DrungoHazewood

Including Aaron and Mays, who almost certainly used greenies? Gary Carter is one of the half-dozen best catchers of all time, or at least has a strong case for that kind of ranking. If he's not in it's basically Bench and... nobody? The unanimous thing is a result of a poorly thought out voting process. In the very early days hundreds of now-enshrined players were eligible, there were no good sources of information, and the voting was the same - you had to get 75% to get in. And there was a badly thought out split between 19th and 20th century players. It's no surprise that no one got 100% of the vote. Cy Young didn't even get in the Hall in the first class because nobody knew if he was treated as a 19th century or 20th century guy. They basically went to hundreds of writers and asked them to go by memory and vote for up to 10 out 1000s of plausible candidates. It's amazing anyone got 75%, 100% is ludicrous. In the 1940s or early 50s. Lefty Grove got votes after he'd already been elected. Di Maggio got a few votes when he was still active, before he was eligible. It was a complete crapshow, and continues to be to some extent today. And yet there are a number of players with lesser careers who've been enshrined. Tommy McCarthy. Ray Schalk. Bill Mazeroski. High Pockets Kelly. You can certainly make the case that Whitaker and Grich are right around the level of an average Hall of Fame second baseman. Grich and Ryne Sandberg are very similar. Whitaker's career is about as valuable as Roberto Alomar. Both of them are difficult to exclude when compared to 6, 8, 10 obviously lesser second basemen who have long been in. Evans is a victim of having an underappreciated skill set in his era. Players who do a lot of things pretty well never get the credit someone like Rice gets for hitting a lot of homers at a very homer-friendly park. Allen would have a better case if he'd been able to control his alcoholism and destructive personality. I know he faced a lot of societal pressures including racism, but it's not helpful when you openly agitate and conspire to have your manager fired on multiple occasions. He was a truly fearsome hitter, much better than Jim Rice.

It is a game changer, so that's why teams should have been extra vigilant. One is a fastball, two is a curve is taking trust to a naïve level.

I think it's more like using 1234 or your birthday as your ATM pin, and being outraged that someone stole everything out of your bank account. It was illegal and shouldn't have happened, but c'mon, at least try a little harder to protect yourself.

A few pages ago I said something like "if you don't want your signs stolen use better cryptography." Teams need to get creative. Have the catcher go through signs like usual, but the real sign is something else. Like where the catchers shoes are pointing, or where his glove hand is resting. Have someone sit in the stands behind the plate giving real signs and the catcher's are all fake. Legalize some kind of simple electronic system between pitcher and catcher. Use the rotating advertising boards behind the plate - fastball is Ollies Bargain Outlet, curve is Verizon (but keep having the catcher give fake signs). Have the catcher or pitching coach use a little handheld device that controls seemingly innocuous lights in the pressbox that would indicate pitches. This is really a rules change and harsh punishments about not wanting to have to really try hard to avoid sign stealing. I think you assume everyone is stealing your signs all the time, so you need to come up with a different and better approach. Looking back on this it seems a little silly that the baseball world is all in an outrage because someone broke their kindergarten-level communications encryption system.

I threw it more like 80'. Two hops to the backstop. Probably 3' outside. I have a bum shoulder from a long-ago softball injury, and there was no opportunity to warm up. It was kind of horrific. But I do have a photograph of me in mid-windup that looks like I knew what I was doing.

I think it's a spitter. Isn't it strange that the commish is throwing out an obviously used ball? When I threw out the first pitch at the Blue Crabs game on my 40th birthday they at least gave me a new ball!

But we just don't know the actual impact. There's a large difference from a reasonable assumption that there's usually some benefit, and the wild assumptions of everyone involved getting massive benefits.

I get that. It's not too much of an exaggeration to say that integrity is the foundation of everything for a decent person. If you're taking money to throw games, or even betting on your team to win I'm fully on board with harsh punishment. You have to be trying to win, or the whole thing comes crumbing down. Baseball turns into boxing, where everyone kind of assumes some of the matches are thrown and there's a stench over the whole sport. But... scuff a ball, spit on a ball, you get a week or two off, everyone laughs about it. Pretty much the same thing for doctoring a bat. Nobody has ever really cared, and the punishment has never been more than a slap on the wrist. Steal a sign standing at second base, or with some binoculars from the bullpen and nobody thinks much of it. You might get a fastball under your chin, maybe not. Certainly no suspension or fine. Nobody has ever had the book thrown at them for stealing signs by any method before now. Ohhh but if you use a camera and a TV in the tunnel and a trash can, that's the end of the world. I'm having a hard time mustering real outrage here.

