DrungoHazewood
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Posts posted by DrungoHazewood
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1 hour ago, Frobby said:
I convinced my wife that we should go to the O’s - Nats game last night. Boy, do I wish I hadn’t!
I went and bought upper deck seats halfway between home and 3B, five rows back. All-in cost, $87 on VividSeats, would have been more if I’d bought direct from the Nats. And, I bought an advance parking spot at a lot several blocks from stadium, cost $25.50.
I live about 16 miles from Nats Park. Game time 6:45, my map app says it will take an hour and 6 minutes. We leave at 4:45, and I figure we’ll spend 30-45 minutes looking around the stadium and finding some veggie food for my wife. Instead, we spend an hour and 53 minutes in the car. It’s bumper to bumper for most of the trip, the map app keeps pushing our ETA further and further back, and when we finally get to the address where the parking lot is supposed to be, there’s no obvious parking lot entrance, and I have to circle the block in very slow traffic, take a lucky guess that the lot entrance is off an alley between two buildings. Eventually we find it and park, and the parking attendant tells us that the lot closes 30 minutes after the game. (The website had said 60 minutes.)
We walk to the main entrance, it’s now game time, and it’s a mob scene. There’s a woman with a bullhorn telling people it will be faster to walk to one of the other entrances, so we do, which takes several minutes. We get there and there’s a single-file line of a couple hundred people waiting to get in. We wait that out, which takes 10-12 minutes, and by the time we’re inside the stadium it’s 7:02 and the first inning is over. But my wife needs her veggie food, so we find the one stand that has some, and as we stand there, I see an Oriole trying to score, but there’s a pillar blocking my view of home plate and I have to guess from the roar of the crowd that the runner was thown out.
My wife’s food in hand, we look for a stairway or escalator to the upper level, and finally find the longest series of ramps you have ever seen in your life. It takes eight turns of the ramp, each one several hundred feet long, to reach the top. By the time we are finally at our seats, the Nats already have scored in the second inning and the Orioles are up in the third inning and already to the last batter in the order.
Meanwhile, I haven’t eaten but I want to actually watch the game for a while, so I wait until the bottom of the 6th and get in line at Ben’s Chili Bowl, figuring that will take no more than half an inning, but no, it takes a full inning and I miss the O’s scoring their third run in the process.
Well, I don’t need to tell you what unfolded in the 9th through 12th innings and how excruciating it was, but let’s just say I was already in an extreme state of agitation before any of that happened and my mood got darker and darker and barely brightened when we actually won. As we leave our seats, I pick up an empty water bottle and beer can of mine and dump them in a nearby recycling bin. My wife says she needs to use the ladies’ room and while I’m waiting, I reach into my pocket for my cell phone and…it’s not there. I want to run back to our seats to look, but my wife is still in the ladies’ room, so I have to wait for what seems like an eternity. She finally emerges, I dash back to our seats, but the phone is nowhere to be found. As I come onto the concourse, I spy the recycling bin and realize I may have dumped my phone in there while dumping my empties. I fish around for a minute, don’t find it, but short of dumping out the whole bin, I’m not going to be sure it’s not in there. But I look at my watch and realize I don’t have time to do that because the effing garage closes 30 minutes after game time and 15-20 minutes have gone by already. So, I check with customer service to see if a phone has been turned in (no, of course), and dejectedly leave. I have never, ever been in such a bad mood leaving an Orioles victory.
So, that’s my tale of woe. Even before the 9th to 12th innings and the cell phone fiasco, I’d told myself this was one of the worst experiences I’d ever had at a baseball game and that I’d never again be caught dead driving from my house to Nats Park. The rest was just icing on the frigging cake, and now my phone is probably at the bottom of some dumpster.
At least we won the game. If not, I’d probably be in the bottom of some dumpster too.
That's miserable. The food situation at any sports stadium is often ridiculous. The prices outrageous, and anytime during the game it takes 10, 15, 20+ minutes to go through the line, and the whole time you're thinking I'm supposed to be here watching the friggin' game not in line! My boys and I went to a hockey game in Chicago in March and two of us missed a good 10 minutes of the game getting some wildly overpriced chicken tenders.
The area around Nats' Park and Audi field is not great for vehicle access. I didn't have your experience, but was at DC United on Saturday and even 1.5 hours before kickoff it's a bit of a mess. Luckily I have a CAC card and can park on Ft. McNair for free. But getting out is a 30+ minute ordeal.
