DrungoHazewood

I loved Wild Bill. I was a little kid and he was into the game and he led cheers to get the fans into the game. The wave is all about finding something to do because you're not paying attention to the game.

It was completely different. Eddie came up as an Oriole, his teammates loved him, and he was not known to be a jerk to anyone except some reporters. He also got a really raw deal from EBW who more-or-less blamed him for the combined faults of the 1980-86 Orioles organization. Belle was a surly drunk signed to a huge contract in mid-career. He corked his bat, snarled at kids, threw baseballs into the stands at hecklers. Saying Eddie and Albert are the same is like saying that Manute Bol and John Means are both tall.

The wave is a symptom. I probably shouldn't be upset by people who aren't particularly interested in baseball drifting off and finding other things to do when the game hits the 2:45 mark with four innings to go.

It's just semantics, but I'm pretty sure the term originated with the old perception that minor league numbers didn't really mean anything and that there were players who were awesome in the high minors but had some kind of fatal flaws that made them terrible major leaguers. That entire concept has been debunked, which may be why the term has taken on other connotations.

Bill James has an article up on his site ranking managers by how hard they ride/rode their best pitchers. I think it's subscriber-only. He put together an index ranking each manager against his peers, combining use of relievers and starters. The details aren't particularly important, but it's based on rankings and assigning points to managers based on that. It's scaled to years so someone who rode his starters hard by the standards of 1965 will rank equally with someone who rode his starters hard by the standards of 2015. He ends up using everyone who'd managed at least ten years since WWII. That's 59 managers. The managers who used their pitchers hardest were Bobby Cox and Billy Martin. The least, by quite a bit, was Casey Stengel. But on to the Orioles-related content... Earl Weaver was the 10th-hardest on his pitchers of the 59. But that's broken down into 3rd-hardest on his starters, and was the easiest on his relievers of anyone in the entire study. Earl liked to say that he wanted to get the most out of his top four starters as he could, and that was absolutely true. But he used his relievers almost ridiculously lightly. Pete Richert had ERAs of about 2.00 in '69-70, but only pitched 95 times and a bit over 100 innings combined in those two seasons. He had Eddie Watt who was amazingly consistent and had very low ERAs, but had two years under Earl where he didn't even pitch 50 innings. Don Stanhouse pitched in an era where top relievers would regularly throw well over 100 innings, and he never broke 75 under Earl. On the other end of the scale was Buck Showalter, who was 2nd to Casey in lightest touch on his pitchers. Buck had three seasons where his high-use score was zero, and there were only 32 instances of that for all managers in the entire study (out of 1806 manager-seasons). Other Orioles include Frank Robinson, who was 11th, one slot behind Earl for hardest on his top pitchers. Davey was mid-pack at 35th. Johnny Oates a few slots below Davey. Mike Hargrove was close to the bottom, right next to Paul Richards. And you'll probably ask, but no, there's isn't a correlation between how hard you work your pitchers and how good the pitchers or the team are/is. As I mentioned, Casey and Bobby Cox have some case for being among the very best managers of all time and they're at the opposite extremes with regard to their staffs. And you might think that managers tend to rely heavily on really good pitchers, which is true to some extent. But, for example, Bobby Cox led the league in being tough on his starters with the Blue Jays when his starters were Dave Steib, Luis Leal and Jim Clancy. So it wasn't just Maddux/Smoltz/Glavine.

I thought Quad-A referred to that mythical beast who dominates AAA but gets his butt handed to him in extended trials in the majors. Asher Wojciechowski has a middling 4.27 ERA in AAA, and had a 96 ERA+ for the O's last year.

Is that a real thing, or is that just atomic-level commentary on how the Orioles have screwed up everything from Jake Arrieta to the hot dogs? I don't know how anyone could see Mike Wright pitch and think he's going to win a Cy Young. Although he has only allowed three runs in 11 innings in Korea...

I don't know what qualifier means in the IL (140 innings?), but among pitchers with 100 innings he was 10th in ERA. And only 23 pitchers pitched 100 innings. This is AAA if you're good you're almost automatically some MLB team's 6th or 7th starter and you're not going to spend the whole year in AAA. Not unless it's the Orioles and they specifically want to avoid service time and don't care if they win at the MLB level. Similar to Mountcastle's MVP. He was the MVP despite having the 45th-best OPS (min 100 PA) in the IL, and the 4th-best OPS on the Tides because he was arguably the best real prospect in the league who spent the whole year there. All the guys like Josh Vanmeter and Nate Lowe and Chance Sisco with much better batting performances got called up and ended up with fewer IL counting stats. If you make the qualification criteria 10 or more starts Akin was 29th of 56 in ERA. It also says something that Akin had just 112 innings in 24 starts. That's less than five innings a start.

Which clearly indicates why we need the ban on politics, because the interpretation of that quote was far different than the literal text, and the discussion quickly turned south. Without the political subtext it's not particularly controversial to suggest that some optional events with mass gatherings could wait for a vaccine. But if you want to run with inferences you can make anything as crazy as you want.

