DrungoHazewood

You're always better off picking higher. Always. What actually happens with that pick is full of noise and random chance, but the odds are always better the higher you go. Also, you're picking higher in all the rounds.

a) I'm completely on board with what he's doing, in that Game Scores is a cool, fun thing to help visualize just how good a pitcher's start was but it has some weaknesses. b) This effort is probably doomed to fail because almost everyone who cares started using the old, slightly flawed version 10, 15, 20+ years ago and they'll keep on using it rather than change to something that's harder to calculate for 10% better accuracy out of a fun stat. Analogous to OPS, which has some flaws but is good enough and is universal and any attempt to fix it is a pain for minimal gains in accuracy. c) It just might take hold if Sean Foreman and the folks at Fangraphs tweak their formulas behind the scenes, use it on their sites, and most people won't even notice the difference.

I'm not entirely sure what this part means. I don't like that baseball teams have almost limitless opportunities to stop the game. Baseball doesn't need dedicated commercial breaks because the action stops for several minutes 25+ times a game. We don't need any more, 3-4 hours per game is plenty.

Schoop is an average MLB hitter, he's an average fielding second baseman, and he's 27. Jones is a below-average hitter, he's a below-average fielding RFer, and he's 33. How is Jones a better value? His sage advice to the youths?

Don't the NFL and NHL have caps, luxury taxes, minimum salaries, everyone is not a free agent, there are drafts and retirement plans? And teams certainly work together to set benefits and salaries.

If McDonalds is making cash hand over fist in a location, Burger King and Arbys and Chick-fil-a are free to open up a restaurant right next door and do everything conceivable to take all of McDonalds' customers away. If the Yankees are making cash hand over fist in The Bronx I'm not sure that there's any power on earth that would allow someone else try to take a chunk out of that market. The Yanks might actually form an army to defend their territory before they let a team into Brooklyn or Manhattan or New Jersey or anywhere else within a 100 mile radius. MLB acts as a monopoly. If you're a baseball player and you want to go somewhere else to play ball in the US... well, your option is submit to MLB's terms and conditions, or go play for $12,000 a year in the Atlantic League. I guess you could move to Japan or Korea, if there are openings for a foreign player of your skills and abilities. Imagine if the response to losing your job in the only company in the auto industry was "sucks to be you, but you could always go build cars in Japan or China or Mexico." But in the auto industry there are about a dozen companies making cars in the US, all competing to out-do each other.

Maybe it is too harsh. But it's similar to what the 2007 Orioles would have done. It's burning $6M on a guy who won't be there in a year, who will not even remotely put them in contention, and will probably bring back little at the deadline. I guess a more charitable take is that they're rolling the dice that he'll repeat 2017 and bring back a halfway decent prospect for their money.

Certainly the best play I've ever seen in person.

Player: Hey, boss, I hit .320 with 33 homers and 133 RBI last year. Can I have a $10k raise? Owner: You hit .322 the year before, you were slacking off, I'm going to cut your salary $5k. Player: What, that's no fair. I'm going to hold out. Owner: You just try that and I'll go to the press with what a selfish ingrate you are. Player: Okay, sir. Six weeks later he breaks his leg, and he's released with no severance, no health insurance.

I'm quite sure that MLB has agreements, either written or implied, with NPB, KBO and the Taiwan leagues, and an explicit one with the Mexican League, that prevents those leagues from signing players under MLB control. The minute a Japanese team signed a player controlled by MLB they'd declare all such agreements null and void, and MLB teams would be free to use their much larger budgets to poach NPB stars currently under contract there. And maybe @Frobby knows the language in the standard player contract but I'm guessing there's language that prohibits league jumping. In the 1940s some players jumped to the Mexican League and were blackballed by MLB for years.

Max out international spending. Max out draft spending. Infrastructure. Scouts. Analytics tools and personnel. Or put most of it in a low-risk investment, ready to be spent in 2023 when they're in the part of the competitive window where it might matter. What are they going to be likely to get for a few months of a 2-win second baseman? Hint: Some team's #22 prospect, for about $3M. Schoop is coming off two years worse than Jonathan Villar, and the O's got almost nothing for him. Spending for a few wins coming off a 47-win season is essentially setting the money on fire so their version of @atomic won't complain so much.

