DrungoHazewood

What does he cost? If you can get him on a one-year, $1M deal that might not be a bad pickup. He's always allowed some homers, and last year with the superball he was kind of off the charts. I'd think that if he's healthy (which is really the primary question to answer), and with the ball deflated a bit, he could be a decent guy to fill some big holes in the rotation.

With baseball that's kind of cheating. You automatically make the four other starting pitchers and the reliever who threw two innings last night ineligible. If you wanted managers to really think hard and make choices you'd have a 16- or 18-man active gameday roster. With soccer you can make three subs out of 11. The end. With 26-man active rosters you can make 17 subs out of nine. Ohhh, that's hard.

That's a terrible idea. While I'm a fan of seeing the best players play, I'm also a fan of top athletes stretching themselves and working with their limitations. Strategy in baseball often revolves around making do with the slugger who can't field, or the shortstop who can't hit. Do you pinch hit, knowing that your utility player now has to play the last three innings and he's not nearly as good with the glove? Is Renato Nunez worth it if he has to play third? NFL-style one-way players means you just plug in your lineup and go at it. Man to man. $225M payroll against $80M payroll, with little in the way of strategizing to make up the gap.

If anyone starts posting stuff about trading him when his value is high I may have to violate some stay at home orders and come beat you up.

I'm philosophically against counting Browns as Orioles, but nevertheless everyone on your list of Browns aside from Sisler has mostly been lost to history and I applaud you bringing them up. Occasionally people talk about Williams and the fact he just missed a 40/40 season in 1922. 39 homers, 37 steals. That was the only 35/35 season from the dawn of professional baseball until Mays did it in 1956. Thing is Williams was about 60% park effects. Old Sportsmans Park was a great place to hit, and Williams had about a 1.000 OPS there, compared to just over .800 on the road. About 75% of his career homers were at home, numbers a modern Rockie would be envious of. In '22 he hit .290 with seven homers on the road, .373 with a 1.238 at home. bb-ref has him as nearly an 8-win player in '22 and '23 but that may overstate the case. He was also a guy who didn't start playing ball until late, and didn't get to the majors until he was almost 30. Would be an interesting guy to try a do-over career in OOTP or something with him debuting at 23. Harlond Clift could be called the first modern third baseman. Prior to the 1920s second base was more offense-focused, and third was where you put a strong defender who didn't hit much. Clift and Ken Keltner were some of the first guys we'd recognize as being out of the Brooks, Schmidt, Scott Rolen, Chipper Jones model. Had some years in the late 30s with 20-35 homers, 100+ RBI. But had some injuries, got traded to the Senators when Griffith Stadium was just impossible for a power hitter, and was done at 32. George Stone is truly lost to history. He was arguably the best player in the world in 1906, and I couldn't even pick him out of a lineup. Led the league in average, slugging, OBP, OPS+, OPS, Total bases. Another guy like Williams who just didn't start playing pro ball until the age a modern player would be in the majors, then bounced around the independent minors for most of his 20s. So his MLB career was really short, and looks worse than it was because it was the depths of the deadball era. Even his last year with a .644 OPS was better than average. 26 wins from age 28-33 is typical of a Hall of Famer, on par with Mark McGwire, Scott Rolen, Dwight Evans, Lou Bodreau, Yogi, Eddie, Molitor, others. But that was his entire career. Bobby Wallace is perhaps the most obscure HOFer. Shortstop. Played forever, from 1894-1918. Never led the league in any offensive category but was apparently an excellent fielder. Vern Stephens is a little famous for his time as teammates with Ted Williams, and would probably be in the Hall if not for drinking. Urban Shocker is remembered for being on the '27 Yanks, but spent most of his career on the Browns. It seems like a third of the league from the 1920s is in Cooperstown, but somehow they missed Shocker. I don't really know much of anything about Baby Doll Jacobson, but he was the center fielder on the Browns during their brief period of relevance in the early 20s. Del Pratt was the old-school kind of second baseman who could hit but probably couldn't turn the double play and would be a third baseman today. I swear a remember an anecdote about him having a great arm, but that doesn't really make sense for a second baseman.

So they're talking about schemes to restart baseball eventually, and most of them involve expanded rosters. This being 2020, the mind of a manager immediately goes to "wow, now I can finally have my dream of a 23-man pitching staff!!" But I think we can do better than that. What kind of strategies could an innovative team use if given a 30 or 35-man roster all year? It'll be a little like September roster expansion, but for presumably a longer period. We could have teams platoon the heck out of six positions. Teams that are short on talent and just don't care... like your 2020 Baltimore Orioles. Also, we could see a return on pinch hitting, pinch running, defensive replacements. What else?

