DrungoHazewood

Isn't his foundation just funding a lot of vaccine research? Are Peter Angelos and his boys leading SMEs in baseball analysis because they supply the funding for Elias' analytics department?

Just switch to bottle-conditioned beers that let the yeast do all the carbonating the beer needs.

All I know is that when I see the jackbooted thugs of the one world government coming around to forcibly inject everyone with the Bill Gates microchipped "vaccine" I'm moving to Mars. I'll put up with a lot, but becoming a mindless slave drone in the Wuhan tofu caves is a step too far.

I don't know what Weaver is doing, leaving Palmer out there to give up 12 baserunners in six innings. Good thing the rain came or this was going to get ugly. I'm not sold on this guy yet, his hothead act has kind of worked for a year and half, but it's a matter of time until the players are done with it. First of all they blow the Series to a clearly over-matched Mets team last year. Then after they somehow start 5-0 they're now 8-4. Lost four of the last seven, if this keeps up they'll be under .500 by May. Are we looking at a rebuild here? The other day Merv Rettenmund was leading off. He hit .247 last year! Terry Crowley was batting third, of all things. Some 23-year-old pinch hitter who hit .280 at Rochester? I'm not impressed. Maybe they'll make some deals, get some of the kids up and pull it together by '73 or '74, if we're lucky. Maybe get a real manager like Leo Durocher. Sucks that we missed our window when the Yanks were down the last few years, they're gonna crush it this year.

I think that's something of an exaggeration. Most indications are that we'll be slowly going back towards normal over the next few months, and we're nowhere near the point where you go to the grocery store and there's no food; I've seen more shortages on the day of the week before deliveries come. If I counted calories like Mark Watney for everything in my house I'm betting it would be at least several months before my family would absolutely have to find some more food or risk starving. And right now I could drive three minutes to the store and immediately buy three weeks worth of almost anything I want save for toilet paper.

I have a hard time giving away real division titles for hypothetically better future rebuilds. Even as an academic exercise.

Some, but it's trumped by other metrics. Allie Reynolds and Jon Lester have about the same W/L records. 182-107 vs 190-108. By rWAR Lester leads by 45-25. Reynolds had a 109 ERA+, Lester a 120. Pedro Martinez was 219-100. Which isn't terribly different than Bob Lemon's 207-128. Pedro's ERA+ was 154, Lemon's 119. Pedro has more than double the WAR. Subjectively I don't think many folks would put Lemon in the same zip code as Pedro. CC Sabathia and Bob Feller have almost identical W/L records. Feller has, at times, been described as one of the best pitchers ever. Not sure CC is quite in that class. Juan Marichal and Andy Pettitte have very similar W/L records. As do Dizzy Dean and Jared Weaver. And Max Scherzer and Sandy Koufax, or Ron Guidry and Koufax. Kershaw has more wins and a higher winning percentage than Koufax. Bartolo Colon and Dennis Martinez nearly identical records. Orel Hershiser has a better record than Don Drysdale, and so does Mark Buehrle. Milt Pappas had 25 more wins and nearly as high a winning percentage as Cuellar and McNally. Bronson Arroyo and Don Newcombe had 148 and 149 wins, respectively. Most people who had 200+ wins were good, durable pitchers. I wouldn't go much farther than that.

I'm a little disappointed when any Oriole doesn't make it. Wilson looks like a pitcher. He looks like somebody they'd cast in a baseball movie, with a beautiful wife and a Porsche. Maybe he can still have all that, just in Korea.

Because no matter the topic some percentage of the population will decide that the data and the analysis and the consensus is wrong. There were people here who aggressively, desperately wanted the Orioles to start a rebuild in mid-2014.

Unless you specifically say so, nobody is talking about just fielding when you say greatest X of all time. It's the whole package. Mike Schmidt was clearly the greatest third baseman of all time, even if he's not Brooks or even Buddy Bell with the glove. Nobody says Keith Hernandez is the greatest first baseman of all time, even though he has the highest defensive ratings at the position of anyone since 1900. They say Lou Gehrig because, duh.

Graig Nettles was about as good with the glove at third as Bell, was his direct peer, hit twice as many homers, led the league in homers in '76, played in seven post-seasons, made six all star games, and was a Yankee for most of his career. And never got 10% of the vote for the Hall.

Sure, but the median player in Korea is probably a AA player in the states.

Love the reference, but Quinn had 18 and 26 wins (the 26 was in the Federal League for the Baltimore Terrapins) in a season by the time he was 30.

