DrungoHazewood

Ah, yes, Joe Altobelli. Gulliver has some alien lines from his minor league career. In '79 in the Tigers' system he hit .223 with 12 homers, 104 walks and 78 hits, 38 Ks. At Rochester in '82 he had 90 walks and 79 hits. In '83 he hit .309/.464/.472 with 117 walks in 123 games, 37 Ks, and 127 hits. In '85 at Richmond he hit .189 with no homers, but somehow walked 32 times in 44 games. For his career he had 831 walks, 327 Ks in 1084 games. Another strange thing, he was drafted in the 8th round in '76 and debuted in AA ball. Never played below AA until the last three games of his career.

.438 OBP in AAA at 26 and the Mets were like, yea, whatever.

Even Earl gave up on Glenn Gulliver. Gulliver's family of players is extinct. I think the last guy who did nothing but work the count for walks was Lance Blankenship.

It depends on the issues. I don't know if Puig's issues are nothing or something, but teams should most certainly take into account behavioral and other problems when considering signing someone. I've been a manager and a supervisor for a decade, and I don't care what field you're in you will reach a point where high performing employees who require constant discipline and course corrections make the whole organization worse. Obviously you don't shy away from a guy with a 1.000 OPS and GG defense and instead sign a journeyman because the all star is a little weird. But you just might avoid Albert Belle and sign a guy who's just decent because the constant circus just isn't worth it and it will cost you in wins and losses.

You'd have thought an offense headlined by Matthews and Jay Gibbons was bound for glory. In September the usual lineup had Conine/Batista/Gibbons batting 3/4/5 and Geronimo Gil catching every day. If there's a causal factor it just might be Gil, who had a .270 OBP and led the league in PB. The highest strikeout rate among all starting pitchers that year was John Stephens, who had an 82 mph fastball and didn't throw a knuckler.

Everyone loves the underdog. Well, everyone except Yanks and Patriots fans. Who doesn't want to see the little guy who hustles and out-works everyone else do better than the QB of the high school team who dated the prom queen? Every Oriole fan has a soft spot for the Rene Gonzaleses and Lenn Sakatas and Floyd Rayfords, the guys you could almost imagine yourself having similar talents and somehow willed and lucked and hustled their way into MLB careers. Just don't let that enthusiasm convince you that David Eckstein is the MVP.

Remember that as late as the mid-90s Juan Gonzalez won two MVP awards as an okay-fielding RF with an okay OBP and 150 RBI. Neither of his MVP years were in the top 10 in the AL in rWAR. The 1996 MVP voting is inexplicable. ARod hit .358 with a 1.045 OPS as a SS, and they gave the award to the slow RFer with 144 RBI. Gonzalez was 57th in the majors in OBP among qualifiers, he was about 90 points behind Frank Thomas in the AL.

It couldn't have been much more sophisticated. That was the timeframe where Bill James would look through 1500 box scores on microfiche to try to approximate things like run support for starters, or opponent stolen base rates for catchers/pitchers. Writing the annual Abstracts was a many, many month process, mainly because the data we can access in a three minute bb-ref query took weeks of research.

Is. Remember that conversation in another thread where Corn said a four or five win bar for Mountcastle was setting him up for failure on purpose? Manny just turned 28, missed half a year with injury and 2/3rds of another because of COVID, and has had four 5-win seasons, two of those over seven.

No, it's that it is natural to project someone to their ceiling when the large majority of players don't get there. It's why 80th percentile draft picks are seen as miserable failures. Mountcastle could be a 4-5 win player, but it pretty unlikely. I'm just hoping for Trey Mancini with an earlier debut. Not unprecedented, but unusual. 75 or 100 years ago it was common for someone to play in other leagues (minor leagues, Negro Leagues, etc) until relatively late in their careers, then have a MLB life starting in their late 20s or early 30s. Today, with hyper-structured developmental systems its much more rare for a player to be basically a utility infielder at 28 and an All Star from 29-35. But it occasionally happens. Melvin Mora.

To qualify for the ERA title this year a pitcher will need to throw 60 innings. The difference between a 3.75 and a 4.50 in 60 innings is five runs. Anything can happen, and it will probably be a fluke.

wildcard takes the whole office out for dinner at Ruth's Chris for making it to the first coffee break at the project kickoff meeting.

Five of the last eight years the MLB average OBP has been under .320. (Or you could have just read Frobby's post from 20 hours ago...)

In his last five seasons Puig's best mark is 3.4 wins, and that coming with a +14 in RF which he's never approached before or after. He's an average to average+ RFer. I'm sure from Puig's standpoint he wants a one-year deal where he hits pretty well and turns that into his last reasonably big contract. Hopefully the Orioles want nothing to do with the latter.

