DrungoHazewood

My preference is for the best team in each league goes to the World Series, so the real drama and excitement is the pennant race. But only if each team has a reasonable shot at competing on a regular basis, which means taking down the Yanks and Sox and Dodgers a few pegs. Which they can't. So whatever.

There is something to that. I've been lucky and my kids teams haven't had any really toxic parents. But you hear stories. At higher levels it gets more engaging. Younger players often don't have any action, and when the ball finally comes to them they're unprepared and look silly. And they bat a few times a game and often strike out. But even at the highest levels, for example, Nick Markakis sees less than two chances a game in the field. Is that really a thing? I find it a little hard to believe that 11-year-olds are not playing baseball because their favorite wide receiver only has to spend 2-3 years in college but a high school shortstop might spend 4-5 years in the minors. Manny, Harper, and Trout were all in the majors on or just before their 20th birthdays.

I think almost every parent of a Little Leaguer has a similar story. My oldest played in 15-12 game that had one clean hit, that an infield hit by my son. There had to have been 27 walks and 32 wild pitches. Heck, each team might have had 27 walks and 32 wild pitches. Parents were close to bribing the ump to call off the game by the 4th or 5th inning.

I think every sports league in the country has fewer people volunteer to be coaches than they'd like. At least every one I've been associated with is always looking for volunteers to coach.

Certainly a 17 game home season is very different than 81. I was just responding to sevastras' post that said he'd bet a lot of money that a large percentage of people who identify as soccer fans are only doing it to be cool, that they couldn't care less about the sport. I think that's no more true of soccer than baseball. A lot of US sports have a problem with pay for play. If you can't afford the equipment or the travel fees you don't play. Soccer certainly has this problem; the US has millions of immigrants with soccer in their blood who have every incentive to make it a career, but they don't have the NoVa/Montgomery County parents with dual six-figure incomes to be on the team. I think that's the primary reason US men's soccer has stalled. Baseball has similar problems. Throughout the last 150 years people from lower socioeconomic demographics have succeeded at sports at rates well beyond what you'd expect. Kids trying to get out of bad situations will fight to succeed in ways that upper-middle class kids just won't. My kids' fallback plan if sports doesn't work out (and it won't) is going to a good four-year college. If your parents make $30k a year you don't have a fallback plan. Sports that shut out the kids without a fallback plan are failing.

Baseball does need to take a cue from other sports. I coach soccer and there's a big emphasis from the national level on down to getting more kids playing more soccer and doing less standing around at practice. You start off practice will small-sided games, adding players as the kids show up. You alternate between skill development, conditioning, and play. You always maximize touches on the ball for every player. You structure the drills to flow from one into the next with minimal transition time, by pre-positioning cones and goals and other things. The youth baseball practices I've seen always involve a lot of kids standing in the field waiting for the ball to come to them, but often they'll stand there doing nothing for five, 10 minutes or more. And they'll bat 2-3 times in a 90 minute practice. They need to break into smaller groups. Have kids pair up, one pitch, one hit. Or one throws grounders to the other. Do long toss... Maybe this kind of planning and practice structure exists, but it wasn't there when my kids were playing 8-10 year old baseball a few years ago. Every single practice involved 30-45 minutes with players at every position during batting practice, even though half the kids were physically incapable of hitting the ball to the outfield.

I've been to countless DC United matches where one entire side of the stadium stands and cheers and sings and throws beer and yells and beats drums and waves banners and lights flares the whole game. The Screaming Eagles and Barra Brava and El Norte are waaaaay more into the game than pretty much anyone at any regular season MLB game. The average 2019 MLS match had more fans than a 2019 Orioles game. And Portland and Atlanta and a few other places regularly draw 30,000-50,000 fans. I doubt they all paid to be there only to be seen and be counted as cool at a sport they don't like. I get that it's usually in an employer's best interest to hire the people with the best qualifications. But baseball is a company that has to think about not only their immediate needs, but the next generation of players and fans. If you constantly take the Ivy Leaguer as your intern instead of the guy from Howard, the guy from Howard goes to the NFL or the NBA or college basketball and slowly takes a little part of the fanbase and future player base with him, and that's at least a small part of why large demographics don't really care about baseball any more. I shy away from broad generalizations about generations of people. Yes, millennials have a somewhat different perspective than 40 or 50 or 60-year-olds. But I have a bunch of them working for me as engineers and technicians and analysts who are fantastic employees, they work hard, they get results. If baseball gives up on them because of stereotypes about how they won't watch games with depth and nuance, the sport will be worse off for it.

