DrungoHazewood

No, you don't understand me correctly. Or I don't think so. All I'm saying is that Gonzales, by virtue of playing in a completely loopy environment, gives us less information to go on. So he's inherently more risky. Some of that risk is mitigated by the combination of scouting reports and college summer ball. But not as much as a bunch of games played in a place where there are five runs scored a game instead of 10.

I'm pretty sure he was right. The game improves all the time. I'd expect the best players today to be objectively better than the best players of 50 or 100 years ago.

There are already players in the Hall who had less value than Manny does today (Kell, Traynor, Lindstrom). I think that as we progress in time the standards for the Hall will go up significantly. If you played in the 1920s and 1930s a career of 45 or 50 WAR was very likely to get you in the Hall. Today we have a number of players not even on the steroid list who aren't in with totals of 60 or even 70. If Manny flames out and just averages 2-3 wins a year for the next 10 years he'll end up with a career value over 60.0. The average HOF 3B has 68 WAR. Logically, he should go in by the standards of today. But I fear that the voters won't be able to cope with the expansion time bomb, and will push the average up. I know a lot of folks are in favor of higher standards, but that will also serve to highlight the disconnect between turning away guys like Scott Rolen and Evan Longoria and possibly even Manny depending on how things work out, and the fact that vastly lesser players are in. Of course it's pretty likely Manny ends up north or 70 or even 80 or higher. Here's another way to look at this. Career value among third basemen through Manny's age: 1. Eddie Mathews, 45 2. Manny, 37 3. Brett, 36 4. Santo, 36 5. Longoria, 30 6. Wright, 29 7. Schmidt, 27 8. Clift, 27 9. Baker, 27 10. Beltre, 27 Longoria is still active, I suppose he could still make a pretty strong case. Wright was destroyed by injuries around 30. Clift got testicular mumps (yikes), was injured in a fall from a horse, WWII happened, and he was pretty much done at 30. Everyone else is in the Hall, or will be.

I think 1900 the average was about 45, although the distribution was very different because the infant and child mortality rate was many, many times higher than today. So if you got to 20 you had a good shot at 60 or older.

Brooks has a very good case for being the best defensive third baseman ever. And of course he's a stand up guy of the highest order. But the idea that he was the best every single year for 16 years is almost certainly wrong, and an artifact of a flawed Gold Glove voting system.

His numbers should be discounted because of an alien offensive context. That doesn't mean his scouting reports aren't legit. But 42 games is 42 games. David Newhan once hit .400 over 42 games. Hurricane Hazle once had a MLB 1.126 OPS in 41 games. Gonzales' 42 games should be treated like anyone else's 42 games.

His career line in college was .344/.481/.570. And it wasn't even at New Mexico State, it was at sea level.

I know, I've seen that. And that's a very positive thing in his favor. But... it's also 42 games. If a 42 game sample is representative it's a coincidence.

I don't know that I'd call a guy who's already a first baseman at 20/21 a strong #1. #1 is the best overall talent in the draft and he's already limited to 1B/DH as a pro. In my book a strong #1 is an up-the-middle fielder who can also hit a ton. Not at all surprising that you're ranking Martin as a weak #2.

It's funny how Cal made a career out of never, ever saying anything the slightest bit controversial. He slips up once out of thousands of interviews and we will never let him live it down.

Not all of us. Just finished re-reading Where They Ain't, and it's weird how so many people from that era (and presumably the preceding million years) just got old and died when they were 50 or 60. And these were baseball players, in better shape and probably better diets than an average person. Willie Keeler died of congestive heart failure at 50. John McGraw at 60. Hughie Jennings was 59. Joe Kelley made it all the way to 71. Heinie Reitz died at 47. Steve Brodie at 67. Pitcher Bill Hawke died of cancer at 32. Duke Esper at 43. I think Boileryard Clarke and Bill Hoffer were the only NL Orioles still alive when the Browns moved in '54. That's about the same distance in time as today is from the '66 Series. There are a lot of '66 Orioles still alive.

Several times I've looked at schedules for the open curling at the (I forget the name) curling rink that's somewhere near Landover, I think. But it's never worked out.

But that was in the 1930s, when not hustling was a funny story that someone would tell at an Moose Lodge roast. Not like today when it's serious as a heart attack.

