DrungoHazewood

Smith, Williams, and the waiver wire. It'll be down to the wire to see who comes out on top. Williams is a better defender but projects to .650-.725 OPS. Smith might OPS close to .750 but is barely better than Mancini in left. There could be someone trying to slip through in late March who's better.

That's like giving the President or the Governor a poor grade because a hurricane happened.

I'm curious as to what a non-failing grade would look like for a GM who inherited a 47-win team with a bottom-five farm system.

There are very clear differences than before. Most notably, that in 1998-2011 and even after that they never actually rebuilt. They never started to rebuild. The closest they came was trading Erik Bedard. Today they're clearly tearing it down with the intent of changing their fundamental philosophy and rebuilding.

I've tired of whatever nuance there is between my position and yours. Good day.

So? It's just as obvious as the others.

Okay, all the circumstantial evidence points in that direction. And most people don't take sports teams literally when they say things like "total control". Clearly Elias wouldn't' be allowed to sign six $300M free agents this winter. He wouldn't be allowed to try to move the team to Greenland. He could't change the team name to the Charm City Murder. And he's not allowed to release Chris Davis.

Or maybe it's that they hadn't really participated in any international sports in their entire history, wanted to change that, and decided to put a ton of resources (relative to their size) into one particular sport about a decade ago.

The MLB team wasn't supposed to improve yet; the plan was to put almost all of their resources into development for 2022 or later. Elias is the GM, he probably doesn't have anything to do with Marketing. The MASN dispute is a legal matter, again out of the hands of Elias. And it's very clear that the Davis situation is being handled by people outside of baseball operations. For what Elias controls he's doing or at least saying all the right things.

But not even remotely enough difference from a random population of humans to account for their short-term performance. And if they were somehow insanely genetically predisposed to soccer how come they just figured this out in 2014-2018, give or take?

You just need to be very careful. There's a fine line between small pockets of people with a combination of environment and genetic traits that help them in a few narrow cases, and generalizing your way into early 20th century eugenics type nonsense. Saying Icelandic people are genetically predisposed to be vastly better at soccer leans heavily towards the latter.

In an alternate universe baseball could be just like baseball in 1880. You mostly go straight from amateur ball to the majors. There are only a few hundred players making a living at baseball in the world. Is that better than having thousands of players in the minors? I don't know. I'm sure a lot of guys look fondly on their careers that topped out as a halfway decent player in the Carolina League. I don't think the world is necessarily a better place if 100 extra guys get to be something besides baseball players a few years sooner.

Ah... now I get it. You don't like soccer you've decided it's easy and any good athlete would automatically excel at it. I'm sure Lebron would be able to push around much smaller players. Buts since he's never played soccer at even a moderately high level he would have no earthly idea how to do it well or legally, and without years of training he'd look like someone who has no feel for the sport whatsoever. It would be a much more involved version of Herb Washington, who was a world-class sprinter and a very mediocre 31-for-48 base stealer because he had no idea how to play baseball. I'm reasonably confident that Lebron would have been a very good soccer player if he'd played soccer from a very young age. But to transition to the sport in his 30s and almost immediately be the best center-back in the US is comically ridiculous. You're essentially saying the Tyreek Hill or Lamar Jackson could start in the NBA this year. It's nonsense.

Just like he could have been the best defensive shortstop of all time, but we'll never know.

Actually I think Bono's peak sanctimonious was in the late 80s, Rattle and Hum era. He was still a true believer. Then they went back and retooled and (with varying levels of success) goofed around with irony. Now Bono regularly talks about how he knows he rubs people the wrong way, but yea, still has more than a little of our music will save us all vibe going on.

Having a messiah complex doesn't preclude you from actually doing some good.

No one does sanctimonious like Bono, and I will love U2 until the day I die. In any case, are you really that sure that rock n' roll won't save the world?

PEDs are different. Probably 75%+ of players used them, and the league both willfully ignored and tacitly endorsed it. Bud's shock about those seemingly good boys taking those awful drugs reminded me of someone's elderly aunt being bowled over by teenagers these days drinking beer and having premarital sex. Oh goodness, that doesn't happen, does it? Bud was more than fine with it right up to the point it had the potential to hurt his bottom line instead of enhancing it.

So they'd be "helped" by being cut off, they never play pro ball, and are forced to get on with their lives a few years earlier?

That used to be the case. In 1948 the Dodgers had 26 (six above class B, which is roughly A ball today) affiliates while the Senators had 11 (and only one of those above class B ball). In 1935 the Browns had two and the Cardinals 13.

I know I was expecting the entire tectonic shift in organizational structure and philosophy to be wrapped up in four to six weeks.

You grade them on the reasonableness of the picks. Whether or not they become solid major leaguers is a combination of development and luck, which has nothing to do with drafting. Example: you can grade the Orioles' 2009 draft poorly since they took Hobgood at #5 when the consensus was that he was more like a #20-30 pick.

You're kidding. I must be, Japan is islands - okay, the important thing here is that, uh, you ask me what kinda car it is. Uh, uh, what kind of car do ya' got? I've got a b#$$%ing camaro.

You'd be all right with the Angelos boys paying a mobster $100M to get the Orioles' opponent or the umps to throw the World Series, just so long as the Yanks or Sox are on the losing end?

At our local theaters you can get reserved seats for less than $10. But soda and a popcorn are 3 million dollars.