DrungoHazewood

That's like saying if the world wants to fix climate change, then a simple solution is to just get Republicans and Democrats and the Chinese and the Indians to all come together in a spirit of mutual cooperation and shared sacrifice and they'll work out something awesome. If it was that easy, it would have happened generations ago. The problem with fixing revenue sharing is that the people who bought into the Yanks and Dodgers and Red Sox and Cubs and Astros and Giants and Cardinals and others did so on the basis of a model where they have dominant revenue streams. Their franchise values are based on this. You are asking them to voluntarily give up $10s or $100s of millions of dollars or more for the good of teams who they currently beat on a regular basis. The only way they agree to this is if they see the entire structure on the verge of collapse, and even then they probably start off by lopping off weak teams rather than sacrifice their own finances. And MLB is not on the verge of collapse - it's at peak historical revenues; pretty much the opposite of collapse.

But you're the kind of person who thinks anyone in charge of anything is dumber than a bag of rocks. You viscerally hate Mike Elias, you were no big fan of Duquette, you hate Manfred. I'm guessing you didn't like Bud (who did?). How would commissioner Atomic fix all that ails baseball?

They need to get creative. Every North American sports league gets all their ideas from slightly tweaking what they've done for the past 30, 50, 100 years. I think they should shrink the playoffs. The current playoffs are about crowning a champion, right? They've already made it so that the best team in baseball has less than a 1-in-3 chance of winning the Series on the first day of October. Why further dilute that? Why continue to pretend that it's greater to win a few short series in October than it is to have a team that wins over six-plus months? (I know why - they can't fix gross revenue imbalances, so they randomize the World Series champ by adding rounds of playoffs that necessarily don't reflect organizational quality so much as luck.) They need to give teams something else to play for. Why do teams tank? Because they get better picks, have a lower payroll, and even if they try they have essentially no chance of winning the single trophy baseball gives out. So give them another opportunity. Maybe set up a League Cup, where every few weeks you play a in-League series that serves as a secondary competition with tangible, sizable monetary or payroll or roster space or (something) award to the winner, along with a big trophy. Maybe you have a competition where the bottom 8 or 10 teams from last year play teams from the Mexican League in some kind of tournament, with a 3-game series played once or twice a month, and a championship happening at the same time as the divisional playoffs. Perhaps instead of contracting a bunch of mid- or low-tier minor league teams, turn AAA into an independent league that's still loosely affiliated with MLB. Everyone over 26 still on a AAA roster at the end of the year is free to sign with any other AAA team. I'm making this up on the fly... but maybe you could do promotion/relegation with this league, maybe you have a competition between this and the lower-tier MLB teams. I know... this is new and different and weird and I'm sure the collective power of baseball fans can come up with 6,994 reasons why this will never work and I'm a fool for suggesting it. Then come up with your own idea on how to incentivize teams without realistic hope to try. Whatever MLB has come up with in the last 125 years hasn't worked. The entire problem is baseball teams in a modern revenue environment often/usually take years and years to rebuild from a down period, and they literally have almost no incentive to win during that time. Give them something to play for.

Mr. Kramer, I'm not even sure what this is supposed to be. It's like you have no training in business whatsoever. I'm just trying to get ahead.

It is difficult to reconcile projections 1.00 run better than LeBlanc with the idea that Cashner is worse than all the other pitchers ever.

Am I an awful person for noting that Costanza was working on the Penske file for some other company that he just showed up to work for?

LeBlanc? His Fangraphs projections are for a 2020 ERA in between 5.50 and 6.00. Cashner's projections are for about a 4.70. But you're right, there's no way LeBlanc could be any worse than Cashner because numbers.

Might want to bookmark this thread for the next time we have someone suggest that Elias and his team have spent the last year-plus playing Xbox and smokin' doobies.

Strange as this feels, I agree with wildcard here. You're suggesting pitchers who were broken for much of the past year or several years are a better fit. They're arguably, nominally better if your main goal is flipping for a middling prospect in June, but worse if you're trying to get 150+ innings out of a starter.