I would have lost my mind if I lost my cell phone at the game.
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22 minutes ago, now said:
While all of this sounds true, I wonder what the other side of the equation is. The majors also has all the world's best hitters, with their analytics teams breaking down the opposition pitching. So couldn't you argue that AAA pitchers will have an equally steep adjustment to the majors when they first arrive? It doesn't negate the argument made here, but seems it would duplicate when it comes to young pitchers getting called to the Show. Yet what we hear is only, "The jump from AAA to MLB pitching is the biggest jump in sports."
Remember when expansion supposedly diluted pitching? When I'd ask why expansion didn't dilute hitting just as much the answer was usually something along the lines of "well, it's obvious that there are all kinds of effects that the scarcity of pitching shows that there's just more hitters in the pipeline and kids these days can't see that the training and stuff isn't like the ways that the people did it back in the 50s and all that... yea."
Until someone shows me relevant data confirming Rosenthal's hypothesis I'm going to assume he has no idea if it's true or not. But his article will now be cited as evidence by any number of people who claim it is.
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I haven't read the article, just the snippets in the original post. But I'm guessing there's no study to accompany this, where they show a bunch of statistically significant samples of rookie performance in their first X games in, say, the 1970s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, and then compare the data to the 2020s with a clear trend line that it really is more difficult to break in today?
Because without that, this is more-or-less a fluff piece speculating on the causes of an effect that nobody has shown to actually be true.
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1 hour ago, dystopia said:
Is it though? He looks like’s swinging a 50 lb. bat. He’s aging so badly, I don’t think he’ll ever sniff a .700 OPS in his career again.
Of course it is. While it's possible he lost the ability to hit overnight, it's much more likely that he's still a 100 OPS+ guy, +/- a few points. It would be somewhat unusual for a player to just lose it before his 30th birthday unless there's an underlying injury.
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30 minutes ago, Sports Guy said:
1) Injury risk
2) Valuing everyday players vs a reliever/potential starter
That’s about it.
I personally don’t think they trade him if they do intend to make him a starter again.
If I had one reason to trade him it would be the injury risk for Miller is about 30 times higher than for a non-pitcher.
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1 minute ago, ChosenOne21 said:
I wish we had an elegant counting statistic to evaluate pitcher effectiveness that was better than wins. I don't really care about pitching wins--I mean, it's better to get them than not to--but I don't look at it at all to evaluate how good a pitcher is. Everyone knows what the problems with that statistic are.
At a minimum, we need a better "rule of thumb" for the HoF than 300 pitching wins, or we're going to have a hard time inducting starting pitchers.
300 wins has always been a automatic threshold, but only about 1/3rd of HOF starting pitchers have 300+ wins.
If you want a long-career rule of thumb 50-60 WAR is a good place to start. Setting aside active players and PED cases there are less than 10 pitchers over 60 rWAR who aren't in the Hall. And five of them are from the 1800s when pitcher's jobs and expectations were very different.
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2 minutes ago, Moose Milligan said:
Go back to GW-RBI!
I'm a bigger fan of game-tying runs scored.
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6 minutes ago, Too Tall said:
As an old fart, yea it still plays for me. Particularly starting pitcher win because that generally means a quality start (not always see last night as what could have been) and the bull pen did it's job. Note to anyone who cares - I will never get current on modern statistics just like I will never have a really smart phone.
On 17 different occasions Greg Maddux got a win in a game where he allowed five or more runs. Another 38 times he took the loss in a game where he allowed two or fewer runs.
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7 minutes ago, Moose Milligan said:
No, you're not alone.
I also want to see Adley hit .300.
Waiting for @DrungoHazewoodto come in and admonish me for enjoying stats that are archaic and random and don't mean anything.
Here's a live look-in at me not caring:
You can be nostalgic about anything you want. I still want to see somebody hit .400 in my lifetime. But that doesn't mean that's best way to assess runs and wins.
I only get a little upset when people turn their nostalgia into "We knew better in the old days than they do now, stop all this xwOBA, WAR gobbeldygook and go back to stuff that matters like pitcher wins and RBI!"
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16 minutes ago, clapdiddy said:
Without "THE" guy in the bullpen, I like the idea of matchups. That being said, I'd still like to see them add another reliable arm. I'll actually be surprised of they don't.
I'd be surprised if they didn't. But I would be surprised if they traded one of the big prospects (and perhaps it would take more) for a closer.
