DrungoHazewood

What, two feet high like the Dodgers? No, if anything they need to lower it.

Maybe it's time to admit that this experiment with having the pitchers stand up on a mound of dirt like some kind of deranged mountain goat has run its course, and that it's time to get back to baseball's roots and put the pitcher back into a box on flat ground.

I think it's plausible that Trumbo could have become a MLB quality pitcher. But at the highest level there are small differences that make the difference between a guy with a 5.00 ERA at Bowie and a good major leaguer. How many pitchers in the O's system have a good four-seamer with late jump and a pretty decent second pitch? 30? 50? More? We know that Trumbo had a solid career as a hitter. As a pitcher he had the same hypothetical career as someone like Griffin McLarty, Connor Gillespie, JJ Montgomery, Ryan Conroy, etc. It might have worked out, but the odds were against him.

Move the mound back a few feet to start. Mandate minimum bat sizes including handle thickness and overall weight. Deaden the ball some. Enforce and strengthen rules about minimum fence distances in all new parks. Make/reduce maximum sizes for fielding gloves, to incentivize contact and balls in play. There are lots of options, they don't have to do them all, at least not at once. But there are certainly things they can do to cut down strikeouts.

We share roughly 60 percent of our DNA with fruit flies.

Why would you think we haven't?

Is it wrong to make a choice that will work out in your favor 99% of the time, and there's no way to tell if this particular choice is the 1%? At 33: Carlos Delgado had a 161 OPS+. Over his last four years of his career he was worth 4.8 wins. Jack Clark had a 148 OPS+. Three years later he was done. Derrek Lee had a 146 OPS+. Two years later he was an Oriole... and done. Pedro Guerrero had a 145 OPS+. The next season would be his last with average batting numbers. Aubrey Huff had a 142 OPS+. He never had a 100 again. Lance Berkman had a 140 OPS+. He'd have two more pretty good seasons. John Olerud had a 140 OPS+. After that he played 214 games with a 98 OPS+. Jeff Bagwell had a 140 OPS+. He actually had three more good years before falling off and retiring. Mike Easler had a 140 OPS+. He had one more .800 OPS season. Cecil Cooper had a 138 OPS+. He had one more season where he was an average or better hitter. Don Baylor had a 138 OPS+ (actually at 34). He had one more season with an .800 OPS. George Hendrick had a 138 OPS+. He had one more part-time season with an .800 OPS. Andre Thornton had a 123. He's have one more good year. Adrian Gonzalez had a 130 OPS+. Since then he's gone .784, .642, .672. Dmitri Young had a 129 OPS+. The next year would be his last. Then you have Nelson Cruz and David Ortiz at 137. Cruz has a .928 OPS and been worth 21 wins since leaving Baltimore. And Ortiz had perhaps the best late career hitting and phone smashing record of all time. Also, remember Cruz was born July 1st, on the cutoff date, so if he'd been born 12 hours later his walk year with the O's would have been his age 34 season, so we'd be comparing him to these guys a year later and a year worse.

Thank you. Although Frobby did have a good point in the article he linked. Bonilla is getting the equivalent of an 8% return, which is not too far off the historical rate of the stock market. So he would have been quite lucky to have gotten a lot better return than what he's receiving now.

Me, either. What (slightly) offends me is the 56 other guys who were just as good who aren't.

There has to be a very, very long list of decisions made in the history of the world by old guys in power giving the middle finger to new guys who've figured out a better way.

As a relatively old guy who sits in a lot of meetings, we're asked to make decisions because all the smarter people ran away and want nothing to do with far reaching decisions half of everyone hates. But in the Hall's case I wish they'd take their job a little more seriously than just hanging out and voting for dudes they like.

I'd have a special wing of the Hall for players who had epic, far-wandering careers like Julio Franco. You know that in 2001 he hit .437 in the Mexican League? He debuted in Rookie ball in Montana in 1978, and played his last pro game for a Fort Worth indy league team in 2014. And in the middle he played 23 years in the majors. Plus stints in Korea and Japan.