Strange as this feels, I agree with wildcard here. You're suggesting pitchers who were broken for much of the past year or several years are a better fit. They're arguably, nominally better if your main goal is flipping for a middling prospect in June, but worse if you're trying to get 150+ innings out of a starter.

It's not about analytics. It's about bringing in someone to hopefully give you 150 innings that aren't a total disaster. That's it. None of the others are any/much more likely to do that, and we know Cashner is a decent fit on the team, with coaches, players, etc. Actually, most of the other pitchers don't fit that mold. Someone like Buchholz is a little more likely to be better per inning, but it's been four years since he threw as many innings as Cashner has in each of the last four years. I'm not advocating for signing Cashner. But it's kind of irrelevant. He'll cost a million or two over a AAA free agent. I'll trust Elias to make the judgment call as to whether that money could be better spent elsewhere. The downside is that there's about a 30%(?) chance Cashner is just as unpitchable as some guy they find on the waiver wire in late March.

For each of the past four years his FIP has been between 4.60 and 5.25. He's thrown between 132 and 166 innings. So there's a high likelihood that he's going to give you like 150 innings of a 5.00. Is that awful? I guess not, it's not random guy from AAA awful. Last year was a near best case scenario, where he had his normal high-4.00s FIP but got high-3.00s results. It's about as likely that he does what he did with the Red Sox, where his ERA is around 6.00. The only reason you sign Cashner is to have a somewhat higher confidence that you get 150 innings that aren't a total trainwreck. There's almost no chance you flip him for a decent prospect, zero chance he helps contend, almost no chance he does something that warrants a place on a future roster. You're spending a few $million for a bit more stability in the rotation on a 57-win team.

I think Duquette did a great job, at least given the constraints he was faced with. He pulled off things with the back end of the roster MacPhail wouldn't have even considered. That core was good, but no better than (and probably not as good as) the other teams in the division. The '13 Red Sox won the Series and then added Bogaerts, Bradley and Betts. And Porcello, Price, Kimbrel and Eduardo Rodriguez. The Orioles didn't improve the development system because Duquette was given a set budget and (presumably, seemingly) was told to win and keep winning. You can't have 30-40% of the Yanks and Sox revenues, rebuild the bottom-5 or bottom-10 farm system, build up front office infrastructure, reset and implement a new organizational philosophy, AND keep a $120-160M payroll to win 80-95 games a year.

The reason it was so awesome is that it was so unlikely. The bullpen set an all time record (at the time) for WPA at over +13 wins. Jim Johnson, Pedro Strop, Darren O'Day, Luis Ayala... greatest bullpen ever. If you saw that coming you're lying. McLouth had hit .200 with a .600 OPS over his prior 2+ years, and he played at a 3-win pace for the O's. From 2009-11 Davis OPS'd under .700. In '12 Mark Reynolds fielded .850 at third. Here's a list of Lew Ford's teams in that era: Rochester, Hanshin, Louisville, Caribes, Long Island, Oaxaca, Long Island, Baltimore, Norfolk, Long Island, Norfolk, Bowie, GCL Orioles, Magallanes, Venezuela, Long Island, Magallanes, Toros, Tijuana... and he started a playoff game for the Orioles.

2012 didn't have to happen. It wasn't preordained. A lot of things went right. If God simulated 2012 1000 times probably 700 of them the O's finish under .500. 2014 probably doesn't happen with 2012. Duquette's plans worked out very well, probably as well as they could have with moderate payrolls and a poor farm system. Tearing it all down was most certainly a reasonable option. Maybe a more reasonable option (without the 20/20 hindsight) than saying "hey, we're going to rely on like Nate McLouth and Chris Davis and Joe Saunders and Lew Ford to get us to the playoffs after 69 wins in '11." If you'd have told us in mid-2011 the story of the 2012 Orioles you'd have been laughed off the site.

Elias probably wouldn't be here if Peter was still in charge. He would have interviewed, and Angelos would have said no to the rebuild, no to international investments, no to a real analytics department, and Elias would have turned it down. Just like the first 3-4 candidates did in 2011.

