DrungoHazewood

The deepest Mantle family secret: Mickey had an identical twin they kept locked in the tornado cellar as a backup. They pulled out Rickey Mantle to go school in Mickey's place whilst he was barnstorming.

Yes, in 1939 Mickey Mantle was playing alongside 34-year-old barnstormers at the age of eight in a tiny village on Virginia's Eastern Shore just to get the mythical developmental advantage of the cool, moist sea air, while having a doppelganger attend grade school in Commerce, Oklahoma. 100% true.

It's like the old saying goes, you should use stats like a drunk uses a lamppost. For support, not illumination. It's whatever you need to make your point.

It's not very well known, but the whole reason Mickey Mantle was good was the 11 years he spent secretly playing for a barnstorming team based out of Cape Charles, Virginia from ages 8-19.

Just measure it. Go to Google maps, find a baseball park, and measure from normal third positioning and the normal short. Third to first is something like 135 feet, short is something like 125 feet. The outfield grass at deepest short is something like 145', while the third base line/grass mark is about 155'. Sure, you can find places a third baseman needs to cover that are closer than some places a shortstop needs to cover. But I think it's clear an average throw from third is longer than an average throw from short.

Also the "hoarding cash" part implies that the team has a vault somewhere that's labeled "2024-2029 payroll" and they just throw all the profits in there, ready to take out and spend on free agents. The much more likely case is that the profits are used or distributed to the ownership group as they come in. There is no $500m account ready to fund future signings beyond this year's revenues. Unless someone can find me strong evidence to the contrary I'll continue to believe that the 2024 Orioles' payroll ceiling is based on the projected revenues of the 2024 Orioles.

So, maybe a little like Top Golf, but I guess you get to go down to the "holes" on the field to putt? Apparently you're limited to sand wedge through 8 iron. When I saw the title my first thought was home plate to CF is reachable with a 9-iron, and a PGA pro could drive a ball over the warehouse from anywhere in the upper deck. The light rail station on the other side of the warehouse is a little over 200 yards from home. I might be able to hit the Hilton that looms over LF with a good drive from the plate.

I don't see how it can hurt. At the very least it builds connections to the Oriole teams of the past. Most players are fans, too, and many of the current guys probably grew up watching guys like JJ Hardy, even if most of them were not Orioles fans. It's probably cool to be around players like that and to hear stories and maybe even get a few pointers. I guess it could be counter-productive if the old guys were bitter, or the kind of person who rants about how the game has gone downhill with all this newfangled 4-inning-starter, nine relief pitchers a game, stat nerd mumbo jumbo... but I seriously doubt that's the kind of guy the team will bring in.

I think that's a good data point, but it's just one. Mountcastle has been in the majors for 1638 PAs, he's 27, and prior to 2023 he had a .774 OPS, in 2023 he had a .779 OPS. Fangraphs lists a bunch of projections, all of them have Mountcastle between .758 and .789. They're just projections, but nobody is betting on a big breakout. Doesn't mean it can't happen, but I don't know if it's likely. How well do unexpected 2nd half splits actually stick? In 2022 Nathaniel Lowe had a .964 OPS 2nd half, and a .771 coming into the season. In 2023 he had a .775. Eloy Jimenez had a .948, an .822 coming in, and a .758 in '23. Trayce Thompson had a .947, coming off a .688 career, and then a .579 '23. Joey Menses had a .930 as a 2nd half '22 rookie, then a .722 in '23. Coming into '22 Bo Bichette had an .850, 2nd half of '22 he had a .921, then an .814 in '23. Jake Fraley had a .656 going into '22, a .903 2nd half of '22, and a .783 in '23. Vinnie Pasquantino had an .899 as a late '22 rookie, then a .762 in '23. I'm sure you could find counter-examples, but for the most part the plexiglass principle applies. Or you could call it the SI jinx. Players who play unexpectedly well (and often are recognized for that with things like magazine covers) tend to regress to career marks. "Tend to" doesn't mean that's destiny, but I don't know that I'd count on Mountcastle being a top-10 offensive player in '24.

Is it really wise to just assume that the US won't go into an extended deflationary period like we saw between the War of 1812 and the Civil War? Sure, that's essentially unheard of since then, but maybe Elias knows things we don't. There's strong indications he's part of the Illuminati.

