DrungoHazewood

I don't disagree, but I also don't see how baseball can solve it's economic and competitiveness problems. Most of that is rooted in a very long history of how business has been done. In order to fix the problems in any real way you have to make 1/3rd or more of MLB teams give up substantial revenue or competitive advantages for the greater good. How do you get the Yankees and Dodgers and Cubs and Cardinals and others to willingly slide down to a level on par with the Brewers or the Pirates? Do you compensate their owners for the substantial loss in franchise value? I think we're stuck with huge revenue imbalances until/if such time that shared sources like MLBAM become the dominant revenue stream in the game. Now rules... they can change rules. Although even there they risk alienating the 30-50% of the fanbase who see any changes to the rules as breaking the sport completely. See: the folks who view the relatively minor change implementing the DH in the same way die hard Catholics look at Martin Luther.

I may be the only person who would have preferred the CFL Colts/Stallions to the Ravens. Every time I flip through the channels and see the CFL on I'll check to see if Montreal is playing, and I'll remind my boys that that's really Baltimore's team.

OPACY isn't that far above the harbor. They might buy some sandbags. Just in case.

In 1902 the Orioles disbanded and were replaced by the Yankees in the AL. Within 20 years Jack Dunn's International League Orioles were the preeminent minor league team of the time, perhaps of all time. They signed any number of future major league stars as kids and kept them for years, refusing to sell to the majors. They won seven consecutive pennants. The decade with the highest winning percentage in Baltimore baseball history was the 1920s. When the stories of doom come to pass we just need to band together and buy an Atlantic League team. Raise some case, maybe go public, sell some stock, have an IPO... whatever. Then the new Baltimore Orioles of the AtL signs a bunch of MLB quality players, runs roughshod over the league, we have some fun. It'll be great.

Young players have always been under-paid. It's more obvious now that teams and their analytics departments have come to realize just how terrible an investment 30+-year-old players are. So they still have the big young player discount, don't spend nearly as much on declining free agents, so the end result is an ever-smaller percentage of revenues going to the players. This will probably be a point of strong contention in the discussions about the new CBA.

Some baseball commissioners were liked by either the players or the owners, but rarely both. And fans tend to not like them either way, but that's not universal. For example, Kennesaw Mountain Landis was probably liked by the fans for cleaning up the sport and his zero-tolerance policy towards gambling. But many of the owners disliked his heavy-handed approach to any number of things. I'm not entirely sure what the players thought, although he was very friendly to minor leaguers rights so they probably liked him. The owners like Bowie Kuhn. The players thought he was the devil, and I don't know that the fans were particularly fond of him. Giamatti has this mythical quality in some circles, but he and Vincent were unliked by owners because they dared have some independence and sometimes took the sides of the players or fans. Vincent was highly unpopular with the owners, and was outed in a coup that resulted in Bud taking over. If Giamatti had lived another 4-5 years he would have probably suffered a similar fate to Fay Vincent. But instead he gets the James Dean/Shoeless Joe view from history: all peak, no decline. And in Giamatti's case the peak was all of six months. He was basically the William Henry Harrison of commissioners.

The single most important thing to consider in any baseball aging study is survivorship or the drop out rate. A number of studies were done years ago that suggested that aging was of little or no consequence because, for example, the OPS of all 37-year-olds is usually as high or higher than all 27-year-olds. That's because there are only, like, eight 37-year-olds left in the league, and they were almost all among the very best players in baseball at 27. 95% of all players are sitting at home at the age of 37. You have to include them in your sample in some way, and to be fair you should probably take their last year in the league and subtract something like half a win for each year beyond that. So a guy who retired after a 0.5 win season at 33... at 37 you count them as a -1.5 or -2 win player or worse.

It's not entirely clear if he tested positive or was otherwise implicated. He was suspended 50 games for violating the joint drug policy. But no, he hasn't tested positive since his one-time lapse in judgment. I'm sure he learned his lesson and had an age 39 peak just based on hard work driven by a sense of honor and redemption.

To my dying breath I will consider the Cruz signing a GM litmus test. If you're happy to sign 34-year-old DHs coming off career years to a multi-year deals you're not the kind of GM I want running my team. Most Hall of Famers wouldn't have been good signings on those terms. 95%+ of all players are less valuable in their 30s than their 20s. Nelson Cruz is a GIGANTIC outlier. Not one in 100 players will have his career trajectory. The only way a deal like Cruz' is a good bet is if you know that he has access to some kind of fountain of youth and assume that if he's caught the suspension will be without pay. Mark Trumbo was a similar signing, just on a smaller deal, and worked out more typically for players of this type. Which is to say very poorly.

And if he plays reasonably well he's going to be an everyday regular, probably batting in the top half of the lineup. No way that's happening in the Majors. Additionally, while many teams would be okay with their 4th outfielder having a .700ish OPS there's a risk of collapse for a 30-something veteran. Combine that with his expected salary of at least several million and I can see why teams wouldn't want to take him on.

