DrungoHazewood

I think he's now the ultimate anti-hero of a certain group of malcontents and nihilists. If he was in the Hall he'd just be one of 250 guys in the Hall.

It's very clear with Rose. Bet on your team, banned for life. He bet on his team. The end.

Canseco is one of those people for whom the truth is a vague concept. He has no idea how much of an impact any of this had because no one does. The individual circumstances are all over the place. We have only the haziest ideas of the details necessary to put together objective evidence of how either PEDs or sign stealing impacted players' numbers. The impact might have been anything from slightly negative to slightly positive to overwhelmingly positive, and anyone who tells you they know precisely which one for any individual player is making stuff up.

Lowenstein and Proctor were the best, and it's not just nostalgia. Lowenstein was truly a character and it came across all the time, Proctor was his straight man. They were a great comedy duo. Miller is awesome, every time I hear him on Giants broadcasts I get a little twinge about what we used to have. I'm just old enough to remember Thompson, and he was great. I loved Thompson paired with Brooksie in the early 80s. Angelos firing Miller was probably the pettiest thing he ever did. Firing people for not being enough of a blind cheerleader for the company is a huge red flag for how the company (or country, or whatever kind of organization) is being run.

Just spitballing, but wOBA is based on average run values of various offensive events. Runs Created comes in various flavors based on approximations that work out in most situations. For example, the simple version of runs created is (H+BB)*TB/(AB+BB). There are more refined/advanced versions, but they're all going to be less accurate (and not give you the same results especially in edge cases) than something that uses actual historical run values of individual events. The advantage of runs created is that it's very simple to calculate and most of the time it's reasonably accurate.

One of many.

Not a fan of George Costanza as a Mississippi plantation owner?

His career highs are 27 and 160.2. We still figure out if he's a witch by dunking him in the lake, we just dunk them a bit more carefully than in the past. Let's hope he's a witch.

It would have been more productive to just get rid of everyone else.

I never had any issues with Jeff Conine as a person, but those were some poorly run teams. What on earth does is a team in the middle of a multi-year collapse doing with a 40-year-old 1B/LFer OPSing .726? The '06 Orioles were eight years into the losing streak and they had positional starters aged 30, 34, 28, 32, 34, 40, and 35.

It has a huge impact on the number of people willing to become low-paid minor leaguers. Like people buying a lottery ticket, minor leaguers think they're going to make $millions. So they'll play for years for the equivalent of less than minimum wage. Even if 80-90% of them never even get a cup of coffee in the majors. So there's essentially a limitless supply of players to fill the rosters of minor league teams. Whatever number of minor league teams they settle on they'll never, ever be short of players.

In the beginning all teams were independent. They paid for everything. They were just like Major League teams, but usually in smaller cities. After a while Major League teams got tired of having to bid for the services of every young player they wanted, and the less well off minor league owners got tired of working their butts off to try to win games and make a profit but failing a good part of the time. So they came up with a devil's bargain: the MLB team would pay the minor league team a set fee to have any player they wanted, and the minor league team would be guaranteed enough money to pay the bills and they wouldn't even have to go find players. The Major Leagues also agreed to respect the minor league pennant races and the integrity of the teams, so they wouldn't steal Scranton's cleanup hitter in the middle of the pennant race so he could pinch hit for the Tigers twice a week. But over the period of roughly 1925-1960 this evolved into the situation we have today, where most of the minors probably can't exist without heavy subsidies from the majors, and no one cares at all about wins and losses and pennant races in the minors. The whole thing is just a way to sell beer and popcorn and cotton candy to families who don't mind a sort-of baseball game going on in the background. We now have nearly a century of minor league baseball not mattering, and I don't think you can go back to the old way. Many consecutive generations have grown up knowing minor league baseball isn't really a sport, but just a way to train and funnel a few prospects to a far-away MLB team. Which is most of why Buffalo and Milwaukee aren't terribly different sized cities, but one's baseball team draws 3 million fans and the other's 500k.

