DrungoHazewood

Maybe some of the 65 RSNs that are currently broadcasting replays of 2011 Rays games and miracle knife infomercials 24/7? You could count the people currently watching MASN on your pinkie finger. And he Can_of_corn just has it on in the background while posting here.

Awesome! Now I can find out what really happened at Cla Meredith's 2009 St. Swithin's Day Party.

I probably am mixing things up a bit. But MLB does subsidize MiLB teams. Which means that many of them, absent those subsidies, would not be viable businesses. I truly don't quite get how indy league teams turn a profit and stay in business while also paying players, but I suppose they do.

Sorry, stopped my subscription to warehouseconspiracies.com.

It's the pinch hitting penalty. Related to the DH penalty. Of course there are exceptions, but in general everyone loses about 0.024 points of wOBA (which is roughly, what, 0.075 in OPS terms?) pinch hitting and something like half or a third of that DHing. For whatever reason (and I'm sure people will have no problem speculating) players hit better when they're also playing the field, and especially when they're not hitting cold.

Oooohh.... just reminded me of another extinct pitcher type: the Sunday starter. This predates me, and I don't know that I can come up with an example off-hand. But it used to be that teams would have an older starter who couldn't really handle being in the regular rotation any more. So they'd keep him around and he'd start once a week, often on a Sunday, maybe in a doubleheader that would otherwise mess up the rotation (not that managers cared much about regular rest prior to 1960). Another casualty of teams actually trying to get something productive out of every roster spot, instead of keeping a pinch runner, a third catcher, a Sunday starter, Moe Berg, a defense-only first baseman... and really only regularly playing with 15 guys.

Possibly on ESPN, but apparently things hit a snag when ESPN wanted the rights fees to be $0.00.

I'm very happy there are leagues in the world where guys who aren't quite good enough to play MLB can play ball and make a good living. Not a fan of the North American model of labeling everyone not quite good enough to be at the very highest level losers. Plus, how can you not like Odrisamer Despaigne? He's on the O's all time best name team.

One of the disappointing things about reams of data and video is the standardization of everything towards common, most efficient solutions. Coaches look at someone contorting themselves into knots at the plate and tell them to cut it out and stand up straight, even if they're hitting .400.

C'mon. When I saw Wilson in Norfolk a few years ago he almost got through five innings giving up four earned. The Scranton Wilkes Barre Rail Riders were tough.

Even worse. They're not even paying the players, they're not paying for the stadium. But there are short-season rookie teams that can't be bringing in a few hundred thousand dollars a year. Their entire annual revenues wouldn't pay five people US median wages.

I'd be more interested in an article on each franchise's most absurd stances/swings. Tony Batista, Disco Dan Ford. Mickey Tettleton. Cal probably had one during the 5-8th innings of May 17, 1988, but then changed it.

Their normal business model with revenues involves paying their players $1000 bucks a month and convincing them to stay with random families to avoid rent, while taking large subsidies from MLB. So no revenues for a few months... yes, they're probably in bad shape.

In a normal situation I'd rather watch the LG Twins play the Samsung Lions than the Rangers against the Royals. So, yea.

That's the downside of a business model that relies on another for-profit organization's beneficence. 100 years ago MiLB started down the path of not being fiscally sustainable without subsidies from MLB, and that's with paying players in magic beans and gruel. If MiLB didn't have MLB subsidies and they had to pay minimum wage we'd probably have 30-50 affiliated minor league teams instead of 160.

I think a sport is healthiest where there are competing strategies that can each come out on top. That's one reason the 1980s are sometimes looked fondly on. You had people hitting almost 50 homers, you had Rickey steal 130 bases, you had Clemens and Gooden come up but also McGwire and Canseco. The 1982 World Series with the Cardinals (67 homers, 200 steals) against the Brewers (216 homers, 84 steals). But the world tends to gravitate towards what are seen as optimal solutions. Outliers are sanded off. And today analysis shows pretty clearly that power and strikeouts win more games than speed and contact. It's up to the powers-that-be to incentivize what is seen as inefficient. And in baseball the powers-that-be are very, very reluctant to step in.

The Astros' punishment was really light. Well... the draft picks and front office bans were fine, but no player even got a suspension or fine. Manfred certainly could have gone all Kenesaw Mountain Landis on them and suspended every player with knowledge of what was going on, for weeks or months. Instead, nothing. So I suppose in comparison to no punishment at all for any Astros player, punishing the Sox similarly might be a little harsh. But none of these punishments is going to be severe enough to really serve as a disincentive to anyone. A second round pick? Really? The Orioles once punted on a first rounder to sign Mike Bordick.