He's no Paul Schreiber, who went almost 22 years between major league appearances. Jack McFetridge may hold the record for longest gap between debut year and next MLB appearance. About 13 years, and both for the Phils.

His bb-ref page has a kind of Willis Otanez flavor to it. Been around for 15 years, plays winter ball, so he's on 2, 3, 4 teams every year. Since about 2012 he's been an extreme finesse pitcher with so-so strikeout rates but about 1.5 walks per nine. He was clearly the best pitcher on a 66-52 Yucatan team in the Mexican League last year that was managed by Geronimo Gil. He had a 2.26 ERA in a league that allowed over 6.0 runs/game. Although that league is probably AA quality overall. I have no opinion as to whether he's a depth signing, Elias and team like something about him, or he's just a flier on a freely available guy who had a good year.

The part of this no one (at least that I've seen) talks about is what is the impact of sign stealing? Of course we have no real data whatsoever. No double-blind studies of how Jose Altuve would hit with and without knowing what's coming. We have no idea how often he got the signs. We have some apples-to-pears data from home/road games, but home/road splits are going to be different anyway. And the data is mixed; Altuve had a big home split last year, but an equally big away split in 2018. It's like PEDs. No really good data on anything, so the assumption is that it takes an average dude and turns him into an MVP. But the reality is almost certainly much messier, much less clear cut. Some people did it all the time, some rarely, some never. The benefits were almost certainly all over the place from negative impacts from side effects to massive performance gains. But we're just guessing. Same thing with sign stealing. Some will assume that this is worth 25 wins to the Astros, but we have no idea if it's even a significant thing. For all we know it's like corking your bat; the benefits of that over legal bats are usually zero or worse. Sign stealing has been so prevalent over the years we've all heard the stories of batters who didn't want to know. It messes with their approach and their heads if they're tipped off to what's probably coming. In the end we can probably make the assumption that stealing signs helps the average batter somewhat. But we have no idea of the actual impact.

There is no evidence that the 1900 Phillies banged on trash cans.

Imagine the 2008 Orioles if they'd signed Miguel Tejada to a 7/150 deal in 2006. I'm sure the 2019 Orioles' revenues were quite a bit higher than in 2010. Shared revenues had to be higher. According to this the 2010 Orioles had revenues of $175M, $251 in 2018. Probably still in the $240+ in 2019. The 2010 Orioles had a payroll of $81M on $175M in revenues, and a league median payroll of about $90M. The 2019 Orioles had a payroll of $82M on $240-something in revenues and a league median of about $145M. Unless their non-payroll expenses were dramatically greater in '19 they were much better off.

I dug out my copy of Baseball in Baltimore by James Bready. It has year-by-year records of every professional league team in Baltimore history. Not to disparage the non-league teams that were predominant before the 1870s, but records are scarce for such clubs as the Baltimore Excelsior Base Ball Club, or The Pastimes, who both played in the late 1850s. We could add a win in for the June 6, 1860 match between the Excelsiors and the Washington Potomacs when ended 40-24 in Baltimore's favor. In any case... the 1903-1909 Eastern/International League Orioles were 523-425, .552 winning percentage. Add in the 1901-02 AL Orioles, and for the decade they were 641-578, or .526. That's 6th-best in city history. The book also notes a couple omissions I'd made: At the start of the 1890 season the Orioles somehow found themselves kicked out of the old AA, and in the Atlantic Association. There they went 77-23, before skipping out on the league and going back to the American Association to replace the Brooklyn team that folded in August. That pushes Baltimore's overall 1890s winning percentage to .593, just ahead of the 1970s for the 2nd most successful decade in Baltimore Base Ball history. And the Baltimore Monumentals were 3-10 in the Eastern League before folding early in the 1884 season. That year Baltimore had teams in the American Association, the upstart Union Association, and the Eastern League, at least for a month or so. So now we have a comprehensive ranking of Baltimore baseball by decade: 1870 0.479 1880 0.4342 1890 0.593 1900 0.526 1910 0.533 1920 0.625 1930 0.506 1940 0.469 1950 0.463 1960 0.566 1970 0.590 1980 0.5125 1990 0.5119 2000 0.4345 2010 0.466

Ed Delehanty and Nap Lajoie were on the 1900 Phils. I think they should be suspended from the Hall for five years. Maybe we could knock 30 points off their batting averages. While we're at it, let's retroactively fine everyone on the '00 Phils. Track down Klondike Douglass' great-grandson and tell him we're coming for a $250 fine (that's like $8000 in 2020 dollars).