Maybe there's something to this, but when someone who has loudly and repeatedly said that (yes, I'm paraphrasing) Manfred is a traitor to the sport of baseball I can't take this thread as any kind of objective viewpoint.

The Hall's first class was 1936. Depending on your point of view the first group of non-inner circle (i.e. very good) inductees happened in either 1939 or 1945. By 1950 there were something like a dozen guys in Cooperstown who were no better than, say, Jimmy Key and John Olerud.

I love (read: find it insane) that the hundreds of BBWAA members said no to Morris for 15 years, then a group of like a dozen old guys overruled them sitting around a table in a committee meeting.

My issue with it being a literal Hall of Fame is that you can construct an argument for hundreds and hundreds of players that's just as valid as Jack Morris or Harold Baines or Jim Rice. And you have to consider the Hall's own behavior, which is to induct any number of players who aren't famous until the Hall makes them so. A few years ago the Hall inducted Deacon White. If you went around OPACY in 2000 (heck, 2019!) and asked every single one of the fans in the stands who Deacon White was likely not a single person could have told you. Not unless I'd been there that day. White has been dead for 80 years. So, no let's not make it a WAR leaderboard. But I'd like to have some kind of standards. When you put Harold Baines and Jack Morris in but exclude dozens or even hundreds of players who were better and arguably just as famous it makes for good discussions, but doesn't do much for logic and sense. At least in my opinion. I could certainly write a few pages on why each of Jimmy Key, Frank Viola, Dave Steib, Jim Kaat, Billy Pearce, Dwight Gooden, Tommy John and at least 20 others were better than and as famous as Jack Morris.

And, strangely, the Hall's rules specifically say you can't use a single game or instance (like Van Der Meer's back to back no hitters) as justification for induction. But I guess a 10-inning post season win along with a 4.00 ERA gets you there.

Shouldn't be that hard, since no one cares about players who aren't yet in the union so the slots will be set at about 25% of what the kids would get on a theoretical open market.

Some fans of college baseball. But MLB cares less about them than they do about the Appy League.

Sure. So did Orel Hershiser and 50 other guys.

Or one where the draftees have no leverage, no opportunity for negotiation. They take what they're offered, or don't play major league baseball.

Don't necessarily disagree. But what happens when there is no slotting? We end up where we were 10 or 15 years ago. They Orioles pick Wade Townsend as who they think is the BPA. They say they can afford X for him. Townsend says I want X times 1.5, there's no cap, no limits, pony up the cash. The O's say they can't, so they get no BPA, he doesn't sign. I guess another option would be to just have hard slots. Tell the #2 pick he gets $5M. If he doesn't like it, he could go pound sand. Benefits of being a baseball monopoly.

My biggest wish for the new CBA is scrap the current free agent setup and make everyone a free agent at 28. You get the best players in the majors much faster (which could help with tanking), and you eliminate the Carlos Ruiz problem, where a guy who comes up late is never a free agent until he's well into his decline.

Definition: played MLB for parts of 10+ seasons, and a creative writer can come up with some kind of story about them that sounds superficially good. Jack Morris got in because he was arguably the best starting pitcher between Nolan Ryan and Roger Clemens (yes, they overlapped, shhh). Jim Rice got in because he was the most feared hitter in baseball among Fenway sportswriters. Harold Baines got in because everyone (except some other people) with 2866 hits is in. So, sure, 40 wins and leading the majors in homers in the 2010s could get him a plaque. I don't even think you need the "goes strong for a few more years" qualifier. He's already better than Baines, and nobody cares about PEDs if you're nice. Only bitter, vindictive PEDs count against you.

Brooks Robinson wasn't a good player until 23. But he spent parts of five years and 1000 PAs in the majors from 18-22. Sometimes the best way to develop the skills to be a major league player is in the majors.