That's easy: maximize current wins while doing all the stuff Elias is saying he's doing (and explicitly showing the fans all the behind the scenes stuff so we can be more confident he's not a snake oil salesman) and add 50% more for good measure. In other words, top five farm system, top five analytical staff, and never dipping below 75-80 wins at any time between 2019-2021.

I think that fans do an awful lot of word-parsing and inferring context and asserting that what a GM says on February 11th is exactly and literally what he has to do on November 22nd or he's being disingenuous. When the 322nd interview question of the month is answered with a "no" instead of a probably not" I'm sure someone on the internet will call him out for his duplicity.

I think the Third Alternate kit/cap thing is often targeted at the people who don't want to be like everyone else. Soccer teams whose colors are blue and white will have yellow or turquoise 3rd kits. The Orioles probably think they can sell caps to 475 people who'd otherwise never buy one, plus the 332 people who obsessively collect every piece of kit the franchise ever produces.

The first year of the DH in '73 the Orioles used Tommy Davis as the nearly full-time DH. He had almost 600 PAs and hit .306. DH'd 128 times. But he only walked 30 times and had 30 extra base hits, so he had a .732 OPS. Not the worst performance ever, but by today's figuring it was a 1-win season. Clearly well below average, really a position where they needed a better solution. But by the thinking of the era he was more than just fine. He finished 10th in the MVP voting(!)*. In '74 he got 155 games as the O's DH with a 95 OPS+. Then 111 the next year! They just hadn't thought through the concept that if you have zero defensive responsibility you need to hit better than an average second baseman. Oh, and in '73 Orioles had Jim Fuller, Royle Stillman and Doug DeCinces at Rochester OPSing in the mid-to-high .800s, all 22 years old. In '74 they were all back at Rochester for part or most of the year. What's the story with Stillman? He had close to 2000 PAs in the O's system, mostly at AAA, with OPSes consistently in the high .800s, and he got 40 PAs in Baltimore. * He scored 53 runs and had 7 homers in nearly full time play as a DH, and got more MVP votes than Catfish Hunter, who went 21-5. He got more votes than George Scott who also hit .306 but had 17 more homers and 28 more RBI. He easily out-polled Yaz, who had an .870 OPS. He finished ahead of Thurmon Munson, Yankee catcher with 20 homers and an .850 OPS. I don't get it.

The 49ers coach looked like a middle aged white guy trying to be a 22-year-old rapper and (of course) failing miserably. At least Andy Reid embraces the 60-year-old walrus aesthetic. I can respect that.

I'm trying to imagine the kind of person who'd wear this hat un-ironically.

I think most people do something like that, but I think you have to at least eyeball a slope of history. If you don't you see that a majority of the most dominant performances were 80, 100, 120+ years ago and could conclude that there was a golden age of Roman Gods who played the game back then and no one will ever match that. Mike Trout would most certainly hit something like .419 if he played in a league like the 1911 AL. You should also add to your list the ever-increasing sophistication of player development. In 1885 a good amateur/sandlot player might be signed by a MLB team on Tuesday and be the starting pitcher against the NY Giants on Wednesday. In 1910 that player is probably signed by a Class D team where he stays for all of a year or two or three until Connie Mack's cousin's buddy happens to see him play against Waukeegen and suggests they give him train fare to Philly for a tryout. It wasn't until after WWII that something sort of like today's development systems really took hold, and it continues to be refined all the time. In the 1960s Earl was still wiring fake boxscores to the Orioles from Rochester to fool them into thinking somebody else was playing RF because Earl wanted a real RFer there. Today the Orioles know where Norfolk's RF was positioned on every play.

It would be fun to have a MLB team run entirely by nihilists.

But that has its own complications. When Ty Cobb was 25 the major leagues were probably about on par with the Korean League today. Japan if you're being charitable. What would Mike Trout hit in the KBO? How much better than the average KBO player would Trout be? In a primitive league Old Hoss Radbourne might have been 15 or 20 wins above replacement, but Barry Bonds and a 50-gallon drum of steroids wasn't that good in modern baseball.