Also, I'm a fan of Martin at #2 for the Orioles. But if Asa Lacy looks anything like the last baseball star named Asa (Brainard), I'll be fine selecting him.

That's funny, but almost no one besides you makes a decision on watching the draft based on Manfred's presence. I think they should get rid of the draft, and then have a three day amateur signing window extravaganza. Each team gets an amount they can spend based on the inverse of their market size. At 7pm on June 15th they say Go! At 7pm on June 18th they stay stop, and nobody can sign their first MLB-affiliated contract for another year.

What were we 18 months ago? Something like 28th, right?

I think the owners could win public opinion, or the optics of the situation, by offering up a CBA proposal that restructures how money is divided up in baseball. Today we have situations where one or two players a team often get close to 10% of the revenues of the entire organization, while rookies make 0.2%. Even though in a lot of cases the rookies contribute as much to the winning as the guy with the giant contract. The owners should propose a system that's more like a lot of companies where the veteran big performers make more, but only two or three times as much. Have a setup where the salary floor is $2M (per player), but nobody can make more than $10M a season. And minor leaguers with more than a year's experience get at least $40k. Sell it on equity and fairness and the fact that it's no longer tenable to have the MLBPA use laws designed to keep miners and factory workers from making 25 cents an hour to make sure David Price gets $30M a year.

We're talking about existential threats to the game. As I type that it sounds a little alarmist and silly, but... we are to the point where baseball is about as popular as luge with 20-year-olds*. If this COVID situation and the owner/MLBPA slap-fight cancels the whole season this could be an inflection point, where the game has a moment of self-reflection and realizes things have to fundamentally change. More likely it won't happen and we'll continue a long, slow decline. Usually fundamental change happens with big organizations by some smaller, agile organization out-flanking them, and they're forced to change or die. But MLB has set up a nice baseball monopoly, so good luck with a startup league that's focused on action getting a foothold. * If I had a luge track a few miles from my house I would have already forsaken all other sports for icy sliding glory.

Cricket was around in 1782, and is still the most popular sport in a number of countries. That may be the baseball model. A niche sport, but perhaps the niche will be big enough that it won't be terribly different from today. Even if MLB decides to proactively change things to make the game faster, more action-packed and more appealing to a wider audience there is no guarantee that it will work. What's cool and fun and engaging is hard, especially when you're trying to pivot from a slow, stodgy old man's game to something cooler. It's like Cadillac. They've had tremendous problems trying to go from your grandpa's car to a BMW competitor because it's too hard to shake the grandpa's car label, even if they've objectively out-BMW'd BMW is a lot of ways.

Except that it doesn't have to be. Everyone is probably tired of me saying this, but in the 1800s baseball games were often played in 90 minutes. In 1920 the average game was two hours, and occasionally you'd see a game played in a little over an hour. Baseball has made choices over many years that have resulted in a game that's not only three hours long, but also with long pauses between stuff happening. It doesn't have to be that way. We think in tunnels and bubbles and are familiar with what we see every day. Baseball can be played with two strikeouts a game, lots of balls in play and steals and defensive excellence, and nine innings can be over in 90 minutes. But a lot of proactive steps need to be taken to get us back there. The first of which is the powers-that-be need to really forcefully acknowledge that they have a problem. Which they don't, at least in part because large changes create uncertainty and force teams to shift strategies, and that's hard and what they do today won't be as successful. So inertia and status quo forever...

I haven't read a lot of Joe Posnanski lately, I think he's gone behind a paywall and there's only so many little things you can pay to read or watch. But he has an interesting and free piece out a few days ago wondering who is looking out for the game of baseball. It's really no one. The major league players are looking out for the major league players, the owners for themselves, and that's kind of it. There is no larger governing body of baseball, and I don't know if a FIFA for baseball would accomplish what I'm describing anyway. This isn't directly Orioles-related, but it is indirectly. He touches on the game being 4th-most popular among Americans, and kind of distantly behind football, basketball and soccer among those under 40. I think we see that here, the age of Hangout posters probably reflects baseball fan demographics (average age over 55) pretty well. And he talks a little about the dearth of African Americans in baseball. Baltimore is a minority-majority city, yet the sigfnicant majority of Oriole players and coaches and front office personnel are white. I don't know if that's a chicken and egg thing (or what's the cause and what's the effect?), but it can't be positive for the Orioles or the game that most people in their own city see the sport as kind of an afterthought. They'd much rather watch the Ravens or other sports. In the end Poz doesn't really offer any solutions, probably because there aren't any easy ones. What's popular and what's not is elusive. You can't do One Simple Thing and suddenly everyone under the age of 20 wants to be a baseball player like it's 1920 all over again. But I do think that baseball tilts too far towards nostalgia and history when making decisions, and has difficulty tailoring rules and marketing and putting together a vision of what makes the game exciting to younger people. And that's mostly because of the reactions of the core fan base, the older white guys who react very negatively towards changing the game, seemingly more content with a niche sport that's just like what they watched as kids (even though strikeouts and homers and other things have changed pretty radically) than taking proactive steps that might make things different in ways they don't like. But most of all for this moment, nobody is taking the MLBPA and the owners aside and saying, "hey, I know you want what you think is yours and you don't want to set a precedent in the new CBA negotiations, but (*whack*) you're killing baseball here!" If they don't get their stuff together and give us some kind of a season, a lot of people will go through the summer without any baseball and they'll realize that it just wasn't a big deal. And it'll be that much harder to turn it around with the younger crowd.