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I have a question. Why would the A's trade Miller? Why would the A's trade Miller for another player who has five years of control left, when they could just keep the high-performing young guy they have locked up through 2028? If you're a team that is looking to build for the future don't you build around players like Miller?
And if you're waiting for some point in the future where you're the Las Vegas A's, I'm still not sure you're making any moves because there are no very young players who're likely to be both more valuable than Miller and need 3-4 years in the minors.
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1 minute ago, Just Regular said:
Mason Miller and David Forst have said as much in interviews I've seen this spring, but the Red Sox probably said the same stuff about Papelbon back in the day.
Sigbot first wants to see if he's healthy after the MLB draft.
I think this is unlikely. How often do you see successful closers transition back to the rotation? How often does that succeed? You often see starters move to the pen, but the other way? Very unusual.
I'm trying to think of an example in the last 30-40 years... there were some in the 80s-90s. Like David Wells, Kenny Rogers, Curt Schilling, Derek Lowe. Smoltz moved to the pen and back after an injury. But very infrequent in the last 20-30 years. Jeff Samardzija, I guess.
I have my doubts that someone who throws 103 is going to be more valuable/healthy going five innings every five days, and probably having to throw a wider variety of pitches and maybe try to not throw as hard.
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- Popular Post
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The 2021 Rays won 100 games and 14 different pitchers had saves, no one with more than 14. The 2022 Rays won 86 games and nobody had 10 saves. The 2020 Rays, in just 60 games, had 12 pitchers get saves in 40 wins and they had a .667 winning percentage.
You don't have to have one guy be the closer.
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2 minutes ago, Sports Guy said:
So what do you want to do with him? Do you just want to DFa him in hopes you can trade him? Do you want to lose him for free? Do you think that’s the best way to use your resources?
Urias is an average MLB player. On the free agent market he'd likely get 2/20 or 2/15 or something like that. I think it's unlikely that Elias releases an average MLB player and gets nothing out of the deal. If they're thinking about making a move I have to assume they're trying to find a trade.
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50 minutes ago, Bahama O's Fan said:
Right now, which would do more for the major league team? Would Mayo go through an adjustment period like Gunnar, Cowser and Stowers did where they weren't very good their first time up? Will Urias come back around to his career average? Also, should we risk DFA Urias and losing him completely?
1) Mayo appears to be a better player, and would likely do more for the major league team.
2) It's entirely plausible that he goes through an adjustment period. Unless he doesn't. Or he's hot to start, then pitchers adjust and he slumps in June.
3) Yes, it's likely Urias comes back to his career averages.
4) I would be careful risking losing an asset for nothing, especially as a panic reaction to one or two games.
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23 minutes ago, Bemorewins said:
Well with Miller you get both.
IMO if he makes it through this year (given his projectable performance with absolute elite stuff) and next year when Felix is back, before his arm blows up, that’s enough.
That might be 1/2 championships. IMO none of those 3 prospects mentioned (top ones not named Holliday) is worth 1/2 World Series. Because in truth I simply cannot see us winning a pennant let alone a WS with Craig Kimbrel closing games in the postseason. At this point in his career, he is no longer a lock down reliever. And you are going to need that at some point in the Fall.
I’m not saying that we need a pen as good as the Yanks (likely our closest competitor in the AL) but we do need the talent at the backend to give ourselves a reasonable chance if we get into a bullpen battle in the playoffs.
Miller isn't the only reliever in the world. And any one player is no more than a piece of a contribution to a potential title. If the O's have a 8% chance at winning the Series right now (or 92% chance of not, which is actually very good), the addition of Miller and subtraction of whatever it takes to get him might make that 8.5%.
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11 hours ago, Sports Guy said:
Well if you told me that he will be elite level high leverage reliever for the next 5 years, I wouldn’t hesitate to trade Kjerstad for him. That’s extremely valuable in todays game.
What if I told you that he's going to be an elite high-level reliever for three of the next five years, but also out with a torn UCL for 18 months, and sort of hurt/rehabbing/not very effective for the other six months?
To me that's the mostly likely case, although the exact time periods could change.
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Yes (they should be starting).
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38 minutes ago, wildcard said:
That is just a side benefit. I gave no thought to how you would think of it when aI wrote it.
Ha! I knew you weren't actually a real person. Has ChatGPT just been using you as a test platform for years?
