DrungoHazewood

He signed in 1953. The Orioles were a Phillies farm team, and the Browns were in St. Louis with an operating budget of approximately 35 cents.

But is that true? Or is it completely true? Do 20-year-old players who, for example, tear an ACL and miss a season come back at the same level they were a year before? Does physical maturity and working out and studying film not play some role in development? It can't be all game action. We could look at WWII. Lots of guys early in their development took a year or three off, then came back to play in the majors. Carl Furillo. Was a prospect, got to the high minors where he hit .280 at the age of 20. Missed three years due to the war. Came back at 24, in 1946, and was a starter for the Dodgers for the next 15 years. Guys like Al Dark and Dale Mitchell didn't start their pro careers until 24 because of the war. Then were almost immediately MLB starters. Hoot Evers played one MLB game in '41, hit .322 in the Texas League in '42, missed three years for the war, then was immediately a starter for the Tigers and others for 12 years. Warren Spahn went 17-12 in the Eastern League in '42, missed three years, came back and had a 2.94 ERA in the majors in '46. Ted Williams and Stan Musial lost years to the war, but aside from the blanks you couldn't tell. They were great before and after. Then there's guys like Charlie Fox or Clyde Vollmer who were prospects before the war and kind of had their careers derailed. I don't know. But I don't necessarily think a year off is a huge deal.

When I was a teenager the standard issue TV/radio announcer was a kind of straight-laced middle-aged guy who soberly described the action. Some a little more character or personality, one or two were Chuck Thompson, but that was the model. So when you first heard John Madden or Chris Berman or Dick Vitale it was pretty cool. These guys got into it! They were different and interesting and came up with nicknames and catch phrases. Now that I'm 48 I think all of them are more annoying than anything else. Will you please... just... stop... yelling. It's the bottom of the 4th, it's May, it's a grounder to short, that's okay, it really doesn't have to be the best thing ever.

That was because of the bonus baby rule. Today an 18-year-old would automatically go to Aberdeen or maybe Delmarva if really highly regarded. Back then there was a rule that if you signed for more than $X you had to spend a whole year or two in the majors, kind of like the Rule 5 now. So Kaline got 30 PAs in his age-18 season. But he turned out okay. All time best players born in Maryland but never Orioles: Foxx, Kaline, Home Run Baker, Cupid Childs*, Charlie Keller, Bill Nicholson, Brian Jordan, Buck Herzog, Dave Foutz^, Billy Werber, Babe Phelps. Pitchers include Lefty Grove (not really, he won over 100 games for the IL O's), HOFer Vic Willis, and Eddie Rommel. Bobby Mathews never played for the Orioles, but he did play for the NA Baltimore Canaries in '72 when he went 25-18 and led the league in Ks and BBs. * Childs is a near-HOFer, and he did play six games for the Eastern League Orioles near the tail end of his career. ^ I bet none of you has heard of Foutz, despite his 1887 season where he hit .357, and went 25-12 on the mound. Won 41 games for St. Louis in '86. Note that I left off Mark Teixeira, because Mark Teixeira sucks. Nothing against Nick, but Kaline's career is kind of what we wanted Nick Markakis to be. 7-win peak early on, then above-average to near-MVP level for the better part of 20 years. Big difference was Nick came up at 22, Kaline at 18. Kaline was a bit odd in that his best year was at 20. Had some other really good seasons, but never quite up to his batting title and .967 OPS year early on.

I don't know why this never occurred to me before now, but the experience with the minors in the late 40s and early 50s might be a lesson that helps inform us about the plans to contract some teams in the minors. As I mentioned in the previous post, in a 10-year period we went from 62 professional leagues to 27. Literally ~7000 minor league playing jobs and something like 300 managerial jobs, and some larger number of coaching jobs disappeared. Not to mention the beer vendors and ticket takers and the like. The Illinos-Indiana-Iowa (Three-I) League had been in business since 1901, closed up shop after 1961. Places like Davenport and Terra Haute had teams for generations. The Evangeline League in Louisiana was similar. Several leagues out in West Texas and New Mexico. They all disappeared. Joe Bauman hit 72 homers in a season for Roswell in the Longhorn League in '54. By '56 there was no Longhorn League. Most of these places lost their team, and never got one back.

This would be the only MLB season ever cancelled since the start of professional sports leagues. In the 1800s sometimes teams now classified as major league gave up and quit at some point in the season. For who knows what reason the powers-that-be keep pretending that the 1884 UA St. Paul team was major league even though they quit after eight games in a league that had one halfway decent team. And there were minor leagues that closed up shop part way through the year in the 20th century. I'm pretty sure there were indy leagues in the 1990s or even early 2000s that failed in mid-season. There had to have been minor leagues that didn't play because of WWII. And there were almost certainly minor leagues in the 1950s that went bankrupt just as the season was about to start. In 1948 there were 62 professional leagues in the US. By 1958 that was down to 27.

