DrungoHazewood

Super critical may overstate things, but every pick has an expected value (or potential for being good enough to have real value) higher than the next pick. Every slot gives you more money than the next. Would you rather have 100 lottery tickets or 80?

Since he's at a theoretical minimum he almost has to improve. I think he peaks around 40-50 walks a year if he hits .280 with power. Plate discipline basically gets better from the day a player enters the league. Normally. It's the exact opposite of speed or fastball velocity.

You're right, Schoop actually walked 50 times during his full year at Bowie. Last year in AAA Mountcastle walked 24 times in 553 PAs. AL pitchers, scaled to 553 PAs, walked 25 times. Mountcastle is at the theoretical minimum.

That should be easy enough to tell. In 1910, just to randomly pick a year, there were 16 teams and eight players 33 or older who had a 2+ win season. In 1930 there were six. In 1960 there were eight. In 2000 there were 30 teams and 25 players 33 or older with 2+ wins. So up a bit. In 2010 there were 20. In 2015 there were 13. In 2019 there were 12. So it seems like we've returned to historically normal levels of old players producing.

Unfortunately he has the strike zone judgment of Jonathan Schoop. Pham walked 81 times last year. Mountcastle has walked 101 times in his professional life.

The Orioles you grew up with didn't have 13 or more pitchers crowding out everyone on the roster. Imagine if Kiko Garcia was the only utility player and had to fill in at 3B, SS, 2B, 1B, and the outfield. I'll reiterate my desire for a rule that gets us down to 9 pitchers on the active roster, so there's more to strategy than "and Hyde motions toward the bullpen..."

It's human nature to round off "mostly" to "every single time". If the coach was a politician or Sparky Anderson he might say that Mountcastle was the best at swinging at only at good pitches since Mays or Cobb.

For 130-140 years the standard deviation, the distance, between best and worst consistently shrunk. In 1890 winning percentages went from .169 to .667. In 1915 from .283 to .670. In 1980 .364 to .636. By 2012 the American League was only spread from .407 to .586. There are individual seasons (example, around expansions) that violate this rule of thumb, but in general the spread shrunk over time. But now, maybe for the first time, that's reversed a bit over a period of years. The tanking teams are basically expansion teams. Maybe with more resources for the future, but on the same level of play. If we had a really strong metric for quality of play you might be seeing this dip over the last few years.

Use of minor leaguers has changed over time. Many years ago GMs kind of respected the minor league teams and pennant races as real things. Prospects would often spend an entire year (or two!) in AAA. Now the teams are almost exclusively seen as vessels for the optimal development of prospects. They're teams only in the sense that they wear common uniforms. Today Wade Boggs would never have 1000+ PAs with a .322 average in the IL. Today people would think you're on drugs if you sent Edgar Martinez back to AAA after two seasons where he hit .329 and .363, but that's what the Mariners did. In 1982 there were eight teams in the IL and 52 players who played at least 100 games, or over six per team. In 2019 there were 14 teams and just 21 who played 100 or more games, or less than two per team. A generation ago there was usually a pretty robust slate of candidates to choose from in a minor league MVP race. Now 90% of the players who are performing well play at multiple levels and at AAA most play at least part of the year in the majors. Mountcastle won the award because he was arguably the best young prospect in the league who spent almost the whole year there.

My immediate thought was Kwame Brown going directly from a rural Georgia high school to the Wizards' roster. Most NBA players never play in the D league, and the D league didn't exist until recently. But there are lots of leagues/sports with no or limited minor league equivalents. The MLB system is specifically set up to have six or seven moderate, discrete steps to get from amateur ball to the majors. Just going from a (whatever they call a D2 school now) to the NBA or NFL has to be a bigger step than AAA to the majors. Aren't there tennis players who go from playing high school to being matched up with Novak Djokovic in the early rounds of a tournament?

I think it was far more important that he OPS'd 1.093 on a 44-21 team where no one else got to .850.

I know this isn't the main focus of discussion here so I won't dwell on it, but I don't think that's remotely true.

