DrungoHazewood

He's 15. Even if he takes the Manny route to the majors he won't be in Baltimore until '25. By then the fanbase will have long since soured on Rutschman since he's not Bench-with-speed or Piazza-with-defense.

We could speculate all day. Maybe he got more rest between starts (I looked, he did, but in '88 there was no performance difference in his short-rest starts). Mike Scott and Jim Deshaies both fell off from '87-88, but they also fell off from '86-87. I don't know.

Ryan's strikeout rates as a percentage of league: Year Ryan Age League Percentage 1968 8.9 21 5.89 1.51 1969 9.3 22 5.77 1.61 1970 8.5 23 5.75 1.48 1971 8.1 24 5.41 1.50 1972 10.4 25 5.57 1.87 1973 10.6 26 5.24 2.02 1974 9.9 27 5.01 1.98 1975 8.5 28 4.98 1.71 1976 10.4 29 4.83 2.15 1977 10.3 30 5.16 2.00 1978 10 31 4.77 2.10 1979 9 32 4.77 1.89 1980 7.7 33 4.8 1.60 1981 8.5 34 4.75 1.79 1982 8.8 35 5.04 1.75 1983 8.4 36 5.15 1.63 1984 9.7 37 5.34 1.82 1985 8.1 38 5.34 1.52 1986 9.8 39 5.87 1.67 1987 11.5 40 5.96 1.93 1988 9.3 41 5.61 1.66 1989 11.3 42 5.67 1.99 1990 10.2 43 5.8 1.76 1991 10.6 44 5.59 1.90 1992 9 45 5.8 1.55 1993 6.2 46 6.18 1.00 His highest K rates compared to league were at ages 29, 31, 26, 30, 42, 27, 40, and 44. He was a freak of nature, but something changed in 1987.

The United States was founded by people who were unhappy with their lot in life. Instead of trying to work things out they decided to get the heck out and completely start over. Often going to areas with no infrastructure or government to speak of, and in many cases a population that didn't speak their language. I think those traits will take eons to wash out if it ever does. We may always have a higher than normal percentage of the population whose first reaction to anything is to tell the world to go (bleep) themselves. That can be both a useful and a damaging thing.

I'm a huge Hall guy, so I'm fine with Moyer going in. Along with about 84 other guys I could construct convoluted cases for. And I hate to say this, but maybe Moyer had some help. It's was the 90s after all. Most of the guys popped for PEDs were pitchers and one of the characteristics of steroids is arresting or reversing age-related decline. Or maybe he was doctoring the ball. On Bill James' site he's strongly hinted that Nolan Ryan was doctoring the ball starting in his late 30s or so, probably about the time his K rate spiked from 8 to 11. I wouldn't really hold it against him, and I have ZERO proof, but being that much of an outlier provokes suspicion. The counter argument is that he wasn't that much better. His best ERA+ through 32 was 130. His best afterwards was 132. He just was more consistently good, and for a unnaturally long time.

It's probably more than offset by the many, many people who have the virus but weren't sick enough to go to hospital. Or just weren't able to get tested.

New NFL motto: "Half the league has CTE anyway, full speed ahead!"

You're tremendously concerned about models not being accurate, but perfectly okay with an completely unsupportable off-the-cuff statement that most COVID-19 deaths would have happened by some other cause anyway? I guess it's just models that don't support your previously formed conclusions that are flawed.

Treating press releases by UFO cults as "the news" is always interesting. Art Bell's show is fun, if you treat it like one of those giant mosquito movies on SyFy. If you treat it the slightest bit seriously... that's concerning.

Basallo is less than three years older than my oldest kid, who is in the 7th grade, weighs 63 pounds, and resembles a major leaguer like I resemble Andre the Giant.

Doug Jones was the closer, and he was 0-4, 5.01. Benitez was 1-5, 5.66. Mark Lee had a 4.86. Arthur Rhodes was 2-5, 6.21. Alan Mills had a 7.43 in 23 innings. Brad Pennington walked 11 in 6.2 innings. Terry Clark had a 3.46, but allowed 45 baserunners in 39 innings and just struck out 18 so his FIP was 4.41. Jesse Orosco was the only reliever who pitched well, and he faced 1-2 batters a game. Oriole relievers had a net WPA of -2.5 wins. You'll lose some close games when the bullpen is consistently engulfed in flames.

Pitchers often have much less predictable career arcs than position players. But still, not many are dramatically better in their 30s than their 20s. And when it happens there is usually a clear reason. Martinez stopped drinking. Dazzy Vance broke off a bone spur hitting his elbow on a poker table, and after surgery was the best pitcher in baseball. Knuckleballers take a decade to figure out the pitch. Some early pitchers like Bill Hutchison who didn't start pro careers until very late because 1800s baseball was disorganized and chaotic. Moyer is almost unique in that there was no precipitating cause. He just turned into a very good pitcher in his mid-30s. Interesting side point: I made a list of the top old (32+) pitchers of all time. Just scanning that list there are at least nine knuckleballers in the top 100. The Niekros, Hoyt Wilhelm, Dutch Leonard, Eddie Cicotte, Charlie Hough, Tom Candiotti, RA Dickey, Tim Wakefield, and I'm sure I'm missing a few. In any given season today there are one, two, three knuckleballers out of 300+ MLB pitchers. So being a knuckleballer probably increases the odds of pitching well into your late 30s or even 40s by 10 or 20 times compared to a standard pitcher.