They probably think that: a) pretty much nobody cares and b) the people who do care are their 78-year-old core fanbase who're still smartin' from the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn. They ain't putting up with no more shenanigans. When that punk kid LaRussa started using Jesse Orosco for one batter at a time that was the devil's handiwork, but gol darn it if they're gonna let somebody tell a red-blooded 'merican manager he has to use the pitcher for three batters. It's our God-given constitutional right to do dumb things.

He was traded for Jorge Julio and John Maine. Neither of them were all that good, but philosophically it was a terrible idea for a bad team to trade a young starting prospect and a reliever for a random 30-year-old making $8M a year. Maine was a cheap, serviceable starter for about three years after the deal. Benson was done after one meh year.

How do you determine the correct cutoff? If you set up a system where anyone who wants to be a professional player can become one you might have 30,000 or 50,000 people or more in the minors. And you'd probably only find one additional major leaguer per 1000 players added. Look at the draft. The number of real prospects drops off logarithmically or exponentially with round or pick. By the 30th round you'll find a productive major leaguer once every five years or something. The current number of MiLB teams wasn't arrived at by analysis and logic deducing where a good balance is between investment and prospects. It just kind of happened, and more-or-less ended up in a place that MLB thought was fiscally sustainable. Go look at a league from 15-20 years ago... let's say the 2005 Sally League. Of the top 100 players in batting average, only 25 ever eventually appeared in the majors. About 30 of the top 100 in innings ever made the majors at all. Is that the right balance? Paying to support an entire 16-team league of 400+ players plus coaches, umps, and infrastructure so that you get a handful of regulars and stars and maybe 50 or 60 players who ever appear in the majors? I don't know. And if you go down a level or two to short-season or rookie ball I'd assume the percentages that ever make it are even lower. I assume the majors support the number of MiLB teams they do not because it's optimal for development, but because they want a local connection to baseball for the good of the long-term fanbase. Although if they really thought about it that way (and maybe they are now) they'd cut out a few levels to increase short-term profits. Someone else will be in charge in 5-10 years and who cares about them?

It is true that until roughly 1990 college players had a significant advantage over high schoolers. When Bill James was writing his Abstracts in the 1980s one of his discoveries/rules was that you'd get more value if you just didn't draft high schoolers. But sometime in the 90s the difference in career value between players picked coming out of high school, and players picked out of college significantly narrowed or completely disappeared I haven't seen the data in a few years, but circa 2015 scouting and other analytical tools had made the 6-year value numbers nearly the same so the only advantage to college players is that they get here sooner. And a high schooler just might be providing MLB value when the college guy is still in college. If Manny or Harper or Trout had spent two or three years in college they'd have missed out on 2-3 years of really good play in the majors, not to mention many $millions.

27-40, 5.77 from '99 to the end of his career. Ubaldo only had a 5.22 with the Orioles.

It's kind of amazing that they didn't say this up front.

Would have never qualified. He never had a season where he pitched and played more than three games as a position player.

Look below the surface. He played quite a bit at first base in the minors when he wasn't pitching. But he only OPS'd .697. Not nearly enough to be a real first baseman, but maybe useful to pinch hit for the pitcher or a poor-hitting shortstop or catcher once in a while.

MLB should double down on their position and claim that all minor leaguers are just unpaid interns. Stop all bonuses and salaries until a player gets to the majors. Field as many minor league teams as you can get players to volunteer for. If thousands of players will play for $1000 a month, I'd bet you'd keep at least 50% for free if you found them host families to live with and gave them a few peanut butter sandwiches.

The idea that having a pitcher face at least three batters will ruin baseball is itself a symptom of what ails baseball. Adding a rule that wasn't in place in 1906 is totally catastrophic, but if we go from 1.2 pitchers a game to eight with no rules changes that's brilliant. What?

I had no idea. From 1950-2015 I'm sure no one would have qualified. Even those couple years Brooks Kieschnick was a LOOGY/OF/PH I don't think he met the thresholds.

Much better to have baseball evolve in unexpected, counter-productive, uncontrolled, and fan-unfriendly ways rather than change anything or try something new.

None. Micah Owings is probably the best-hitting pitcher of my lifetime (non-Ohtani category) and he wouldn't have ever qualified.