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39 minutes ago, wildcard said:
You are speculating and I am just questioning what happens next.
Yes, in the way you always do: Luis Hernandez is five for his last 16. We should monitor the situation closely to see if he's really going to be a .312 hitter over the rest of his career (despite no other evidence that this is in any way likely).
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11 minutes ago, Jim'sKid26 said:
Here's a good primer for you:
"Walks are an essential part of any successful offense. They lead to higher OBP, more pitches per plate appearance, force the opposing team to throw more strikes, and are a sign of a disciplined approach at the plate. While they are not the only factor that contributes to a team's success, they are undoubtedly a crucial component. Teams that are patient at the plate and willing to take walks put themselves in a better position to score runs and win games."
The challenge would be to define a metric for run scoring consistency. I'm not sure there is one as yet defined. The fact is that getting more guys on base while causing a pitcher to throw more pitches is beneficial to the hitting team. So conventional wisdom is more baserunners leads to more runs. More runs are better.
Run scoring consistency is pretty easy: either a team's standard deviation of runs scored, or maybe coefficient of variation of runs scored. Take all the O's runs scored for the year and dump them into a spreadsheet and run the STDEV calculation.
The O's this year have scored 5.1 runs/game, and the standard deviation of their runs scored is 3.3. The coefficient of variation or variance (3.3/5.1) is 0.64. One standard deviation of O's runs is between 1.8 runs and 8.4 runs.
The Astros, with the fewest Ks in the league, average 4.4 runs/game, with almost exactly the same standard deviation as the O's at 3.3. Their variance therefore is higher at 0.75. One standard deviation of Astros runs is between 1.1 runs and 7.7 runs.
So with this very small sample of just two teams (which you should never use to draw any broad conclusions), you could argue that the Orioles and all their strikeouts have been more consistent in scoring runs than the relatively contact-prone Astros.
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16 minutes ago, wildcard said:
Mountcastle has had trouble hitting righties for his last 600 PAs. You left that out. The question is will that continue going forward this season.
Given enough time almost everyone ends up with a platoon split that's roughly average. I would bet that Mountcastle is no different, and when all is said and done his career splits will be something like his career marks right now: around .850 against lefties, .750 against righties. Year to year that will be influenced by random variation.
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2 hours ago, Tony-OH said:
It seems not everyone understands that any more. It's baseball. The Nats pitchers threw well. But dang, it looks like Elias and company gave up on Hunter Harvey a little too early. For all the finds off the DFA or trades, they sure did miss with Hunter Harvey and Evan Phillips. Guess you win some and lose some.
But I'll take Harvey at the back end of our bullpen right now.
Hunter Harvey was in the Orioles system for nine years, and he threw a grand total of 23.2 innings in the majors, and 262.1 innings in the minors. That's 32 innings a year for nine years.
Maybe he becomes the new Rudy Seanez, and pitches 17 years with his arm held together with bailing wire and chewing gum and sometimes has a year like Seanez did with the Padres in '05. But I don't blame the O's at all for moving on after nine years (!) of almost never being healthy.
When Harvey was drafted my oldest kid was in the first grade, and his first 40-inning season in the majors was the year my kid got his driver's license.
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2 hours ago, Jim'sKid26 said:
https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/majors/2024.shtml
Team BA: .254 10th in MLB
Team HRs: 54 1st in MLB
Team RBIs 174 4th in MLB
Team Hit 197 12th in MLB
Team Runs 180 6th in MLB
Team OBP .306 17th in MLB
Team SLG .441 2nd in MLB
Team OPS .747 3rd in MLB
Team OPS+ 117 2nd in MLB
Team Walks 89 one more than last place CWS
Roy, I think they are hitting the ball just fine. But this team has a problem with getting on base and specifically taking a walk. Free swinging clubs are streaky.
Are they? Or is that just something people say? Does anyone have any links to studies that show that teams with more walks/fewer Ks are more consistent (i.e. have a lower standard deviation of runs scored) than teams with less walks/more Ks but similar overall runs scored?
I don't know of any such studies, but I'd love to read one. Do we have any aspiring saberists here who'd like to do some data mining?
The Worst Experience I’ve Ever Had at a Game the O’s Won (By Far)
in Orioles Talk
Posted
It's Ben's Chili Bowl, which is half-smoke sausages that you can get chili on. I don't know if the stadium versions are the same, but the original Ben's is a DC institution.