Maybe he can pull a Robby Cano or a Chris Davis and go from zero plate discipline to 70+ walks in the majors. It's rare, but not unheard of.

Not explicitly, but at least a few people are talking about how he's a top prospect. And he needs to have a lot of PAs in the majors this year if he wants to be a top prospect. I think he's an Orioles top prospect (for now) which is kind of like saying you're Rich Dauer, an Orioles HOFer. Hopefully in a few years we'll be talking about O's top prospects like Rutschman being 5+ win players. I'll be pretty pleased with a 3-4 win peak, not quite as happy if he tops out around 2 wins. But it's going to be a challenge to get much north of two wins with Adam Jones' plate discipline while playing first.

That's one of my Ryan Mountcastle risk factors. Can you trust anyone's 2019 AAA numbers? Jace Peterson is still a guy who'll OPS .674 in the majors.

In all of MLB history there have only been five seasons where a 1B/LF/DH with less than 30 walks and less than 10 steals had a 5+ WAR. And only 13 with four+ wins. Rk Player WAR/pos BB SB Year Age Tm Lg G PA AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI IBB SO HBP SH SF GDP CS BA OBP SLG OPS Pos 1 Felipe Alou 6.3 24 5 1966 31 ATL NL 154 706 666 122 218 32 6 31 74 6 51 12 2 2 11 7 .327 .361 .533 .894 *378/956 2 Joe Medwick 6.0 30 4 1935 23 STL NL 154 670 634 132 224 46 13 23 126 59 4 2 15 .353 .386 .576 .962 *7 3 George Burns 5.9 23 8 1918 25 PHA AL 130 545 505 61 178 22 9 6 70 25 8 8 .352 .390 .467 .857 *3/79 4 Garret Anderson 5.1 30 6 2002 30 ANA AL 158 678 638 93 195 56 3 29 123 11 80 0 0 10 11 4 .306 .332 .539 .871 *78D/H 5 Charlie Hickman 5.1 15 9 1902 26 TOT AL 130 564 534 74 193 36 13 11 110 15 7 8 .361 .387 .539 .926 *37/41 To be a 5 or 6 win player In today's offensive environment Mountcastle is going to have to OPS something like .950 (which will require hitting well over .300) unless he unexpectedly is a really good LFer.

As long as it climbs faster than the innings expected from a starter falls. To get to 250 strikeouts in 170 innings a pitcher has to be around peak Randy Johnson strikeout rates. I think even MLB will make some changes if the average starter is getting 12 or 13 K/9.

That's an interesting thought, but don't know if I've ever seen any evidence that points in that direction. I really don't know if it has any credence. The hardest part about getting 250 Ks today is pitching 200+ innings.

Except in 1977 he was Reggie! Today that's called your #8 hitting second baseman.

I think my two posts were consistent. Mountcastle was arguably the best prospect, the best non-organizational player, in the IL who spent 120 or 130 games there. There were any number of better players or better prospects who spent 30 or 50 or 75 games in the league but didn't get MVP votes because of their shorter tenure. Almost every other comparable or better prospect got called up part way through the year, either from AA to AAA or from AAA to the majors.

Thanks for the article. I may be underselling Mountcastle because of a combination of park effects and age. It's easy to forget Norfolk is still a pitchers park when Chance Sisco and Jace Peterson can OPS over .900. Although I still have trouble seeing a 1B/LF/DH with a 5:1 AAA strikeout to walk ratio being an impact player in the majors. To be a big asset he's going to have to hit at least as well as Trey Mancini, who was just a 3.5-win player with a .900 OPS last year.

The BABIP on flyballs is much lower than on line drives or grounders. I never understood the obsession with ground ball pitchers. They're usually not strikeout pitchers, and most of the best pitchers of all time are power pitchers who can work up in the zone and aren't obsessed with grounders. Clemens, Randy Johnson, Carlton, Koufax, Walter Johnson, Grove, Ryan... they all had a big fastball they'd blow by hitters at the letters. Also, ground ball pitchers usually have a higher rate of HR/FB, so they often don't allow fewer homers than flyball pitchers. And it's only been fairly recently that we've had the combination of everyone uppercutting a super-juiced ball, and almost everyone having a park that's 365 or 370 to an alley.

You know as well as I do that he was MVP because he was arguably the best prospect in the league who had more than about half season's worth of PAs. Is there any question whatsoever that someone like Austin Riley would have been the MVP if he'd been left with Gwinnett for 125 games, instead of less than 200 PAs?