Let's say the worst case scenario plays out, and there is no 2020 season. How will history treat this hole in everyone's career? When I look back at players born in the 1920s I kind of give them a pass for missing seasons in WWII. Not just a pass like you'd give a guy who was hurt, but I make the assumption that they were active players at the time. I think you have to assume Joe DiMaggio was something like a 7-win player in each of 1943-45. He had 2214 hits, but history should judge him as someone who was a 2800 hit kind of player. DiMaggio and the others were that good, they were healthy, they were among the best players in the world, but outside circumstances meant they couldn't play. A little bit like the assumption that Oscar Charleston is one of the best players in history despite no MLB numbers. Segregation, completely outside his control, kept him from playing. I was thinking about this because Mike Trout has the record for WAR through age 27. He probably won't through 28, because Ty Cobb had a nearly 10-win season at 28 and Trout will miss most (or at least half) of his. Trout needs a little over five wins to keep pace with Cobb. So when 2043 rolls around and you're pondering the storied career of Renato Nunez, remember it should have been six wins total, not just five.

How long is a generation? About 30 years? The O's have been around in their modern incarnation for 66 years and have found themselves with Brooks, Cal, Eddie, Manny. None of them are Trout, but the only Trouts ever are probably Cobb, Ruth, Mays, and Trout. Bonds, I guess. And even Trout could fall off that list if his 30s don't quite measure up.

There were rumors to that effect, and also that Angelos pushed to take him because of his Greek ancestry. I'm not sure there's any evidence of the latter, probably just supposition from the standard issue Angelos is a dunce narrative.

Every step away from a standard environment adds uncertainty to the data. Gonzales has been playing in an environment that's like five standard deviations from the MLB mean in run context, and five standard deviations from the mean in quality of play. I'm making up the five, but something like that. On any given day he might be facing a pitcher who'll never play professionally and tops out at 80 mph, backed by a team that has no professional prospects, playing in a park with a runs and HR factor of 2.00. Throw on top of that the fact that his last year in college the season stopped after 16 games. A normal top five pick has a range of outcomes that stretch from "washes out in AAA" to "inner circle HOFer", with a mean somewhere around "decent major leaguer for a while". Almost by definition Gonzales' standard deviation of potential outcomes is higher than a player in a more normal context. There's only so much you can tease out of data with that much noise. If it were me I'd give the scouting reports about 10 times the weight of his performance numbers, which means you have less real information to go on than you would with another player. Absolutely he's a higher risk player than Martin, that's why he'll come substantially cheaper.

If air conditioning hadn't been invented I'd live in Colorado or Switzerland or Canada or something.

I'm going to pick a little nit here. Beltre will go to the Hall because he was one of the best third basemen in baseball for 20 years, he won gold gloves, he got MVP votes, he played on five postseason teams, he led the league in hits, doubles and homers. He's one of the five, certainly 10 best third basemen of all time. And most of that is reflected in very good seasonal and career WAR totals.

The biggest difference between Manny and Beltre at 26 is that Manny has been pretty consistent, while Beltre was a below-average hitter in five of his first eight seasons. But then he had that... interesting... walk year where his OPS went up .300 points in 2004. Through 26 Manny had four 5-win seasons, Beltre one. Beltre also had a unusual age 31-37 peak, so I'm not sure if the comp really means much. Adrian Beltre's career looks like one of those players who debuted in 1913 or 1983, and was in mid-career when the balls/players/whatever went nuts. But, strangely, offenses were going down as he both aged and got better.

I trust the scouts, but when I hear stuff like this I want to yell out "take the best player available, not the guy who OPS'd 1.400 in a little league park!!"

I would totally have a curling rink in my back yard if Maryland didn't now have the climate of Alabama.

Sure. But do you want to be the guy who let a '63 split window go for $25k? At the very least it pretties up the garage.

If I had to do everything over I'd have bought an old Mini or a Citroen 2CV or something more reasonable, that you can fully restore for $20k or $30k, or sometimes even less. You can buy a nice condition 2CV for $15k. The split-window looks awesome and about once every three months a delivery guy or plumber or something comes by and says "hey, you have the holy grail!!" But it doesn't do much good when it doesn't run and will take many tens of thousands of dollars and/or thousands of man hours to fix.

That's way too depressing. First, it's almost all 1960s and 1970s muscle cars. I know, I own a '63 Vette, but I'm not a muscle car guy. Plus, about once every episode of Barrett Jackson they have a numbers-matching '63 split window that goes for $150k or more, and it just reminds me that I can't sell mine and I don't have the time or money to restore it.