That was the one year he was really good. Slightly above average offense, by far his best defensive metrics. Looking at that I assume that his +24 defense (+30 (!) if you include the 17 games with the Angels) is an anomaly, that some combination of playing next to Ed Brinkman and the characteristics of the Senators' pitching staff gave him an unrealistically high mark that one season. The year before he was +8, the year after +5. Even with that 6+ win 1970 his career value was 15 wins in 17 years. The last 10 years of his career he was worth three wins. Weird comp: Larry Parrish. Both he and Rodriguez were third basemen at about the same time. They both played 15+ years in the majors. They were both worth about 15 wins in their careers, so in a typical year they were regulars but below average. They each had one big, All Star kind of season. But while Rodriguez was a poor hitter but a good fielder, Parrish was a poor fielder but an above-average hitter.

Also, the Nats just moved their Carolina League team to Fredericksburg for 2020. I doubt they'd abandon a newly-relocated team and brand-new $35M stadium to move into Frederick and 31-year-old Harry Grove.

Gwinnett is the only International League team that drew as poorly as the BaySox last year. I don't know that that would change if the BaySox became a AAA team. The Tides drew 60% more fans.

In another thread we talked about extinct player types. This game is an example of endangered strategies: the really quick hook. McNally gave up three runs on four hits and a walk and was done for the day, and then he got four days rest. So in an eight-day period he threw about 25 pitches. From '54-59 the Orioles had about five games a season where a starter was yanked in the first inning after allowing four or fewer runs. There were seven years in the 60s where that happened 3-5 times. In the 70s and 80s it still happened almost once a month, with '76 seeing Earl do it seven times. But since 1990 it's only happened 12 times, or about once every three years. With the advent of all max-effort, one-inning relievers the starter who got bombed early has become the long reliever. I think this is also a realization that healthy pitchers don't really have games where they're going to allow five runs an inning, they just had some bad luck or put a couple balls over the plate. If you leave them in you get them regular work and there's every chance they'll be their normal selves in the 2nd inning and beyond.

He was kind of a poor man's 3B version of Mark Belanger. He had a couple years as a decent hitter, and one year where his retroactive defensive numbers look great. But otherwise he was an above-average 3B who'd OPS .600. For the '83 Orioles he went 8-for-67 with no extra base hits and no walks, and was actually on the team from April until August. After they picked up Todd Cruz he became redundant.

That was very Drungo of you!

Not that you're defending this, but you could have just said "math". In '61 the Yanks drew 1.7M fans. Let's say they pulled down $3 a ticket once you figure in hot dog sales and programs and beer and the like. That's revenues of $5M. They probably also made a little bit off radio and TV. Roger Maris' peak salary was $75,000 a year. In '61 Maris made $32k, Whitey made $36k, and the great Mickey Mantle $70k. The Yanks' total payroll was probably around $500k. Maybe $750k on the outside. Player payroll was probably <15% of Yankee revenues back then.

I should have phrased differently. You can find quotes from 1880s from oldtimers who couldn't believe what greedy, lazy kind of people passed for ballplayers then compared to the halcyon days of the 1850s and 1860s. So I'm sure there were guys like Ty Cobb who bitterly lamented what low states the game had fallen to in 1938.

That's great. It's always good to get American eyes on how other countries play baseball. Might open some folks up to new ways of doing things. Coaches in other countries don't always share American truths, and that's good. Nobody has told them what they're doing is wrong, it just is, and it works. The quality won't quite be MLB quality, but I think you'll find that it's still good, fun baseball. This is basically the level MLB was just before WWII, and nobody complained.

I don't know their justification. Other teams clearly had predecessor franchises included. My rule is don't do that. When the Senators moved to Minnesota, they stopped being the same team. The Orioles are not the St. Louis Browns. Plus, I'd argue Eddie was a better player than Sisler. Eddie had a longer, more valuable career. Sisler hit .400 a few times, but what would Eddie have done in a league where the competition had almost no minorities or foreign players, and the scouting/signing/development was downright Paleolithic?

