play happened in Boston I think it's a triple and an E-4. I challenge the board to find me a MLB inside-the-parker in the last 25 years that didn't involve questionable judgment by a fielder and/or dicey work by the official scorer.

I really want someone to build a ballpark where a player can hit an inside-the-park home run that doesn't involve someone making a mistake. Hayes gets credit for a homer last night, but if the Phils' CF isn't so aggressive it's a single. You could describe it as a single with a three-base judgment error. And the official scorer was nice when he didn't say anything about the bobbled cutoff and no-throw, without which there at least would have been a pretty close play at the plate. With parks no deeper than about 425 or 430 at any point I'm not sure Usain Bolt could circle the bases fast enough to get an inside-the-parker on a ball that just flies over an outfielder's head.

I was 12, and it was a constant refrain that The Oriole Way was the kind of magic system they had in place that let them compete every year despite having a fraction of the Yank's money. The Orioles built teams that won games, they weren't buying pennants with mercenaries. As a 12-year-old there's no questioning that, it's just the way it is. Every program I got at a game had a page about how they hadn't had a losing record since before I was born. In 1986, after Earl came back, I just assumed they'd go 30-10 down the stretch and win the Series. That's just what they did, what Earl did. I think my entire worldview started to change when the opposite happened. Three years of losing and bottoming out in April of '88, it seemed like they'd gone down a deep, dark hole. Which, of course, enabled everything that happened in '89.

I think that if you read the board over a long period of time that this is a very realistic place about the Orioles fortunes. There are some posters here who are tremendously optimistic, even in the worst most chaotic years projecting a winning record and an almost immediate turn-around. There are some who desperately, repeatedly emplored the team to be torn down into its constituent parts and sold off for scrap in the middle of the 2014 pennant race. But the consensus is pretty solid. As a group we usually don't get caught up in two week hot streaks or slumps; we have pretty good checks and balances. This Oriole team has 50-win talent. It's a team that was terrible last year, subtracted three major pieces, and only added waiver-wire type players to fill out the squad. They can be tremendously fun to watch, last night was a heck of a ballgame even if it ended after my bedtime. And in a bizarro-world 60-game schedule and opponents with stars opting out maybe they somehow back into the 15th or 16th playoff spot, although that's pretty unlikely. But it doesn't change the fact that this is a team of players with multi-year track records of being one that's essentially tanking. You don't have to put on blinders and pretend they're something they're not to enjoy their successes. If the players rely on wildly unrealistic internet commentary to get through the day they have more problems than I thought.

I hadn't noticed that about McDonald, and Palmer has been reading analysis stuff since the 1980s and makes it clear in his commentary.

It's too early in the morning, but my favorite two teams of all time are '89 and '12. And yes, I was there for the '83 season when they won it all. It's just different when you've been bad, counted out, had no real hope, put together a crazy Bad News Bears team and you take it all the way to the end with a chance.

I went to bed after the 9th because nine innings now take four hours and I have to get up for work at six. But it was a crazy game. What's the last inside-the-parker for the O's? I really don't remember.

Withholding dust until it has impact on a pennant race. Can't impact draft.

I think it's possible the Orioles see something in these guys that they like and it's possible that they'll thrive with the right coaching and environment and data. Sulser has had ridiculous K rates in the minors since 2016. In the old days (10+ years ago) someone with 12 or 14 K/9 in AAA would be tagged as a coming closer. I don't know how to read that stuff anymore, not with the league K rate at 9, and that guy you just saw looking at motor oil at WalMart strikes out seven per nine. But 12 K/9 can't be a bad thing. wildcard could be right in this case, just for the wrong reasons. He thinks Sulser is awesome because he hasn't allowed a run over his last three games. Of course that's silly, but whatever.