There are people who will tell you that Bob Feller would have won well over 300 games if not for the three years he lost to WWII. Bob Feller was one of those people. My take is that after throwing 663 innings in the two years preceding war, the three years he took off were probably the thing that allowed his arm to stay attached to the rest of his body and pitch into the 1950s. If this season is completely or mostly wiped out it'll be an interesting long-term study to see if there are any changing career trends that come out of it.

I think it's just as brutal for the high spenders. Someone like Justin Turner is missing their age 35 season. You'd expect some falloff this year, with rapidly increasing chances of catastrophic decline thereafter. Nelson Cruz is missing his age 39 season; his fountain of youth will end eventually, the good stuff is only so good.

But everyone loses a year. The O's get players who are physically inching closer to peak. The Dodgers, Yanks, Sox... they're mainly getting players moving closer to the cliff.

See this article from Bleacher Nation. The field used by Guthrie, OK high school may be my new favorite baseball field. Dimensions something like 280-300-600-300-280, with a full football field in center. Reminds me a bit of old Exhibition Stadium in Toronto where there was most of a CFL field that stretched on for a long, long way behind CF and RC. I saw a game there in 1987, and Ben Oglivie hit a homer in that direction that may have rolled 500' on the AstroTurf. Might have been more fun if they just didn't put a fence there. This also makes me recall a field I saw from a train in the Czech Republic 20 years ago. First, I was surprised to see a baseball field in the Czech Republic, but also that there was a gully or ravine about 30-40 feet behind first base. So the effective dimensions were something like 300-330-380-250-125. I welcome any other entries you might have.

Yesterday I went to Tractor Supply to get chicken feed, and the the grocery store. About half the folks in Tractor Supply were wearing masks (me included). At the grocery store it was more like 5%. More were wearing gloves, which aren't as effective. Only one of five or six cashiers were wearing anything protective. On the way I saw a group of ~20 motorcyclists parked on the side of the road talking, standing within arms length of one another, wearing no obvious protection. I work for the DoD and we now have more-or-less mandatory masks for those going on station to do limited operations. If you can't maintain six feet, but we're "strongly encouraged" in all cases, which in military speak means "you better do it, even if we can't technically order you to."

After I tore one of mine, before it was fixed, I went to a Virginia Tech football game. Big play happened, everyone jumps up, I land slightly awkardly and *bam*. Shooting pain in my knee. Agony. That also happened after tear #2, when my regular doc was on reserve duty, and backup doc said "I don't think you really tore anything, just rest for a week or two and go back to playing soccer." Like a minute into my first game back, same thing, shooting pain in the knee. Went back to the backup doc, got an MRI, and whatta you know, he said it was the cleanest ACL tear he'd ever seen.

In 1880 the average batting average of the 55 qualifiers was .256, and the standard deviation was 0.037. In 1893 the average was .290 and the standard was still 0.037 In 1941 the average was .282 and the standard deviation .033. In 2000 the average was .282 and the standard deviation 0.028. In 2019 the average was .272 and the standard deviation was .027. That may not seem like so much of a difference, but George Gore was 2.8 standard deviations above the (qualifier) average when he hit .360 in 1880. Ted Williams was 3.8 when he hit .401, but he was a freak. Tim Anderson was 2.3 last year. Since the peak of the 1990s average have fallen about 20 points, while the spread continues to tighten up as it has since the beginning of time. As players get better the distance between best and worst gradually shrinks. To hit .400 today a batter would be almost five standard deviations above the qualifier average. I'm reasonably sure that's never happened. Hugh Duffy was less than three when he hit .440 in '94. Tony Gwynn was only at 3.48 when he hit .394 in 1994, and that was in a short season. Just hitting .350 today is almost three standard deviations from the qualifier average. Yaz was about 2.6 above the AL mark in '68 when he hit .301.

St. Mary's County, population about 115k, has an annual school budget of about $250M. Or roughly comparable to the Orioles' annual revenues.

LSU played something like 70 games that year. McDonald threw 152 innings and struck out over 200. That seems like a lot of innings for a 21-year-old to throw in three months or so. For a comparison the SEC leader in innings in 2019 had 118. ACC leader had 113. Although some guy named Grant Judkins threw 165 innings for Iowa last year. He started 30 of the team's 55 games.