Not that I would wish it this way, but emergencies have a way of forcing organizations to do things they otherwise wouldn't. Baseball does some evolving at the margins, and of course an entrenched part of the fanbase hates Manfred and others for that, but this situation is certainly a valid excuse for trying things that would normally be blown off as "we didn't do that in 19-and-aught-06, so we sure as hell ain't doing it now!"

This is mostly guesswork right now, but my gut feeling is that we're going to see games in July. Schedule of roughly 81 games in sequestered places. But a reasonably high likelihood that there will be positive tests or other outbreaks with team(s) that will shut down at least part of it. Of course no fans. Would be an interesting test case for my pet project of ~3 regionally aligned leagues that in normal circumstances would drastically limit travel and games in other time zones. For this test case put the Eastern League at one site like Florida, the Midwest League in another, and the Pacific League in the third.

AL pinch hitters in general are not extinct, but at least on the endangered species list. From 1960-69 there were 52 instances of someone in the AL pinch hitting/running 50+ times in a season. And that was with between eight and 12 teams. From 2010-190 there were... zero. When I cut the limit to 40 or more games we get four guys in the 2010s. Nine with 40+ in the 2000-09 period. 29 in the 90s. 42 in the 80s. And 34 in just the '73-79 DH period. So it wasn't the DH that killed pinch hitting. That has some effect, but it was more relievers crowding out dedicated hitters like Crowley and Jim Dwyer. Brings me to mind of an old observation by Bill James that the DH increased strategy. In the 1970s AL teams still pinch hit, just not all of them equally. They went from a situation where they'd auto-pinch hit for the pitcher and mostly save their PHers for that, to a situation where they structured the roster so they could have multiple pinch hitters for guys like Mark Belanger and Lenn Sakata. So there was a difference of opinion on how to employ (or not employ) PHers. When you have different managers using different tactics that's strategy. When you have everyone automatically pinch hitting for the pitcher that's a robot.

I'm all for role players providing niche value, but a tremendous defensive first baseman playing all day every day might not be +15 runs on defense. Here's the numbers, over the last five years the spread in defensive value at first (bb-ref) is from a max of +18 to a min of -14. Converting that to 75 games, three innings a game... that's 15% of a season, which means you'd be saving a theoretical maximum of five runs. Half a win (at the very max) seems like quite a stretch to devote a roster spot to. Although that's probably comparable to a random LOOGY.

In the late 40s and early 50s walks crept up to around four per nine, but for much of the last century walk rates have been relatively constant at closer to three per nine. The walk rate in the 1920s is almost indistinguishable from the walk rate in the 2010s or the 1960s.

One type of player that's gone extinct in the last 20-25 years is the Swingman. The guy who'd pitch in 42 games, 12 starts. And he'd start twice a month. You still have players with that line, but because they pitch out of the pen for three months, then pitch two months in the rotation. But it's very rare today to have a 1982 Sammy Stewart who had appearances on 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 11, and 22 days rest. He started 12 times and relieved in another 26. And in his career he pitched 31 games where he relieved and went at least five innings.

Another extinct type is the Luke Appling family of hitters. Guys who wouldn't usually swing hard, but instead would foul off a lot of pitches, work the count, and eventually hit a Texas Leaguer or a little line drive for a single. They could hit .300, Appling once hit .388. He once had a year where he had one homer and 122 walks. Another with 16 doubles, no homers, and 105 walks. Chone Figgins in 2009 is the only person this century to have as few as five homers and 100+ walks. In 1949 there were five such players, with just 16 teams.

Place hitters have been extinct since Babe Ruth. I can't quite wrap my head around how Willie Keeler batted. In Burt Solomon's book Where they Ain't it's described as "he choked almost halfway up and chopped and thrust and poked at the ball." He's said to have swung a 28 ounce bat. With pitchers sometimes throwing close to 500 innings in his era, they must not have thrown hard often, so I think Keeler literally took a kind of swinging bunt at the ball most of the time, and could place it around the diamond effectively where he wanted. Today swinging bunts are themselves essentially extinct. Keeler and a few others probably did it half or 3/4ths of the time. Certainly no one has batted that way in my lifetime. He had some doubles and triples and the occasional homer. So I'm thinking that with less than two strikes he'd sometimes pull the hands together and swing hard. But he also had 8-9 full or nearly full seasons where he struck out less than 10 times.