DrungoHazewood

Probably not a whole lot different than if you make them have 100 games at three or four minor league levels. You're not going to take most teenagers and make them 600 PA regulars. You break them in slowly, platoon them, play them in spots where they have more of an impact. In the 1930s there were 121 seasons of players up through age 20 in the majors, with just 16 teams. 1940s: 190 1950s: 216 1960s: 333 1970s: 156 (free agency hit here, but took awhile for the implications to be realized) 1980s: 64 1990s: 46 2000s: 46 2010s: 46 It's not just service time, there are other factors like quality of play. But prior to free agency and the importance of service time players were routinely given minor league apprenticeships that would be considered borderline criminal today. Brooks Robinson was in the majors at 18. And not because he shot through five levels of minors, he had 400 PAs in Class B ball, which is kind of like Frederick today. Palmer was mostly pitching relief in the majors at 19, after 19 starts with Aberdeen (ND) in Class A Ball. Frank was in the majors at 20 after 1.5 seasons in class A, and eight games in AA. Dave McNally's age 20 season was 7-8, 4.58 in the majors, after debuting at 19. Boog was in the majors at 19. Milt Pappas made four starts at 18. Jack Fisher pitched 27 MLB games at the age of 20. Most of those guys had good careers, many of them great.

The only reason we don't see a fair number of players skip the minors entirely or almost entirely is service time. If there was a fixed age for free agency, like 28, you'd see the number of teenagers and direct-from-college players in the majors go up by five times overnight.

So @Can_of_corn, that means we'll see them in Baltimore in September of '25, right? All about the service time!

There are many opportunities for de-escalation.

Maybe this thread would have been more productive if it went more like this: Kjerstad is #99 on the BA list. Yep, Martin is higher, wish they'd taken him instead. Well, the strategy was to take the cheaper player so the overall draft class might be stronger. Sure, but I'm not convinced it'll work out. Yea, nobody really is. Wanna get a beer? Sure.

It was more of a career accomplishment.

Bonilla would have been better off if he'd taken the money up front and invested it in a relatively safe place. But if he knew that was beyond his willpower and he would have burned through it years ago, I guess good on him for being honest.

I was only commenting on your overall tone of despair.

I don't know how anyone could objectively look at the situation and decide that the sons are worse than the old man. Peter presided over the 1998-2011 debacle, was the common thread in the 1990s-2018 farm/development train wreck, bizarrely kept payroll at league average through the 2000s while the organization crumbled, he pretty obviously orchestrated the Davis signing. And it certainly fits that Duquette acted the way he did with regards to the future and (lack of) building the organization because of direction from the top. The Mike Elias hire couldn't have been a more thorough repudiation of Peter Angelos' philosophy.

Every 2-for-5 is a chance at Ted Williams.

That is a quote that I'm not sure any previous Orioles GM would have made. It's almost like we're catching up.

I'm always fascinated by the human truism that in any decent sized group of people there is going to be someone who sincerely believes that it's all going to burn down*, and really soon. * And when you point that out they respond that it's already mostly burned down.

Ah, yes, pitcher's poison. My kids know what that is, and ghost men. But only because about twice a year we play ball in the front yard. Being a kid is exactly what it's always been: you grow up and stuff happens and for most of that time you assume whatever is happening to you is pretty normal. It's as true today as it was when you'd send your eight-year-old to go work in the textile factory 60 hours a week.

There are also Oriole fans who think that the Illuminati are running a zoo of Sasquatch in the Warehouse to mine their pituitary glands for performance enhancing secretions. Takes all kinds.

There should be a phone app that generates weighted random outcomes for various ghost runner situations. You could pick ghost fielders with different characteristics.

I really and truly couldn't care less if they didn't theoretically maximize the draft by spending every available penny. Could they use more talent? Sure. Would some hypothetical other strategy where they picked other players have led to a point where they spent every penny and possibly, theoretically have gotten 2.2% more talent? Sure, why not. I'm with @Moose Milligan. Don't care at all.

Like everything else it's a balance between safety and people making a living. If MLB can make some money and pay some salaries (not just players) through media contracts while being a relatively low risk to the players, why shouldn't they?

The Bundesliga and all kinds of other European soccer leagues have been playing for a month with no major issues. I don't see how baseball is going to be that different, although the US has different rates of infection in different areas. I don't think safety is a huge concern, and they'll stop if it starts to be. And of course money is a huge factor. Why wouldn't it be? Baseball is a business, it exists to make money. This isn't a pickup game at the local park. MLB is a $10B corporation. Are you saying you prefer that all of the employees of the Orioles just don't get paid? I would love for there to be a MiLB season, there's just no point if playing games costs everyone money. Without paying fans every minor league game is a net loss.

Bruce is the poster boy for all that's wrong with baseball free agency. Just as he got expensive he turned into a 1-win player. He's probably now 10% better than DJ Stewart at 28 times the price.

MLB gets maybe half of their revenue from gameday sources. Something like that. Each team gets over $100M from TV, radio, MLBAM, etc. Some well over that. I'm guessing that MiLB gets 90% of their revenue from gameday sources. Teams like the Tides or Baysox might have little low-power AM stations broadcast their games, and I guess a few dollars from streaming games, but rounding off, if there's no crowd there's no money.

Probably not, but that's what baseball did for over a century. That is a good point about the Orioles. They have nothing to lose, almost no real prospects to ruin. I'd do some crazy stuff this year. If one pitcher is rolling, have him go 80 pitches every three days. Don't even have a starter half the time, go opener, then six relievers throwing max effort.

I don't know why I couldn't use the original Sliding Billy Hamilton as my ghost runner. He is dead. He'd certainly get to third before I could get to first.

I want to see some team decide that since it's just 60 games they're going to have their ace starter go every third day and get 20 starts. What if Texas gave 2/3rds of their starts to Lance Lynn and Mike Minor? Or if the Nats gave 100% of their starts to Scherzer, Corbin, and Strasburg?

So can the all-time pitcher force a ghostman out at third if he gets there before the runner gets to first and there were ghostmen at first and second?

There's a bit of selection bias in your dataset. There are thousands of prospects who could strike out 170, 190, 220 or more times in a season. Keon Broxton probably could have struck out 350 times last year if the O's started him in center every day*. But only the ones who're really good get to keep playing, the guys with ridiculous BABIPs because they hit the ball so hard. If you strike out 188 times and hit .188 with 15 homers your best shot is to become a cult hero in Toledo. * Broxton's 2019 K rate pro-rated to 700 PAs would give him 328 strikeouts.