I was looking at Dalkowski's minor league stats, and they let people do some crazy stuff back in the day. In 1957 in the Appy League Dalkowski pitched 15 games, 10 starts, 62 innings, 129 walks, 121 strikeouts and 39 wild pitches. On top of that Kingsport's catchers had 50 passed balls in 71 games, and you can bet the majority of them were with Dalkowski on the mound. There was another guy on the team, Harold Edwards, who walked a batter an inning. Dalkowski doubled his mark. So he did lead the league with 17.6 K/9, but there were others at 14.4, 14.2, 13.1. He kind of lapped the field with 18.7 walks per nine, but there were others like Andrew Rodriguez who walked 60 in 39 innings. In the '58 Sally League he had 17.6 strikeouts per nine, and the next guy on the list was at 9.8. He walked 20.4 per nine, trailing the league by 10.5 per nine. '60 was the year he threw 170 innings, 262 walks, 262 Ks. Didn't lead the league in Ks... Gary Kroll had 309, but in 257 innings. Kroll was 18, and I estimate he threw over 4500 pitches in 34 starts, which works out to 135 pitches/start. By the same estimating method, Dalkowski threw about 125 pitches per start, but he only threw 5.5 innings/start. Which make for a pace of over 200 pitches per nine. Last year John Means averaged 155 pitches per nine.

Probably Sachin Tendulkar. Averaged over 53 runs in 200 test matches, including 51 centuries. Sir Don Bradman averaged almost a century per time put out, but that was 80+ years ago.

Yes it is, and yes they do. I think it's treated like how you'd imagine 90-minute baseball would be. Mostly younger people and casual fans think it's awesome to watch a cricket match that doesn't take all week. The traditionalists think it's like having the Queen over for a formal dinner and when she gets there you've just microwaved a couple of Hungry Man Salisbury Steaks and you toss her a Beast Lite.

- Right, no foul territory. The pitch sits in the middle of a large oval. - One-day cricket has two innings. Five day test matches have four. - There's rules against that. First, I would think it doesn't do the bowler any good to throw at the batsman, because then he has no chance of hitting the wicket, which is how you get him out. Also, there was the Don Bradman bodyline controversy which directly deals with this issue. Since this is very English you must pronounce controversy "con-trov-a-see". - Yes, on the catching and the throwing out. Although you have to knock the bails off when the batter is between the wickets (in between the lines of the popping creases if you want to get technical) - Yes, you only have to be bowled out once to be retired. - Sorta maybe on the HBP. You can't stick your leg in front of the wicket (out Leg Before Wicket or LBW). But I think you're okay if you get hit by a bowled ball and you're not in front of the wicket. Not 100% sure, but I think that's just a wide ball, it's a nothing. - Yes, there's nothing compelling you to run when you've hit the ball except the need to score runs. - And yes, batsmen are paired up. And the bowler throws so many balls to each end in an over, so they can switch back and forth as to whom is batting. If one is put out he walks off the field (sometimes right up through the crowd to the clubhouse, although cricket fans are usually too polite to heckle) and the other continues.

I'm trying to watch the Rukh Brest - FC Minsk match right now, and I'm pretty sure this stream is dicey enough that my entire life has been compromised by the KGB. It's halftime, but ads keep popping up in the middle of the screen, the resolution is like 640x480 and trying to click on any of the play/pause/volume controls results in pop-up of full-screen ads of dubious origin. scOtt, your part of the underworld is strange.

Fuss is definitely foot in German. I have a lot of Fusses in my family tree.

We'll never know, but that kind of adds to the mystique. If he had made the team and didn't get injured until later he might have ended up as Brad Pennington. For those that don't remember Pennington, he was an Oriole prospect in the 1990s. In 1990 at single A Wausau he threw 106 innings, struck out 142 and walked 121. Cesar Devarez and Gregg Zaun must have put in an heroic effort behind the plate because he only threw 10 wild pitches.

I can. First, it's harder just to normalize by yearly run context, you'd have to do some work before import (are they using OOTP? It can be done, I'd guess someone already has a third-party normalized dB, but you'd have to go find it and figure out how to use it). It's really harder and involves some guesswork to normalize for league quality. Although I guess you could take a shortcut and just assume the league gets better by 0.5% a year. But you'll still have discontinuities like the war and expansions. And you might end up with Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig as the equivalent of Mark Grace and Nick Markakis. And Cap Anson and Willie Keeler as AA players. So my guess is they just import all the historical players as-is and throw them in a pot. Verlander will have a 50/80 endurance, and Walter Johnson will have a 75. And George Sisler will have a higher hit tool than Ichiro.

Probably? Not completely sure.