People will sometimes (or would, not too many people remember Moyer so much any more) say so-and-so is the new Jamie Moyer. Moyer was a massive outlier. Using him as an model to follow is a fool's errand. When the Orioles let him go he was 59-76 with a 4.51 ERA (94 ERA+), and he was 32 years old. By bb-ref the most comparable pitcher to Moyer through age 32 was Mark Redman, who ended up with 68 major league wins and retired at 34. At 33 his top comp was Scott Feldman, object of so many 2013 Oriole fans' anger, who would also retire at 34 with just 78 wins. And at 34 Moyer's top comp was Jason Vargas, who is 99-99 with a 4.29. The only pitcher kind of comparable to Moyer is Joe Niekro, a knuckleballer. And knuckleballers are weird and often don't figure out the pitch until their 30s. When anyone says "this guy sucks now, but is going to be the new Jamie Moyer" tell him he's crazy. There's only one Jamie Moyer.

Shouldn't baseball be a fair fight, man to man, without all this messing around?

And since the median age in Florida is 103 it might get ugly, and fast.

DeCinces was my favorite player as a kid. The day that my Dad's boss stopped by and told me that they'd traded him for Disco Dan Ford was crushing. And they didn't even need to do it. They'd traded him to make room at third for Cal, and then Earl moved Cal to short. Imagine the '83 Orioles with DeCinces at third instead of Todd Cruz. The 1982 Orioles probably make the playoffs with DeCinces at third. After Cal moved to short third was handed by Glenn Gulliver, Rich Dauer and Floyd Rayford. Rayford fielded .898, Gulliver had a .632 OPS, and Dauer was really a second baseman so playing him forced Lenn Sakata or Bobby Bonner into the lineup. And Disco Dan had a .650 OPS as the regular RFer while Jim Dwyer and Benny Ayala barely got 300 PAs between them. From the day of the trade until their careers ended DeCinces was worth 19 wins, including nearly eight in '82, Ford was a little over 1.0.

On another site I was reading someone mentioned Andy Van Slyke. Really an excellent outfielder with the Pirates in the 1980s, a slashing line drive hitter and centerfielder. He was an Oriole for a few months, in 1995. Phil Regan's team, his one year as a manager. I'd forgotten how extensive the collection of stars were on that team. The problem was most of them were terrible. Just awful. Many of them had the worst seasons of their careers. There were the home grown or longer-term Orioles. Cal, Raffy, Hoiles, Brady, Harold Baines. Hammonds. That was Jeff Manto's 15 minutes of fame. Those guys were pretty good. But they also had Van Slyke, Kevin Bass, Bobby Bonilla, Matt Nokes, Doug Jones, Jesse Orosco, Sid Fernandez, Jamie Moyer... that's more than 20 All Star games and a bunch of MVP and Cy Young votes among that group. Jones had 300 saves. Moyer 269 wins and 638 starts. Bass had a 14-year career and some MVP support in '86. Fernandez got some Cy Young support in '86, led the league in winning perentage in '89. Bonilla and Orosco were the only ones who weren't a disaster. Van Slyke went 10-for-63 and was traded in June for the last four innings of Gene Harris. Bass had a .639 OPS. Moyer and Jones had ERAs over 5.00. Nokes hit .122. And Fernandez had a 7.39 ERA. The 1928 A's finished in second place, and had eight Hall of Famers. But Ty Cobb, Eddie Collins, and Tris Speaker were all over 40. Got rid of them the next year and they tore past the Ruth/Gehrig Yanks. The '95 Orioles were a poor man's '28 A's. Once they dumped that great mass of washed up old guys they made the playoffs in '96.

I'm sure that's the narrative that you settled on before this really ramped up, so that's the one you'll stick to forever. Like anything else, this thing has reinforced the fact that no matter what the point of discussion is, roughly 10% of the population will refuse to believe any of it. Everything is always a big scam or a conspiracy or a cabal run by a big eastern syndicate.

N=1 can clearly be extrapolated over the whole human population.

This is why I can't run sims like this, with real teams. I know deep down Bleier can't succeed long-term with his strikeout rate, so I already would have traded him for a bag of balls and replaced him with a submarining knuckleballer I found in an obscure indy league.

He can't really be a Nats fan. He was born in New York. He didn't come to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda until 1968, which means the Senators were only a thing for three more years and they only had one halfway decent season in that timeframe. By my flawless fan reasoning flowchart he should be a Mets fan, since he was born in NY, grew up a Dodgers or Giants fan, when they left he should have become disillusioned, and eventually recovered and started rooting for the Mets. The only way you become a Yanks fan is if you have some kind of deep, dark, genetic or psychological flaw. Which I guess he could have, but he seems like a decent chap. I'm guessing the departure of the Giants/Dodgers scarred him deeply and left him unable to commit to any team. To go along with his coworkers and neighbors he pretends to be a Nats fan, while secretly wishing that he could go to a new Ebbets Field or the Polo Grounds.

Or, perhaps, the measures that were taken have helped to somewhat mitigate its effects.

That's probably true.

I think I have to disagree with that. Strasburg's first MLB start was nationally televised (IIRC) on ESPN and he struck out 14 in seven innings. The hype could not have gotten much bigger, he was basically declared the best pitcher in baseball from day one. McDonald's MLB debut was getting Cory Snyder to ground into a double play in relief of Curt Schilling in the 3rd inning of a September game. It was probably on HTS, but I don't recall any wall-to-wall coverage.

Hopefully he's matured a bit. I think many or most of us can look back on our 20-year-old selves and see the need for some refinement. Even if we weren't handed million dollar checks and spoke of ourselves in the third person.