DrungoHazewood

When you've been running a fictional league for 33 years it has to be right! Literally I have players in my league I've "known" much longer than my wife and kids! There's a guy named Klondike Sherman who started off on my team in '89, retired as a player in 2002, then managed my AA team for four years from 2011-14. I'm going to try to hire him back at some point because he's just a cool dude. Yes, I realize he never existed.

It could be like DUI testing. You can refuse, but then we assume you have it.

In that era I played Earl Weaver Baseball, which was legendary.

But about 50 times deeper, and almost infinite customization options.

And if you really want some insight into the depths of my madness, I'm in the midst of a project to fix the ancient history of the Continental League. When I discovered OOTP in 2000 I imported the CBL, but due to obscure technical reasons I couldn't bring in all the history. When I go to the history tabs everything is complete from 2000-on, but pre-1999 is kind of a mess. I'm trying to import hundreds upon hundreds of old players so that they appear in team histories and leaderboards using text/spreadsheet imports/exports. It'll probably take many, many work-days to complete. All for a league that never really existed except in my head. Perfect for a lazy corona virus telework month.

My long-term sim is kind of ludicrous. I have the majors, the real minors, the Continental League as a 3rd major, three levels of Continental League minors, the indy leagues as they existed in 2006, the leagues in Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Germany, Netherlands, Mexico, China, Cuba, several winter leagues, 5-6 fictional indy leagues, a Greenland Ice Baseball League, and a league in Sao Tome and Principe that plays a 230-game schedule. 50 leagues in total. I closely follow my team in Whitehorse, Yukon in the CBL, and occasionally browse around the rest of the universe to see what kind of crazy things are happening. Almost every league is free to trade with and sign free agents from every other one. My league has been going since 1988, the rest of the universe since 2006. The league files are like 8 Gb.

Bench plus 80 points of BA and 60 walks a year.

The shorter the schedule gets, the better off the Orioles are. Remember last July when they had a run where they won like nine out of 13? If the season is just two weeks long the O's have a nearly realistic chance of making the playoffs.

It makes little sense from a transactional standpoint. It makes a lot of sense from a moral standpoint. Also, the players who've already run the gauntlet are much less likely to want to make it easier on the next set of guys coming through. Someone like George Sherrill spent several years in indy leagues making $1000 a month, he's not going to have a whole lot of sympathy for the next generation. It's a little like Depression kids who grew up eating the rinds of the watermelon and taking four jobs maybe not being the best advocates for later kids who wanted to spend their 20s finding themselves and turning down jobs that weren't meaningful enough.

Also, Billy Rowell career MLB line of .257/.339/.436 in 5700 PAs with 197 homers and 21 WAR. Orioles with four 100-win seasons since '15, 115-47 in '16 and drew 3.7M, but no Championships. And I have nothing to do with the team, I'm GM of a fictional team in another league.

From my long-term alternate universe sim on OOTP:

I assume you're just joking, clearly Britton isn't a major league hitter. Because the best available evidence about Britton's hitting ability is that he's been in the majors for six years since his 5-for-8 performance and hasn't even been allowed to bat once. Batting Britton in that playoff game would have been far wackier than pitching Ubaldo with the game on the line.

For the most part, yes. At least if he was using them to spot in batters or pitchers because of their previous results against each other. But I think he was also using them to see more trends, like platoon splits and other larger data samples that would be useful to inform a hunch. Hanser Alberto is 6-for-13 with a 1.308 OPS against J.A. Happ. If you want to know the most likely outcomes of their future matchups you're best served by throwing out those 13 PAs and going with Alberto's .816 OPS against lefties and Happ's overall performances over his last 3-4 years.

On a moral level I completely agree. If you have a $10B organization that uses loopholes and arguments like MLB does to avoid paying players even minimum wage while expecting them to pay a significant part of their meager salary for clubhouse dues for the peanut butter-and-ham-sandwich spread they should be ashamed. If they don't cough up a significant amount to help out these players during this pandemic they should be ashamed. But on the other hand, there is essentially an endless supply of young men who willingly spend their late teens and early 20s making $8000 a year because they absolutely know that they're going to be one of less than a 1000 players in the Show (some of whom are) making $millions any minute now. From an owner's perspective it's hard to logically justify paying $30k a head for a job that you have thousands upon thousands of people eagerly willing to do for (essentially) free.

Of course almost all individual pitcher-batter matchup data is close to meaningless. But I'll take what I can get - I'll accept a manager that uses meaningless matchup data over a manager that just goes with hunches.

Yes, but aren't they all?

You make it so easy. You set dial to either 11 or -1 on every single solitary issue.

You predicted the O's were going to win 30 games or so, then they won 54. So applying the atomic curve to this, I'm thinking the US ends up in the 30-40 worst hit countries?

I guess people tend to remember the worst, but my enduring memory of Buck is of him standing on the dugout, arms folded, smiling as the 2012 Orioles rush the field after winning the wild card game over the Rangers. Their first postseason win in 15 years.

Barring a deathbed confession we'll never know for sure, but it's somewhat plausible this was a natural thing. Memorial Stadium's HR park factor in that era was something like .9 or .95. A little below average. Fulton County Stadium was like 1.4. Coors Field range. In '72-73 the Braves and their opponents hit 379 homers at home, and just 270 on the road. In '72 Johnson was hurt and missed a third of the schedule. In '71 he hit eight homers at home, 10 on the road. In '73 he hit 26 at home, and 17 on the road. So if you apply the Memorial Stadium effect to his '73 numbers that works out to more like 14 or 15 at home, 17 on the road, so about 30 overall. In '71 he hit 18. Going from 18 to 30 isn't that crazy. Why he went back to seven home, eight on the road in '74, who knows?

I don't know that there are definitive rights and wrongs just yet. But atomic takes the most alarmist position, recently stating that it's too late, it's going to be an absolutely massive impact, and everyone will be on their own without medical care. A few posts later we have orioles119 saying it's not as bad as seasonal flu and apparently questioning if it's even a virus. Time will tell...

It's pretty premature to make that conclusion.

I almost never blame a manager for a short-series loss. Earl probably underplayed or overlooked the fact that Williams was not a great guy (at least from a baseball perspective). Long, long ago a read Earl's book, and at least in retrospect it seems Earl Weaver regretted taking on someone he saw as defensively inept and lazy. If Davey had his '72-'74 seasons today everyone would just assume he's on the 'roids. Maybe he was.

How could everyone have ever been tested? That's 330 million people just in the US. They tested the NBA because there are like 400 people in the NBA. I won't go out of my way to defend the government, but this is kind of how it works. In an evolving situation there will be differences of opinion, and in a republic/democracy there will never be immediate consensus on what to do. Even tyrannical governments don't usually take decisive and correct action.

Nice to know you're every bit as optimistic about this as you are about the Orioles.