Ugh. Sean Foreman's biggest flub has been putting oWAR and dWAR on bb-ref. Way more confusing than enlightening. dWAR = (defensive run above average for position) + (positional adjustment) converted to wins. A win is about 10 runs. Let's say Adam Jones is a -10 CFer and a +0 RFer. The typical full-season positional adjustment for CF is +2.5, for RF it's -7.5. So Adam as a CFer is (-10 + 2.5) = -7.5 runs or -3/4ths of a win. Adam as a RFer is (-7.5 + 0) = -7.5 or -3/4ths of a win. Exactly the same overall defensive value.

Why is it notable that Elias has to check with ownership before taking on a poor contract with a prospect attached?

The other one is... a goalie? Place kicker?

Not 100% sure, but probably.

Maybe this isn't your intent, but I think you're kind of underselling Japanese pitchers. There are certainly MLB quality pitchers in the NBP. The average guy in Japan is probably more like a AAA pitcher, but there are 20, 30, 40 pitchers who could play in the majors right now. More than that if you set the bar at "could pitch for the Orioles or Tigers". There are a long list of US players who've gone to Japan to hit some dongs off sub-par pitchers and came back three months later with their tails between their legs. Just the other day I look up Matt Stairs, who spent over 20 years in the majors. In the middle of his career he spent 60 games in Japan OPSing .712. MLB minimum is about $560k this year. The median salary in Japan is about $800k. Baseball would be better off if there were leagues outside of MLB's influence that could afford to sign decent talent. Competition can do wonders.

Yes. In Fukuoka in 2005. They played the Seibu Lions at the Yahoo! Dome. It was a tremendous experience. Bands. Chanting, singing, kimono-clad people leading cheers. Nearly a sellout for a Saturday afternoon game in July. I saw Tony Batista. Half the fans were wearing jerseys of Tsuyoshi Wada, Nobuhiko Matsunaka, others. Impossible to tell details of what was going on most of the time, as the scoreboard was all in Japanese characters and I couldn't hear any PA system. It was wonderful.

If we really wanted to jump-start the rebuild you'll want to wipe out the All Star game. The big teams would lose four, five, six of their best players, the O's are probably out a single 3-win guy.

The 2019 Orioles were about 400 runs behind the playoff contenders. Even if you're optimistic and think that Rendon, Bumgarner, and Keuchel each improve that by 50 runs the Orioles are still 250 runs behind. Where would that come from? I think the last and only time a team went from .333 ball or worse to winning the pennant was the 1889-90 Louisville Colonels. They went from 27-111 to 88-44. But that involved an expansion league stealing a ton of players from other existing teams, Louisville playing in the American Association which was not really on par with the NL, and a context of general chaos in baseball in 1890. In today's world a gain of 30 wins in a single year is close to the limit you ever see. 30 wins puts the Orioles in the low 80s, and probably less since they've shed ~5 wins with the offseason transactions.

Using the bb-ref neutralized stats converter, Mancini's 2019 numbers in a '19 Coors context is equivalent to .331/.408/.612, 1.020 OPS, 145 runs, 211 hits, 46 doubles, 43 homers, and 132 RBI. And the same OPS+ and WAR as he really had.

Just imagine Dallas Kuechel pitching in OPACY in front of Richie Martin and a Rule 5 second baseman and Stevie Wilkerson and Trey playing RF. Caught by Chance Sisco. I'm sure his ERA would be fine, just fine.

I know I felt like a winner after watching the 2005 Orioles make a run.

Just look at the 2000s Orioles' W/L records, the 2005 Raffy/Sosa debacle, the end of the OPACY honeymoon and Cal's retirement, and the 1998-2005 collapse and chaos. A 500k fall in 2006 completely fits in that narrative. They were a miserable, losing team. Sure, the Nats hurt some, but it would have been astonishing if the O's didn't have a large attendance hit in that period, Nats or not.

But how much? Do they really have this thing down to a science, or are they guessing and hoping on effects? I'd like to see a 1988, where they over-corrected and ended up with homers falling more than 25% and runs down from 4.7 to 4.1.

If 30, 30, and 20 are the going market rates for those players I think you'd have to assume it would take a large premium on top of that to get them to come to a 50-win team that (in this hypothetical) is apparently, inexplicably, doing a 180 and trying to jump 40+ wins in one offseason. So more than a $140M payroll for '20, still need 20-30 more wins, and have just spent every last dime that was available for fixing the organization long-term.

Bumgarner had a 3.90 ERA in the NL West last year, and only pitched 21 games in '18. Keuchel had about a 3.75 ERA the last two years. Rendon is 29, coming off a 6-win career year. These moves take a 50-ish win Oriole team and pushes them to the low 60s in wins. You still need about 25 more and you've already maxed out payroll.