DrungoHazewood

They have a Hall of Fame for pretty much everything, don't they? I thought this was largely an American phenomenon, but apparently there are things like Finnish Hockey Hall of Fame, and the Australia Rugby League Hall of Fame. Was Baseball's the first? I'll answer my own question: No, apparently the Baseball Hall was inspired by the Hall of Fame for Great Americans at what's now the Bronx Community College. Which, in turn, was inspired by the Ruhmeshalle (translated literally as Hall of Fame) in Munich, which I've walked by but never went inside or understood the significance of. Apparently that was built in the 1850s, but there is an even earlier German Hall of Fame called Walhalla near Regensburg. And I'm guessing all of these took some cues from the Panthéon on Paris, and the Pantheon in Rome. So there you go, a direct lineage from the Roman god Neptune to Youppi.

Does NYC have teams in a league where you get sent to a lower league if you finish near the bottom? No, clearly not, because then the Mets would have found themselves in the NY-Penn League multiple times in the mid-60s and late 70s. I started rooting for 1860 around 2000, and stuck with them through multiple relegations. It's awesome to see the Grünwalder Stadion packed to the rafters with fans who don't care if they're in the 3. Liga, Die Löwen are their team. Hell would freeze over before they switched to Bayern. (Note: the section in the corner is for the visiting fans. When you're in the lower divisions the other teams don't always have the level of support 1860 does. When they were briefly in the 4th-tier Regionalliga they'd have road games where they had many times the fans that the home team did. Opposite of the picture above, the little visiting section would be overflowing while the rest of the stadium was mostly empty.)

What's worse is when meeting reasonable expectations is seen as meh, or even worse. There's 30 teams trying to win the draft, and the O's did reasonably well for their slot, so we're supposed to be bitter?

Right, if they didn't have clearly the consensus best overall draft of the 30 teams then they've failed. So they failed. Oh well, there's always next year.

My comparison works just fine. But if your mind can't wrap itself around it, then substitute Mets for Orioles.

Cool. But saying there's always Bayern is like being an O's fan and when they fall on hard times you say "well, you can always fall back on rooting for the Yankees."

- To save resources for development/infrastructure - To allow for enough pool money to hopefully get five or six players who have a cumulative value better than just hoping Martin works out

That may be the nicest thing you've ever said about Mike Elias.

One more point. I've always argued that you should grade drafts based on the information available at the time. If you draft Fred Smith and Fred Smith was the best available player and a year later he gets hit by a rickshaw and his career is over, you can still get a very good grade for the pick. You did what made sense at the time of the draft. The Orioles have thrown a wrench into that, because I don't know that anyone really has the information necessary to grade this appropriately. At least I don't have a good idea of where the overslots would have gone if money wasn't an option. I don't know if Kjerstad was really a top-five talent because of metrics and reports that aren't publicly available. I think the best we can do is say Elias went unconventional, and with that comes risk, but possibly also reward.

I don't think it's easy to see that, I think it's easy to see that Peter Angelos put significant constraints on previous GMs and it at least appears that his boys don't. I don't think it's trivial to take a team that's years behind in development and turn it around. And although I would have preferred Martin at #2, we'll see how Elias' strategy plays out in a few years. It was an unconventional and arguably risky draft strategy, but it'll be a long time until we can make a clear statement on how it did at acquiring talent. I'm also curious about what signings you're disappointed in. The amateur/international guys? If so, I think patience and a few more signing periods will tell that story. This was always going to be a long game. Fans want results yesterday, but that's not how this works.

It is, until it hits the players and owners in the pocketbook. Then they'll do anything.

You'd have to think through it, experiment in the minors. My pet idea is to make pickoff throws count as a pitch, just 90' off the plate so it's a ball. Unless you actually pick off the runner, then it doesn't count on the batter. So pitchers won't throw over, runners will get bigger and bigger leads, until the pitcher really thinks he has him. I think that increases baserunning, without making steals automatic.

I don't know. The Atlantic League was at least discussing it.

What's the appropriate level of compensation for the 151st best draftee? Look back at the 6th round from, say, 2005-2015. Most years there are one or two, maybe three guys who signed and then had pretty decent careers. I think there's one 20-win player in the years I looked, a lot of years have just a couple of guys in the 5-10 range. If you're paying for a 1-in-15 chance of a Bud Norris, Mark Trumbo kind of career, what is the right level of bonus? The Orioles have had 55 sixth rounders. Mike Boddicker, Erik Bedard. Third best was John Maine. 50 of the 55 had careers worth less than one win. Funny aside. In '95 the O's sixth rounder was John Bale. Didn't sign. But the O's had the last laugh - they later traded for him. Jayson Werth. But they got their man. And the full value of 26 2/3rds innings of a 3.04 ERA.

So you're saying there's a chance Kjerstad becomes the greatest player of all time?

We know what numbers stabilize most quickly for major league players. K rate, walk rate, GB and FB rate, homers per FB. Kjerstad only had 78 PAs, but about a .350 ISO.

Let's say that a normal draft, one where you just pick the Baseball America best player available at each slot, gives you six guys with the following probabilities of being a good MLB player: 40%, 15, 10, 5, 5, 5. Numbers made up, but let's go with it. The Orioles instead did something like 25, 15, 10, 10, 15, 15. It's plausible that the Orioles' strategy gives them better overall odds at developing a good player, even if the individual odds, especially for the top pick, are lower.

All of those guys could play some center when they were in their early 20s. Ichiro was still playing some CF in his 40s. Kjerstad will probably never play an inning in center as a pro.

He has more talent than Matt Hobgood or Chris Smith.

There are/were the two Sliding Billy Hamiltons, both outfielders and the fastest players of their day. Just separated by 115 years. Two Dutch Leonards, both pitchers, one from the teens and 20s, one from the 30s and 40s. Both won over 150 games. But Dutch was a nickname.

I want to see if any undrafted players get better offers from foreign leagues or even indy leagues. Even an Atlantic League team might be able to swing $25k.

Trumbo's career is complete or nearly so. Kjerstad, well, I'd never heard of him before Wednesday. There are a lot of unknowns. But based on what I've read the last few days the Venn diagram of Trumbo's career and Kjerstad's possibilities have significant overlap.

For the first ~4 years of his pro career Trumbo was exclusively a first baseman. When he got to AA, just before his debut he started playing some outfield. Not sure why, maybe because the Angels had Kendrys Morales, Mike Napoli, and Hideki Matsui already at 1B/DH. So it wouldn't take much to be better than Trumbo. He was 2009's Trey Mancini. Only an outfielder out of necessity.

We'll never be able to fix it if the going-in rules are that we can't really change anything of substance. But I could (and have) laid out a way to get back to a game with more contact, more baserunning, and more action. Limit teams to nine pitchers, deaden the ball, make the bats bigger, limit pickoff throws, make parks bigger. Someone just has to have the will to do those things. If base stealing doesn't merit the risk because of the analysis, change the game so it makes sense to run. It's the rules of the game of baseball, not the Ten Commandments.

I didn't want to be accused of being lazy. I like facts to tell the story. I hope Kjerstad works out, but it's not ridiculous to suggest that he might end up with a hitting profile similar to Mark Trumbo's. Those two things aren't mutually exclusive. Mark Trumbo was a good hitter. He just wasn't someone who worked out as a 30-year-old free agent signing.