I think you want the Orioles to be successful with your model, but not the current plan. You hope the current plan fails because you think it's cheating or immoral or lying or something.

I mentioned this multiple times over the year, but the 2019 Orioles had the 6th-worst bullpen ERA since WWII. And they had way more innings pitched than the top five. Their 449 runs allowed is the all time record, although I should note that four of the top five and 8 of the top 15 totals of all time were set in 2019. Bit of trivia: the 2019 Orioles' pen allowed 19 more runs than the 1972 Orioles. The whole '72 Orioles pitching staff. Now, that was a strike year with only 154 games and it was a rather extreme pitcher's season. The AL allowed just 3.47 runs/game, compared to 4.88 in 2019.

You'd love that, wouldn't you? I think you're rather have the entire rebuild crash and burn than see Elias be successful. Your dream is for Elias to be caught up in this scandal, get fired, and have him be replaced with a Jim Beattie/Andy MacPhail clone whose immediate priority will be to sign half a dozen 30-year-old stopgaps for $6M each to push the O's to 73 wins this year.

In 1900 the Phillies buried some kind of electrical contraption under the third base coaches' box at Baker Bowl, with some wires exposed to the damp soil. Someone in center field would watch the catcher's signs with opera glasses or a scope of some kind, and then relay electrical pulses to the box. One shock for a fastball, two for an in-swinger, three for an out-swinger. Later that season it was discovered that the Pirates had used a similar if less sophisticated system. See page 52 of this link to the 1991 Baseball Research Journal for the whole story. In the end the box was dug up during a game, and the league's response was essentially nothing. Apparently on the basis of (and this will warm @Frobby's heart) minimus non curat lex (the law does not cure trivial matters). No one was banned, nobody fined, and apparently the highly partisan papers of the day didn't say a whole lot about it.

In the NBA/NFL case it's ridiculous to impose upon the players the requirement to pretend to go to college for a year or two. And in my opinion it's ridiculous to have colleges pretend to educate basketball players and other athletes who are really majoring in a one- or two-year basketball program. I get why the NBA likes this. Free minor leagues, and player development risk reduction. But for colleges, they've strayed far, far from their educational charters by giving free rides to athletes who have no intention of getting a degree unless their athletic careers get derailed.

I like Mancini, he's a good player. But he just had a 3-win peak year at age 27 when most players peak, and in a year with juiced baseballs. It's good they're going year-to-year with him.

That's why people get nostalgic about the pre-free agency days. There was no discussion of player retention beyond "is he still a positive for the team?" If yes, then keep him. But I've long since made peace with the fact that the old setup is both awful for players and never, ever coming back. While fans loved having Mike Cuellar for eight years on absurdly team-friendly terms, maybe Mike Cuellar would have liked some say in where he played and for how much. And I don't blame him one bit.

What is comes down to is the amount of tactical planning from coaches or similar (in baseball, the catcher). In basketball, soccer, probably hockey, maybe rugby there's little or none of that. A soccer manager discusses and lays out tactical plans during training, and it's up to the individual players to execute that in a game. The decisions on how to execute plays or how the game flows are in the heads of each player. To "steal" plans you'd have to be reading the minds of the opponents. There's no secret codes, no radios, no delving into game theory three turns ahead. There is a pretty easy fix in baseball, since the pitcher-catcher interaction is really the only (slightly) encrypted tactical communications. They could allow electronic aides to facilitate communications between pitcher and catchers and the bench. Either radio, or some other kind of signaling device. Or a team could just decide to have the pitcher call all the pitches and not tell anyone ahead of time. Allow all sign stealing, and then start judging catchers on how well they anticipate pitches.

Officially, none.

It would be a lot harder to cheat in baseball if you made all sign stealing legal. If you don't want your signs stolen come up with better cryptography. Although you'd still have doctored balls, corked bats (those should be legal, too, since they're actually counter-productive), and PEDs.