DrungoHazewood

No worries, we don't have to rehash anything.

Yea, it's much better to eyeball it. Then you can come to any conclusion you want.

Three years ago Pham was worth 6.2 wins, and got a few MVP votes. The 0.8 is part of his 2018 season split between St. Louis and Tampa.

Let's say the Angeloses said "You have $260M. Out of that has to come payroll, player fringe benefits, all team expenses. Whatever's left is your budget for rebuilding the team and getting us back to the playoffs. You get no more." If I were Elias I'd be scheming every way possible to maximize what I could get out of that, and apply it to rebuilding. Forbes thinks the O's ran a $6.5M deficit in 2018. I don't necessarily believe it, but it's not like Elias has ($260 - 50M payroll) to spend on building. I think/hope he has a productive plan for what to do with the $10M they saved on Villar, and the $5M they saved on Bundy. And if not for those trades that plan would not be executed.

Maybe? The Marlins have no one besides Chen (again, released) on the roster who couldn't have been non-tendered and owed nothing for 2020. The entire roster is pre-free agency. The Orioles not only have Cobb and Davis, but more arb-eligible players. Or at least did before this week; we gave one to the Marlins and one to the Angels.

He has people for that.

Circa 2008 he was advocating the team (remember, with essentially no farm system and a 68-win baseline) sign a bunch of Teixeira/Fielder category free agents to right the ship. He's probably thrilled with a complete rebuild. Surprised we haven't felt great disturbances in the force. The greatest Trea-ism was "no one should ever be criticized for their opinions."

You don't have to be a MacArthur genius to pick up a call from the league office, listen to someone tell you to get the payroll up, and go trade for Jonathan Villar.

I have my doubts. The Orioles have been actively trying to trade him for a while and got little interest, and he's coming off a career year so he may trend down a bit.

I think the league told Jeter he had to have at least a few players on the team making over the minimum or it might hurt negotiations on the new CBA. I think that's the only reason they acquired Villar.

It would be... interesting... if the Marlins had (by far) the most expensive player on their roster be someone they don't intend to play every day. If you take away Wei Yin Chin and his $22M (since they released him), Villar's salary will be something like 1/3rd of the Marlins' total payroll.

It's funny, but it's probably true.

Absolutely. Even if they just guarantee you a one-year deal at $1M you might as well take it. You just have to be willing to adapt to the Japanese culture, baseball and otherwise. Not everyone does. Matt Stairs was in professional baseball for 20+ years, his time in Japan was 60 games of a .712 OPS when he was 27.

Former Orioles from a quick scan of the 2019 NPB: Zealous Wheeler, Rakuten Golden Eagles. .243/.320/.418 in 117 games. Tsuyoshi Wada, Fukuoka Softbank Hawks, 4-4, 3.90 in 57.2 innings. Rick Van den Hurk, Fukuoka Softbank Hawks, 2-0, 3.12, 17.1 innings. Ariel Miranda, Fukuoka Softbank Hawks, 0-2, 2.52, 25 innings. Chris Marrero (briefly played for Norfolk and Bowie in '14), Orix Buffaloes, .211/.256/.317 in 43 games Plus I believe that Dennis Sarfate spent the whole year on Fukuoka's injured list after being unbelievable from 2011-17. ERAs in the 1.00s six different years with 35+ saves five different times in 140-something game schedules. In Korea there's a couple more: Hyun Soo Kim, LG Twins, .304/.370, 437 in 140 games. Tyler Wilson, LG Twins, 14-7, 2.92 in 185 innings. Felix Pie was there in '14, but has been playing in Mexico and and the Dominican since. He OPS'd 1.131 for Leon this past season. Speaking of Mexico... Henry Urrutia hit .370/.427/.674 for two teams in Mexico in 110 games. Chris Roberson (Norfolk, '08) had a .916 OPS for Monterrey at the age of 39. Niuman Romero (Norfolk, Bowie '13-14) had an .833 for Union Laguna. If you gathered up everyone who even briefly played in the O's system who is now in a foreign league you could probably piece together a decent AA team.

They're making good money, but even the stars in Japan only make about what a middling free agent does in the States. I'm not sure anyone has ever made $10M in a season in Japan, and the average salary is probably less than $1M. Okay, so I can't post this without looking stuff up... It looks like the median salary in the NPB is about $800k. Compared to a 2020 MLB minimum of $563k and an average over $4M. My boys in Fukuoka (I saw a game there in 2005) are out-spending even the Yomiuri Giants with the top average of $1.7M, which works out to a total payroll of $40-50M depending on roster size and players on IL, etc. So the top team in Japan pays about what the lowest team in MLB does.

You can't carry any more than 13 pitchers. Which is kind of like a law saying that you can't have any more than 11 kids: philosophically annoying, but realistically it only impacts crazy people. If the Orioles were planning on carrying 14 pitchers we'd have bigger problems.

He's not a shortstop in any real sense. He last played there in 2014. But as a 2B/3B he's kind of the new Ryan Flaherty.

So 2019 AAA, do a little math, assume they deflate the MLB ball next year, that's about a .625 OPS in Baltimore, right?

Especially if the ball is back closer to historical norms. And San Francisco has a pretty huge outfield for a fringy CFer to cover.

A typical major league player peaks at 27. The curve is pretty flat from 26 to 29 or 30. But you can't expect a guy who turns 28 before next season starts to continue on a upward trajectory for a number of years. All players are different, but he's probably as good as he'll ever be.

Wouldn't it be a lot more concerning if he continued tearing it down to the studs and aggressively rebuilding... except for the times where he kept Jonathan Villar and Dylan Bundy and paid them $15M total that could have gone to the future, just because 63 wins is better than 57?

Gausman had two things going for him after the trade: his BABIP was really low, and he allowed a few less home runs. He actually struck out fewer batters and walked more than he had with the Orioles. If you look at his FIP it's been between the mid-3.00s and mid-4.00s almost every single year/team of his career.

I'll try to stay away from politics, but there are some situations where the free market breaks down. This is one of those. If the cable companies were left to their own they probably wouldn't even run service to many rural or even suburban locations with lower population densities and longer distances between houses because it's hard to turn a profit and keep the infrastructure maintained compared to more dense areas. In many cases they only do it because local governments demand it in the contracts with the companies. My family has a farm in western Virginia that's 15 miles from the nearest town of 1,000 people. The road they're on has no cable at all, and it would be many, many thousands of dollars per house to install. This in an area where the income is probably half or 2/3rds the national average. It's just never going to happen if they have to pay for it. My aunt would have to pay probably half or more of her annual income to have cable installed.

That's the situation I was in up to about 3-4 years ago. When I moved in 10 years ago my house was 1000' from the nearest cable line, down a private road. Metrocast was the local provider, they quoted me about $5000 to run the cable. We're probably 30 miles from the nearest FIOS installation, no other high-speed options. Satellite is no good for internet unless you have nothing else. So I used Directv, and a Verizon aircard for internet. Soft data cap around 20 Gig after which it dropped to dial-up speed, even before you hit that it was not quite fast enough to really stream anything. Then a couple houses got built that moved the end of the cable closer, the quote dropped to $2500, and I had to do it. I guess we could have survived on the old setup, but with two middle school kids needing access for homework and countless devices it would have been highly annoying every day.

You mean like Wojo, who was basically the same as Bundy? I think your pessimism has obscured the fact that when you're a 54-win team you're close enough to replacement level that you don't lose much by just fielding waiver wire players.