He's an Oriole prospect. The odds of him tearing something trying that are... 94%?

I can see Wrigley Field. Hit it down the deep RF line, and have it get caught up in the ivy*. But Toronto? The CFer and RFer must have collided and knocked each other out. * Description from AP article 5/25/99 "Millar's fly ball with two outs in the ninth inning off Aguilera went over Sammy Sosa's head, hit the ivy-covered wall and bounced away. When the Cubs right fielder couldn't find the ball, Millar circled the bases for a homer."

I should probably give the Burns documentary another chance, but I didn't much like it when it came out. I thought it should have been titled Race Relations in America, As Seen Through the Lens of Baseball. But it's been a long time since I saw it. Also, I thought it barely mentioned dozens upon dozens of topics that whole books have been written about. I suppose that's to be expected, you can't fit everything in the time alotted. I was really looking forward to the episode on the early history of the game up to 1900, and (I know, this is just me) I came away thinking I didn't learn a single new thing. Burns spent maybe 30 seconds on the champion NL Orioles, and most of the rest of the episode on how Cap Anson and others segregated the game. I wanted a documentary on baseball, not on how repugnant Anson's attitudes look to a modern observer.

I would have liked to see this, from long-time Oriole catcher Wilbert Robinson:

I have a '34 Goudey Jimmie Foxx* card that I once bought for something like $10 because it's in poor condition, and the first line on the back is "Down in Sudlersville, Md., a farmer boy was playing on a high school team and dreamed of big league baseball..." Foxx never played for the O's but he spent a season on the Easton Farmers of the Eastern Shore League. One of the few Class D teams to have two Hall of Famers. Foxx was 16 and hit .296, led the team with 10 homers. And Home Run Baker (also from the Eastern Shore) was the player-manager at 38. * The card spells his name "Jimmy"

A team that's a little lost to history is the 1929-30 Philadelphia A's. You think of the 1920s and 1930s as part of a long string of Yankee dominance. But those A's teams won consecutive pennants, beating out the Ruth/Gehrig Yanks by 18 and 16 games, respectively. They took a dynasty with two of the inner-circlest of inner circle HOFers to the woodshed. And four of the key players on those A's teams were Orioles. Second baseman Max Bishop was from an extinct class of players, the kind who'd hit .260 with 20 doubles, eight homers, and 125 walks. He was a local kid, going to both high school and college in Baltimore. Connie Mack bought him from Jack Dunn in '24. The shortstop was Joe Boley, who played in Baltimore from 1919-26 and hit over .300 almost every year with 30+ doubles, double-digit triples. Of course on the mound was Lefty Grove, who still has a halfway decent argument for being the best left-hander or even the best pitcher of all time. Grove was from Lonaconing, MD, just down from Frostburg. And finally George Earnshaw, mentioned a few posts above for going 29-11 in 1925. Mack pried him loose from the O's in mid-season 1928, and in his first full year in the majors at age 29 he went 24-8, leading the AL in wins.

I was at this game, and the only thing separating me from an in-person no hitter was a 7th inning infield single by Glenn Davis. Chuck Nagy then got Sam Horn to ground into a double play, and he finished off the last two innings without incident.

10 in a row from April 26-28th, 1981.

If only the Orioles and Ben McDonald hadn't been quibbling over $750k maybe they'd have had access to someone who wasn't a fantastically ridiculous underdog... In '89 the Orioles' initial offer to McDonald was $255k as a clear, consensus 1/1 pick who would almost immediately be MLB-ready. For context, in 1989 the MLB minimum salary was $68,000. Today it's about $500k, so... that bonus offer was kind of the equivalent of about $2M today. Rutschman got $8.1M. McDonald was asking for Bo Jackson money (about $1M). He eventually signed in August for a $350k bonus and a 3-year MLB deal that paid $1.1M. His 1990 FIP of 3.68 was better than any '89 O's starter except Jay Tibbs.

Tied with Gordie Sundin and Jeff Rineer for shortest career by an Oriole pitcher. Each faced two batters. In the third inning of the second game of a doubleheader on September 7th 1977 Farmer was brought in to face the Tigers with Jason Thompson and Rusty Staub on base. He gave up a single to Lance Parrish, then a walk to Ben Oglivie. Was removed for Randy Miller, who let Parrish score. So Farmer's Oriole ERA is infinite. Sundin had a similar story in '56 as an 18-year-old. Rineer got the most out of his two batters - credit for a whole inning pitched. Came on in the 6th inning of the last regular season game in '79 with Ron Hassey on first. Got a flyball to left, then an GIDP, and his major league career was over.