Adrian Gonzalez went 1/1 in 2000, and before he made his debut the Marlins traded him to Texas as partial payment for Ugueth Urbina. That should have been a huge win for the Rangers, but they turned around a couple years later before Gonzalez was established and traded him for a washed-up Adam Eaton and 90 innings of Akinori Otsuka. I almost have to think there's some kind of backstory there. Not often you have a #1 overall pick who ended up with a heck of a career, but was traded twice before he's established for what turned out to be almost nothing in both cases.

Sign him and then cut him when the inevitable media circus and his inability to not publicly say dumb things happens? Then why sign him at all. Also, his real, actual MLB ERA, mostly from his 20s, is 3.79. I don't see any reasonable way to say "he probably is at least a 3.50 ERA pitcher". You know how many full seasons he's had with an ERA+ of 130 or better? One. In 2020 he had a great 73 innings. In 2018 he finished 6th in the Cy Young. In '21 he was really good for 107 innings. Besides that? Five years of mid-4.00s ERAs and 175-200 innings. Fangraphs lists four different 2024 projections for Bauer, with ERAs between 3.93 and 4.63. Last year he had a 114 ERA+ in a AAAA league.

No it's not a blunder. C'mon. You add talent where it makes sense, you don't overpay or stretch your resources thin to add deep depth. Wasn't it a week ago that major publications and outlets were touting the O's as having one of the stronger rotations in baseball? You don't use a small-to-mid-market team's resources to go all in on a $300M contract for a starter when your rotation is already a strength.

In a world of hot takes, reflexive bitterness, and completely uninformed opinions, you've presented us with not only some optimism, but also a relevant and serious medical study directly related to the topic at hand. Bravo.

The Orioles have been a top 5 worst team in sports the last 25 years. Part of that is a series of scandals and other unsavory things like the Albert Belle mess, the Palmerio/Tejada PED debacle, the suicide of a longtime pitcher/announcer/GM, a laughingstock owner for 30 years, the Chris Davis contract trainwreck, and on and on. Finally after decades we have a World Series contending team and an unbelievably fun and cohesive group of players, coaches, and front office. But for some reason a few people want to drop a media circus and PR nightmare into the middle of that and potentially create yet another reason to call the Baltimore Orioles a chaotic mess. All for the 13th-best pitcher in the Japanese Central League in '23.

July 19th. That's how long it took the Orioles to overcome the Rays starting an '84-Tigers-like 27-6.

Well said. The 2014 Orioles had like 14 major things go off the rails and won the division by 12 games. Everything doesn't have to go right for the O's to be a playoff team this year. To be a contender all that has to happen is everything can't go wrong. And it never all goes wrong.

Circling back around, the NPB numbers I posted aren't a crystal ball that says 100% Bauer is going to be a mediocre starter the majors. But, they also don't point to him being a great pitcher. There are a lot of pitchers in the world, most of them don't have 1/10th the baggage and risk Bauer does. I just don't think it's worth it. I'd rather the Orioles not be that organization who prioritizes winning over being decent. Oh, but Drungo, what about Albert Belle? What about Delmon Young?! Why don't we leave that stuff in the past and try to be better. We have an exciting, young team with a ton of talent and a great clubhouse. No reason to bring a controversial sideshow in to that.

For a minute let's set aside your political opinions. The Japanese Central League has six teams. Which means they had roughly 30 or 40 starting pitchers. Just 26 pitched 100 innings. Bauer's ranking among those pitchers: ERA (min 100 IP): 13th IP: 16th H/9: 14th HR/9: 21st BB/9: 12th K/9: 2nd K/BB: 7th Summing that up, he was a 2nd or 3rd starter in a league that sits somewhere between AAA and the Majors. And he'll come with a media circus and a PR hit. People look at his 2.76 ERA and think "oohh.. he's great". But the Central League had a 3.15 ERA. Total runs allowed were 3.5/game, or fewer than all but two MLB seasons in 150 years of history. Last year Japan was an epic pitching environment. The average pitcher in a AAAA league had a 3.15 ERA. 2.76 is just a smidge better than average there. His ERA+ was 114 in a lesser league. Relative to his league his ERA was essentially the same as Tyler Wells or Bryan Baker, but the quality of competition was lower. On the Yokohama Bay Stars, a 3rd place team, 74-66, 12 games out of first, he was their 3rd starter. So, how far out on a limb do you want to go for that?