You're not watching the ballgame anyway, since the Orioles and all their players and management are terrible and not worth watching. If you want to do the wave you can save the cost of a ticket and a $12 beer and just do the wave out on the sidewalk. And then you won't be standing up every 30 seconds in front of the people trying to watch the ballgame.

Or for the people who've shown up because the team is good and they want to be part of it, but don't really like baseball so after sitting there for two and a half hours they get fidgety.

No one. And it will be beautiful and perfect. No one should ever do the wave.

I always thought Base Ball was ruined when The New York Game won out over The Massachusetts Game and soaking the runners with the ball was outlawed. Circa eighteen hundred and sixty. Imagine a fine strapping athlete like Jonathan Schoop pelting a base-runner with a ninety mile an hour toss like a musket ball. Exhilarating! But maybe that's just me.

We'll all be better off if we don't fall into the trap of melodrama and believing that one person's opinion represents huge swaths of the population. We're not going to have a situation where years from now sports stadiums are restricted to 20% capacity, not unless some dramatically more lethal thing happens. Baseball will be fine, and sometimes lumbering old organizations need external threats to shake them awake and get them to consider changes that were never on the table because of tradition and inertia. If not for the Black Sox the deadball era might have lasted many more decades, if not longer. The threat of TV, franchise movement, and a third league resulted in nearly doubling the size of the Majors.

1979 2019 Game 03:18.00 03:43.00 1 03:13.00 04:01.00 2 02:51.00 04:03.00 3 03:48.00 03:48.00 4 02:54.00 03:19.00 5 02:30.00 03:37.00 6 02:54.00 03:42.00 7 21:28.00 26:13.00 Sum 03:04.00 03:44.71 Average Those are game times. An extra 40 minutes a game this past year, which is almost 25% longer. But a 50% increase in three true outcome at bats (K/BB/HR). 25% longer, 50% more PAs with the fielders picking dandelions. I suppose the other side of that coin is five extra free hours of World Series! (Actually the baseball probably didn't take much more or less time, it was the standing around). Looks like game 1 of the 2017 series was the last one played in under 3:00.

1) The main problem I see is that MLB decided to write 67 pages on a topic that could have been covered by a page or two of bullet points. Melewski wrote an article critiquing it, and I can guarantee he just skimmed over it. No sane person would read the document, including any of the authors; I'm sure it's like a 1000-page bill in Congress that the Congresspeople themselves don't read. 2) Baseball under the guidance of an inscrutable bureaucratic tome is way better than all the Orioles sitting at home watching the cooking channel. The CPBL, KBO, and this weekend's return of the Bundesliga are way better than watching ShamWow infomercials that all the RSNs are playing 24/7.

- They're still going to sign players after the 5th round, but pay them less. So let's say each team signs 25 additional amateur free agents and pays them each $10k, that's $250k. - $2.4M is the equivalent of the 16th-highest paid player on the Yanks. Or roughly Mychael Givens. I like how the BA article equates this to 12 team/front office employees making $60k still being employed instead of being laid off. Won't you think of the little people? C'mon... can we be a little less melodramatic? This is the equivalent of 2-3% of a small market team's payroll, and less than 1.5% of any MLB team's typical revenues.

Wusses. They should be forced to go 81 day games in a suit and bowler hat. That's why even the Yanks sometimes barely drew 1M fans a year prior to lights. You have to be a little addled in the brain to sit in the sun in dress clothes watching a 60-win St. Louis Browns or Washington Senators team.

I don't think he can simply declare the CBA void. You can bet there would be an immediate lawsuit, injunction, appeal, etc.

Do the math on that. That's sleeping with a different woman every single day for 55 years. Even if he lined up three new women a day, that's three different women every single day for over 18 years. I think he exaggerated a bit.

I think his major league uniform and $7M salary begs to differ.

I should look at the other sub-forums more. I've watched a couple games, have a few more on the DVR. It's been fun. Nice to have games where it doesn't look like every pitcher is trying throw the ball through the backstop, and every hitter isn't constantly swinging for the fences. I like the different batting styles and stances. And I've enjoyed the guests the announcers have had on. A lot of cool perspective, players who have played in Korea, Korean journalists. I really get into how different cultures deal with things we're familiar with. It's baseball, but not quite North American baseball and that's cool. I believe all the major Asian leagues have the 12-inning cap, the NBP certainly does. While I love the occasional Chris Davis game, probably 95% of fans have tuned out or left the stadium by the 13th inning. I know this is not a popular opinion, but the obsession with declaring someone a winner leads to bizarro things like running out of players and the game being decided by kind of forced, nonsensical moves. That's great for Chris Davis and Lenn Sakata, not so much if you're Darnell McDonald and you have a loss by your name in bb-ref forever. In soccer a tie feels like a more fair and decent result than PKs, which are basically coin flips with huge emotional baggage.

Couldn't you buy a Zeppelin (cost $21m) and have it fly around blocking the sun? That would be a lot cheaper than a new stadium.

That old Texas stadium that opened in 1994. I understand building a new stadium every 10 or 20 years when the old one is made of wood and seats 6500 and the old one caught fire. But when the old one is concrete and steel and has luxury boxes and cost $329 million and the taxpayers foot the bill?