No you didn't directly accuse him of anything. You said that if he liked this tweet he should be released, since in your mind clicking like on a single offensive tweet years ago is the same as Delmon Young's multi-year series of incidents that include throwing a bat at an ump, being arrested for aggravated harassment (while drunk) that included anti-Semitic slurs, and later being arrested again for battery in an incident where he attacked a man while yelling racist comments. Sorry, but what may well amount to a two-second lapse in judgment isn't the same as an extended record of racism and violence.

Roughly AA average talent level, wider spread in talent, and at least a few parks where the run context makes Coors Field look like Dodger Stadium. But it's good to see Pie having success.

We don't have the slightest idea if Akin really liked the tweet, or if it was an accident. Delmon Young clearly and obviously did things that were very wrong. You're equating potentially hitting a button on a phone related to ugly speech with actually committing a crime. Or at least you're pretending to on the internet to stir up responses.

The response should be based on Akin. If he says it was an accident, it's over and we move on. If he comes out and says he liked it on purpose and agrees with the sentiment, then some kind of response from the organization is necessary.

Yes, that's true. Reynolds has that weird combination of being very selective but also about a 30 hit tool. What a strange collection of abilities. 30 hit, 70 power, 60 selectivity, 40 speed, 25 fielding. I think Earl would have figured out a way to get him 400 great plate appearances a year, leveraging the stuff he does well and minimizing the rest. He would have been a bizarro Gary Roenicke. Or... some position player version of Don Stanhouse.

Arguably, yes. But it comes down to our definitions. Do you get credit for a tool if you can't use that tool for good? Lots of players like Pie, Billy Rowell, Billy Beane, they had lots of tools, but were missing the baseball smarts tool so in the end none of the physical stuff really mattered.

Strikeout rate is the combination of selectivity and ability to put the bat on the ball. Maybe a little counter-intuitively being very selective usually makes your strikeout rate go up, so the K rate vs selectivity curve (often?) has a minimum in the middle. Willie Keeler struck out as few as 2-3 times in a full season, but his walk numbers would slide perfectly into Adam Jones' career. Because if you're taking borderline pitches you're striking out a lot more than that.

Coincidentally, someone asked a question of Bill James about how players went from being so underpaid to being paid extravagant amounts, and the answer had a lot of Bowie Kuhn in it:

I don't think you can call a guy "elite hit" when his career high in BA is .306.

Move the mound back 3'. Mandate minimum bat sizes. All media revenues over $50M go into a common pot and distributed by inverse of market size. Local streaming of games for all. Home team gets the choice as to whether today's game is played with a DH or not. MLB split up into three or four geographically-aligned leagues with minimal or no interleague play. Expand to 48 teams over the next 18 years. All nine-inning games are called after 2:30. Large financial bonuses for teams that complete the most full games. The entire balk rule replaced with "you can't stop in the middle of the windup to throw to a base." No more than nine pitchers on a roster (which eliminates the need for the three-batter rule). Teams are limited to 10 minor league transactions in a season, not counting injuries. Eliminate the draft, but institute strict slotting and limits for expenditures on amateur signings based on market size. The Orioles get to spend $20M, the Yanks $1M. Scrap current free agency/service time rules. All players become free agents at 28. The shift is legal forever. All new parks have to have a sum of their LF-LC-CF-RC-RF fence distances greater than 1890 feet. Can be 340-390-430-390-340. Or 300-425-440-425-300. Or whatever, as long as it's greater than 300' down the lines and it adds up to >1890. Implement electronic strikezones. Go back to using the balata ball. Every pickoff throw is a ball on the batter unless the runner is actually picked off.