To be fair, Brett is among the top five third basemen of all time. When they said Brett was great they probably meant he was no slouch with the glove and he'd sometimes hit .330 with power and never struck out. He had batting lines that looked like they came out of the 1920s. And it probably didn't hurt that he looked like a movie star. I had a teacher who said he was her favorite player, despite being related to Johnny Bench, and it was probably that she had a crush on him. While Buddy Bell is more like 15th, and all mixed up with all the other pretty-good-hit-great-glove 3B of the 1970s and 80s. Unless you were a fan of one of them who could keep Graig Nettles, Sal Bando, Buddy Bell, Toby Harrah and Ken Boyer straight? In my mind I think that Bell and Harrah are the same person.

Buddy Bell is the same player as Scott Rolen. Arguably better than 30-40% of the guys in Cooperstown, within a few runs of each other in bb-ref defensive metrics, both around 65-70 WAR. Both had barely more HOF support from the BBWAA than Floyd Rayford.

The Bell vs Brett thing seems kind of odd, but I guess we all have our idiosyncrasies. I don't recall Brett being praised all the much for his defense, he was just a wonderful hitter with that perfect Charlie Lau stance and swing. He had a season in my lifetime where he hit .312 with 22 homers in 600+ PAs and he struck out 24 times. That reads like a typo. Since 2010 Victor Martinez is the only guy to have 20 or more homers and less than 50 strikeouts in 600+ PAs.

I admire a lot of James' work, but I also disagree with him on any number of things. He's currently in the midst of a very long series of articles where it looks like he's trying to reinvent replacement level in some kind of ad hoc, convoluted way. I frankly don't understand what or why he's doing (maybe building on Win Shares, which I much prefer WAR to), he's been more than a little condescending about it, and lot of it would be solved if he had the math chops of someone like Tom Tango. So while I enjoy his writing, I'm not exactly in his thrall. But I don't think he's one to lie or exaggerate. In this case he obliquely referenced this thing about Ryan years ago but didn't want to say anything directly, then more recently someone asked about that comment and he more-or-less said Ryan was doctoring the ball and thought most people knew.

In 1994 Sid Fernandez allowed more homers on the road (14) than he did at Camden Yards (13). I think he just sucked.

I might be able to find it on Bill James' site, maybe not, but at some point he made a remark along the lines of "oh, I thought it was pretty common knowledge that Ryan was doctoring the ball late in his career." And James has at least been around MLB for 40 years.

My favorite kind of player, in the abstract, is someone like George Brett or Stan Musial who might hit .365 with 45 doubles, 16 triples, 19 homers, and strike out 40 times. But that player is at least temporarily extinct. I'd also take someone like Ichiro who infrequently struck out and could hit well over .300. But the last Ichiro before Ichiro was probably Rod Carew or maybe Tony Gwynn, and they haven't been common since well before I was born. We've gotten to where baseball is because home runs are the most effective way to score runs, and for almost all of history strikeouts are positively correlated with power. It's only recently that (in general) high strikeout players aren't a lot more effective than contact hitters. Take a random year... 1955. The top 10 in batting strikeouts includes Larry Doby, Eddie Mathews, Mickey Mantle, Gil Hodges, Duke Snider, and Wally Post, who were all among the best hitters in the league. Look at the trailers in strikeouts and you have mostly guys with .680-720 OPSes like Dick Groat and Johnny Temple. There were exceptions, of course, like Yogi. But eventually baseball caught on to that.

I would imagine that save opportunities are roughly negatively correlated with run environment. More runs, fewer saves. Which is either wrong, or the Orioles were an exception because the '95 team both scored and allowed fewer runs than an average AL team.

As with anything, generalizations are our minds' attempts to make sense of the world and at some level they'll break down.

The answer depends on the conditions of your hypothetical situation. - Are we allowed to pick up a 26-year-old version of each player and use them knowing what we know today? - How do you define peak? Pearce never had consecutive seasons where he got 200 PAs and was an above-average hitter. Reynolds only had one season of 2+ wins, but that's tied up in the fact that he was often an abysmal fielder. Pearce was never a regular. At his best he was a platoon player. And he was hurt a lot. Reynolds played regularly for years, but usually wasn't any good (in part) because he couldn't field. Pearce's 2014 season was the best either of them had, but that's due in no small part to a completely out-of-character +17 season with the glove. Anyway... I think I'd take Reynolds' best 2-3 consecutive year peak and use him as a DH/1B. I could get 2-4 wins a year out of that, I think. But I'd also consider a Steve Pearce do-over career where he has better luck with injuries and ends up as a pretty good regular from, say, 26-34.

Ryan was famous for throwing an 11-inning, 155-pitch complete game, striking out 22, beating up some whippersnappers in mid-game, then riding the exercise bike in the clubhouse for like three hours afterwards.

That makes up for 19-and-aught-02, it does.