In most cases completely unreasonable expectations. Stewart, right now, is about an average #25 overall pick. About 20 #25s (out of 55) never played in the majors for even a single game. About 10 more had MLB careers below replacement level. Mike Trout is the only #25 so far who's going to be in the Hall. Only five players in that spot (less than 10%) had solid MLB careers (10+ WAR). The Orioles have had two picks in that slot. Stewart and Wayne Wilson ('83). Wilson was out of baseball by the age of 22, having thrown less than 400 minor league innings to a 4.90 ERA. The Nats took Seth Romero in '17 at #25, so far in 47 minor league innings in A ball and below he's 0-2 with a 4.37 and hasn't pitched since 2018. The draft is an unusual thing. You have to be a 90th or 95th percentile success story to reach a minimal level of acceptance. To me calling someone better than 75% or 85% of his highly graded peers a failure and a mistake is strange.

That was 2015, so he was still smarting from the O's not taking his advice and tearing the whole thing to the ground in May of '14.

Yes, the Orioles have a poor offense.

Baseball is a boom or bust offense now. The league's hitting .230 and striking out 24% of the time, nobody is building their run scoring on sequential events. You just hope someone was on base the couple innings someone goes deep. And the Orioles, with no one on the roster guaranteed to have a 100 OPS+, bust more often than most.

Average wRC+ for a grade C left fielder isn't 100, it's more like 115. A 100 wRC+ with -5 or -10 defense doesn't play.

I guess this is a philosophical difference, but I don't know how you can call something a mistake when it was basically a failure to predict the future.

Almost every single other team could say the same thing.

It's hard to screw up on defense when you stand in right field daydreaming while balls fly over the fence, or are never made contact with at all. Strikeout rate has almost doubled since '81. If the rate of increase stays constant then by 2060 there will be only about 10 outs in play per team per game. At that point does fielding even matter? Just put nine Giambis in the field and you're good to go.

There are something like 8000 professional baseball players. Another 50,000 college baseball players at various levels. Millions who play organized baseball of some sort. Stewart is at or near the top 1000. At a very good college program at Florida State he was by far their best hitter. His senior year he played on a 44-21 team and had the highest OPS by nearly .200 points. You say Stewart was a draft mistake. The 2015 first round has seen four, maybe five, players out of 42 become established, quality major league players - Alex Bregman, Andrew Benintendi, Mike Soroka, Walker Buehler, and possibly Dansby Swanson. All of them except Soroka were taken prior to Stewart. No second rounder from '15 has been worth 2 wins in the their career so far, and you have to go all the way down to #100 (Harrison Bader) to find the next 5-win player. Who exactly did you want the Orioles to take at the time of the '15 draft? And are you as critical of the other ~90 picks in the top 100 that have worked out no better than Stewart? It is your opinion that the 90%+ of draftees that don't have solid MLB careers are all mistakes by the drafting team?

Another idea that I don't know that I've heard brought up would be shrinking gloves. The whole "striking out is horrible, putting the ball in play at all costs" theme was grounded in the era when players wore stubby little gloves. You got a huge advantage putting the ball in play because fielding percentages were .930 and 8" or 10" gloves effectively reduced fielding range. I would be open to reducing the max size of fielder's gloves by half an inch a year for a while and studying the effects. Part of the ball in play thing in 1910 was the crappy state of groundskeeping. But I doubt anyone would buy into making the playing surface at OPACY look more like your local Little League field.

Homers are down from 1.39 to 1.19 per game (still super high, third highest ever). It would be a bit of work to separate out the short games on game time, but the overall average is only three minutes off last year.

Making the bats bigger is pretty key. If only the largest, strongest players can play the max bat speed all the time game then contact will almost have to become a bigger part of the game. 75 or 100 years ago there was a class of player who was typically 5' 10", 175 pounds, swung a 40 ounce bat, and mostly just worked the count for walks and flaring singles, trying to put the ball in play. Bat speed was more of a concept than a reality for them. Imagine a bunch of Tony Gwynns, just not necessarily hitting .350.

I would assume submariners and low sidearmers allow fewer homers than the general population of MLB pitchers, as well as more balls in play, but I don't know for sure.