DrungoHazewood

Would almost (but not quite) make up for $400M revenue disparities with the Yanks.

The scientific method and statistical significance and quality data sources are fine for relatively trivial things like Mike Elias' analytics department. But this is life and death. If ever there's a time to wing it, it's now.

OOTP has several settings for trade difficulty. I think many/most players set it to "Hard" and "Favor Prospects". Which means you're going to have to work at it to get anyone to even consider your 29-year-old regular second baseman for any kind of decent prospects. And as a GM you will get multiple offers every week for what appear to be stupid trades, like a 33-year-old one-star outfielder and a Grade C- prospect, for your setup guy who has 11 K/9. (Say, 2016 Nolan Reimold and Mike Wright for Brad Brach). To the point where I don't even open many trade offers, I just delete them. But you can still get in situations where you get what you think is a really good deal. In my mind I don't mind an occasional deal that looks like its in my favor after being presented with 100 that made no sense for me at all.

Probably not. The Orioles were probably going to finish 40 games out. If not more. In half a season you could make that 20. How often does a bad team end up in first place in June? Not often. Let say expanded rosters and creative use of expanded rosters means the O's close the gap to 15. How often does a pretty bad team end up in first place in June? Not much more often. My guess is that a short season with expanded rosters increases the O's chances of making a standard playoff from well below 1% to about 3%. Just guessing.

That was in 73 games. In '02 he only played 20 more before deserting the team and going to NY. McGraw had typhoid or malaria in the mid-90s and I think mostly because of the effects from that his playing career was over by 30. The '01-02 Orioles are kind of an orphan now. bb-ref says they aren't really part of the Yanks, since there was almost no carry over between teams. So their entire history is just those two years, half of one was with a severely crippled team after McGraw's antics. And the current Orioles derive from the Browns and the even more obscure '01 Milwaukee Brewers. This is just an excuse to tell stories, but the '01 Brewers had Ned Garvin. Garvin went 58-97 in his career, one of the 20 worst winning percentages for anyone with 125 decisions. But he had a 124 ERA+, which is way better than McGregor, Flanagan, Cuellar, McNally. It's almost as good as Jim Palmer. Garvin was apparently a disagreeable guy, always getting into fights and disputes with teammates. Got traded annually. The suspicion was that his teammates hated him so much they'd throw games just to spite him. But he got his in the end. Died of the consumption at 34.

June. But that was a month ago. And I don't really know much besides everyone involved has a very strong financial interest to have some kind of baseball this year. The only way your prediction comes true is if a massive 2nd wave of the virus sweeps the country before any real games are played.

Can't tell you how many times they've come home from a long day in the mines with ribald tales of the large boys getting the death of themselves stuck in some crevice.

No, but unlike you I'm not preternaturally negative. My take is you're pretty accurate in your predictions if I build in a 50-100% negativity offset. So if you say no baseball until 2021, I take that to mean opening day in July 2020.

Of course not. Radical realignment was considered years ago, but all they could muster out of it was moving the Brewers to the NL and Astros to the AL because Bud was in charge and he was a Milwaukee Braves fan back in the day. Although... nothing like a desperate emergency situation to get organizations to consider things once thought forbidden.

That's why I have my middle school aged boys spending their COVID time in the salt mines. Too much book learnin' ain't good for you. Plus they'll sometimes stumble on a mercury deposit, and you haven't seen a happy boy until you've seen one playing with quicksilver.

Players can live at home, or close.

I've advocated for a three-league setup that's regionally aligned with little or no interleague for a long time. In a normal situation this would dramatically cut down on travel and out-of-timezone games.

You could have an unbalanced schedule that averaged 81 games/team with some playing 80 and some playing 82. I advocate for that because I enjoy half-proving cludgy technical exceptions to rules.

2020.

Necessary to implement strategies that are currently in vogue and keep pitchers relatively healthy and rested. But professional baseball existed for decades with both doubleheaders and rosters far smaller than 25 players. The first National League doubleheader was in 1876, and involved a Hartford team that used 12 players all year against the Cincinnatis who were a bit more extravagant and used 13.

When I was a kid I watched a lot of pro football. Then that tailed off as I found Virginia Tech and college football, and shortly after that the Redskins began their 25-year (and counting) era of total irrelevance. Now I barely watch the NFL, and don't even watch every Tech game. But to be truthful soccer has filled the gap. I still watch baseball (really just the Orioles), but football is down probably 75% from 20 years ago, and soccer is up 1000%. I'll get razzed for this, but I'd rather watch random games of either Asian baseball or German/English soccer than an A's - Brewers game or (most certainly) a Raiders - Bears game.

Sorry, hard to tell intent from text. Plus, I needed something to type about...

Don't forget women's soccer. I think MLB plays 81 games plus playoffs.

I won't simply dismiss data. I'll just determine if the context makes it worthwhile to use. It's hard to get people to use data, but it's nearly impossible to get them to dismiss data that they've already accepted as evidence of their point of view. Thus the annual effort to get people to take someone's 1-for-16 at the start of the season and mix it with 800 PAs of prior data to achieve significance. It's much easier and just about as accurate to tell people to not pay any attention to anything until May or June, except maybe a torn UCL or 6 mph difference in fastball velocity. My guess about '95 injury rates is that good data is going to be nearly impossible to find and if you find it it will be unremarkable, well within normal ranges, and obscured by 25 years and countless truckloads of noise in the data. You can round that off to "dismiss" if you'd like.

And I believe that with a little data you can come to irrational conclusions. I'm of the mind that statistically insignificant data is very often worse than subjective observation. Actually, I'm not sure how anyone could dispute that. If you watched Caleb Joseph at just the right time you'd think he was going to win the batting title. Teasing out the impact of the '95 lockout on pitcher injury rates and its relevancy to today would be like trying to hear a single conversation from across a crowded convention center.

There would still be an effect. Just muted to some degree.

It would be challenging to the extreme to try to control for the differences in the game in the years with shorter schedules (1994-95, 1981, 1972, 1918-19, and off and on prior to 1904). Even 1995 has significant pitcher use differences from today.

Gerrit Cole pitching five innings is probably more effective per inning than an average reliever going one. But if the O's use nine pitchers a game the gap is considerably less.

Don't want to upset their highly-paid All Star starters. You can't tell Gerrit Cole and his $300M that he's pitching two innings every four days. First, that's inefficient use of resources, second it might hurt his ego.

If they have expanded rosters and no gameday limits they could use six, seven, eight pitchers a game. Same pitchers could go as often as every other day. That could be a great equalizer. The Yanks will stick with a 5-man, the O's have 20 max-effort relievers.