Hernandez wasn't as ludicrous a choice as might appear at first glance. He had an 8.7 WPA, which is the 10th-highest total of all time, and the highest of any reliever in history. But the rest of the ballot reflected the fact that nobody had any consistent, logical way to combine or compare different types of production. Kent Hrbek finished 2nd? In what universe is a first baseman with 27 homers who was like 8th in the league in RBI on an 81-81 team the 2nd-best player in the league? Eddie was also a first baseman on a .500-ish team, but had more homers, RBI, walks, runs, steals. Cal's value was so, so high in part because of otherworldly defensive metrics which were unavailable then. Nevertheless, Cal hit about as well as Hrbek, while being a GG-caliber shortstop, on a team that won four more games, but Hrbek beat Cal in MVP vote points 247-1. Steve Balboni, an overweight DH/1B with 77 RBI in 126 games, got more MVP votes than Cal. Sometimes you just can't justify old award votes, because they were a few hundred writers subjectively making stuff up as they went.

Of course 90% of collage athletes never go pro in their sport, so the education they get, the degree they get, is going to get them a substantial advantage in career earnings in whatever field they end up in.

A sham. The origins of amateur sports, and this high-minded idealism surrounding the concept, started off in cricket in England 200 or more years ago. Amateurs were the members of the landed gentry, the minor royalty, who had enough inherited wealth to not need to work. Naturally the posh, upper-class athletes weren't always the best. So cricket teams started recruiting working people, miners and blacksmiths and tradesmen and the like. But to play sports, especially cricket matches that took as many as five days, you'd have to pay them to take off work. Otherwise they couldn't live. So professionals were members of the unwashed, uneducated lower classes. Amateurs were, you know, better people, at least in the traditions of that era. For many years cricket would talk about "gentlemen" and others, they'd have matches pitting gentlemen amateurs against lower-class pros. Eventually they had to stop because the pros destroyed the gentry. The modern Olympics were started in the 1890s when this sentiment was still very strong. And this carried over to other sports, most notably in the US, college sports. Over time it became convenient to talk about the purity of amateur athletics so that you wouldn't have to give the players their fair share of the profits. The Olympics eventually gave up, the final straw being the Soviets pretending their pros were amateurs and beating the US players who were more like actual amateurs. College stuck to this longer than almost anyone else, in part because it was so darned profitable for everyone except the players. And the players had no way to organize to try to fix it, and the best of them didn't have a huge incentive to upset the system because they were dreaming of NFL riches just around the corner.

Yea, I'd argue it's just as bad for football. Even good teams will often see multiple starters leave. I really only follow Virginia Tech, but it seems like half the players are on their 3rd college, and it's being touted as a huge win and a minor miracle that 90% of their starters are returning for next year. Sometimes you'll hear people talk about baseball free agency, and say stuff like "in the beginning they should have made everyone a free agent every year, the supply would be huge and nobody would get these giant contracts, it'd be awesome!" Yea... that's what we have in college sports now: everyone is on a one-year contract, and it's pretty much chaos. If you're not closely following a team you have no chance of figuring out who's playing for them. "What happened to our QB, he's awesome, is he hurt? No, no... he's playing for Missouri now, but that's okay we got this other guy you never heard of from Utah, hopefully he learned the system in the last month." Clearly this is a far worse experience for the fans, who pay for all of this with tickets that are often just as expensive as the pros. But having said all that, it was always ludicrous that Frank Beamer made $5M a year in a small town in SW Virginia, his assistant coaches $500k or more, while his players got $30k scholarships, and could be suspended a month for charging $5 for an autograph, and EA Sports had to keep names out of their college football games. Like the Olympics, it was a corrupt house of cards propped up by this nonsensical and frankly disingenuous notion about the purity of amateur sports, which was really a way to funnel $millions to the people running the organization.

If I'm aligning an infield I prefer it to go northeast-southwest. That's the way most ballparks are built.

Maybe. But there's a difference from the style of baseball I'd like to see, with lots of speed and triples and balls in play, and what wins games in reality. If he ends up as a guy who's a plus defender who steals bases at a high percentage, hits 12 triples and 10 homers with a .300 average and 60 walks that would be awesome. But he could also be 2007 Juan Pierre. Hits .293 and steals 64 bases but is still a well below-average player because his glove is just okay, he doesn't walk enough and had zero homers. Obviously rooting for option A.