Yes, this. They spent $10M for wins 52, 53, and 54. Or something like that.

The same thing that always happens. Some will complain, mostly the ones who don't like high strikes and/or slump early in the year. A few will talk about removing the human element from the game, mostly those who are in slumps. The paid talking heads on ESPN will alternately complain and love it to generate more eyeballs and revenue. And in a year or two it'll mostly be business as usual and in 10 years we'll be amazed that we took it as a matter of course that a ball 8" off the plate might be a strike.

Nowhere in the rule book does it say that you should get more borderline calls if the standard deviation of your pitch location is lower. Brad Pennington didn't deserve to have a pitch on the black called a strike any more or less than Greg Maddux.

I don't see the debate. The rule book says the strike zone is X. This skill is getting umps to call Y. I put it in the same class as an outfielder diving for a catch, knowing he short-hopped it, and coming up holding the ball and claiming he caught it. Replay mostly did away with that. Or it's like using a potato to fool the runner into an out.

I suppose it's a little sad whenever someone loses a job. But do we cry when a pitcher isn't major league quality simply because the juiced balls make his home run rate unacceptable? I'm sure there were some catchers who lost value, or even their jobs when they decided to enforce and tighten up the rules on blocking the plate. There had to have been second basemen whose defensive value was in part related to being really good at phantom tags. Entire classes of hitters have gone extinct over time, primarily contact hitters with mediocre bat speed. May be a little sad, but you have to adapt or you're left behind.

Have they spent their allotment? Perhaps I'm thinking too logically, downplaying all the impediments baseball puts in the way of teams who would like to just go spend some money to fix their team. I'm going to start using Goat Farming as a reference to baseball's bizarre choices in bureaucratic roadblocks.

My take is that they are spending $3M and perhaps as much as $6.1M on 2-win player, on the hopes that they can flip him for prospects when the more efficient way to acquire prospects would be to just spend the money directly. You have $50 and you need some bread and eggs. So you go buy a baby goat, you raise the goat, you feed the goat, you hope the goat grows up to be big and strong, and that he attracts a lot of interest at the livestock sales in six months, then you can sell him and get the money for the bread and eggs. Why didn't you just buy the bread and eggs from the store? Feel free to poke holes in my analogy, and that the store isn't always fully stocked with bread and eggs that you can simply purchase. But this is still a very indirect route to the final goal.

I'm sure it's approaching the theoretical limits of human ability. But also about 10% worse than a good automated system could do.

As opposed to actively sabotaging it? I find it hard to believe this was a difficult sell. We're going to have as many umps, we're going to pay you just as much, but we're going to give you a tool to not only do your job better but also one that gives you an iron-clad defense whenever an irate manager or fan confronts you about a bad ball/strike call. I guess there might be umps still in the employ of MLB who like the freedom to call obvious balls strikes and vice versa?

You mean we don't have a time machine to take us back to 1965? Huh, coulda sworn I read we did. My bad.

John McClane : So that's is what this is about, Hans? A @#(( robbery? Hans Gruber : Put down the gun. John McClane : Why'd you have to nuke the whole team, Hans? Hans Gruber : Well, when you are still owed $4.25M, you can just disappear into a front office job. When you are owed $69 million, they will find you, unless they think you're already dead.

With no deal Mountcastle probably gets something like $500k, $500k, $500k, then $2M, $6M, $10M in arb (total of about $20M), and becomes a free agent at 29 and probably leaves or you sign him to a large free agent contract into his 30s. If he develops reasonably well. The free agent deal probably works out poorly. With a deal he gets 6/24 deal with some decent team options beyond that. They'd have him for most of his useful career a below-market rates. Then at 32 you can let him go. There's some risk, a pretty good shot at reward. Don't know why we can't discuss it. And the position... well, that's 75% of the equation. If Mountcastle was a decent 2B/3B with an .850 OPS he might be a very solid starter or even an all star for years. If he's a DH with an .850 OPS or a poor LFer he might be average or worse depending on the offensive environment.

Perhaps he's taking a stand on the concept of professional sports. Or free agency. We gave free agency a good, long trial. Maybe it's time to go back to owners decreeing players can only make a salary of $16,000 a year.

That's a good possibility.