DrungoHazewood

I'm 48. Let's say I have 30 years left, for the sake of argument. If the Orioles have a 1/30 shot at winning it all each year (if I picked the correct probability calculator) that means there's about a 64% chance of the Orioles winning the World Series in my lifetime. Or a 36% chance that they don't. If you think their annual shot is only half that, or 1/60, then the chances fall to 40/60 against. Reality will be more complicated, because there will probably be at least a few years where their odds are 10% or 15% or even higher. And years like 2020 where the odds are essentially zero.

I don't think that cutting loose a player who you think is too expensive is inconsistent with the philosophy that you should avoid players with serious behavioral or moral problems.

I'm a fan of English soccer team Tottenham Hotspur. Until two weeks ago they were managed by Mauricio Pochettino, who had an almost cult-like following among the players and fans. They loved him. Multiple players publicly said they'd spurn $100M deals from the biggest clubs in the world to stay for The Gaffer. He's just a really good guy, and attracted really good people for the team. They had a bad run. The team fired Pochettino. They replaced him with kind of a suave Billy Martin, in José Mourinho. He speaks in the third person. He blames all failings on his players or the refs or the gods or something. When he managed other clubs you'd root against him just because. You know that within a couple years something will go terribly wrong and he'll get the axe. But they might win two or three trophies before he burns it all down. I'm still rooting for the team. It's fine.

That's assuming a straightforward decline instead of falling of a cliff. It's probably unreasonable for him to get back to that normal level, he'd still be below 1 or 1.5 wins in a rosy, happy scenario that's very unlikely to materialize.

So if I understand this correctly, they got 70+42 = 112M or so in MASN and ticket revenues. 48% of that is $54M, they keep $58M. So $209M in shared revenues plus 58M = $267M. That doesn't include advertising, concessions, parking, random other stuff (I don't think Forbes counts any of that in gate receipts). Even if those things are pretty trivial it looks like Forbes is under-counting Orioles revenues by $30M or more. And I'm no accountant, but that $6.5M operating loss should be more like a $25M profit, right? And that's based mostly on 2018 numbers, before they cut payroll significantly. But also before they lost a 264k in attendance, but attendance revenues probably only declined $7M from 2018-19 (roughly $27 per ticket).

In other words, you're expecting any number of things that are realistically unobtainable. No current organization comes close to meeting this list of expectations.

Davis was roughly a 3-win player in 2016. Even with a linear, somewhat normal half a win a year decline you'd expect him to be a 1- or 1-and-a-half win player in 2020. I think best case is that he gets back to being unacceptably bad, instead of historically bad.

Currently Forbes says the Orioles generate $251M of revenue a year, and had an operating loss of $6.5M in 2018. $70M-ish from MASN (if the numbers from 2012-16 are still valid for 2019). $42M from gate receipts. That's not even halfway there. What's the rest? Advertising. Cut of the concessions. Cut of merchandising. Revenue sharing. MLBAM. Parking.

A self-sustaining competitor. A team that most years has the pipeline of talent to contend without having to sign a bunch of free agents. Getting through the playoffs is a crapshoot; setting "winning a crapshoot" as a goal is foolish.

The problem is that you won't save anything and you'll lose all the weird channels that you only watch once in a while. When everyone has their own streaming service at $9.99 a month it doesn't take that many to add up to your current cable bill, especially when you have to also pay (in my case) $80 a month for high-speed internet to take advantage of any streaming. And it's going to be a hassle. I don't want Disney, I don't like Disney. But I'd like to watch the Mandolorian. So one month I'll probably sign up, binge watch it all, then call somebody, sit on hold for 10 minutes, explain why I want to cancel, then finally get them to cancel. Repeat for every other streaming service. I'm starting to think Directv isn't so bad, except for all the content going streaming-only to get you on everyone's $9.99 a month plan.

All Boileryard Clarke references get a like!

I am a crazy uncle at Thanksgiving, just not that one.

What would it take to make it one year?

You're free to do as you see fit. But you're going to be the crazy uncle sitting in the corner at Thanksgiving complaining about everything and explaining how if he were in charge it would all be awesome. We get it, life sucks and everyone else is kind of dumb, and nobody can understand why they're not following your plan to glory. And we'll hear about it every single stinking day until they hoist a trophy. But then you'll complain that it took seven years instead of like two or three because of their stupid plan.

Even in short samples sometimes the signal overcomes the noise.

I'd like to see Davis released, too. I'm a little surprised he's still here. But the impact of having him here, at least until opening day, is minimal.

If we're going to assume that all funds not spent go straight to the Angelos' yacht payments and not a penny goes back into the team, then sure, let's have a $175M payroll every year.

Yes, let's use wild, off-the-wall, once in a generation outliers as justification for moves. The O's came very close to losing out on a six-win season from Steve Pearce, but luckily 29 other teams let him pass through waivers multiple times because they didn't see it coming, either.

I think there's some chance Bundy brings back more in a trade. But I don't know for sure. Bundy will not be making $10M this year.

It's trading wins 56, 57, and maybe 58 in 2020 for wins 92 and 93 in a few years. Hopefully. You should care about the payroll if that's taking resources away from building the organization and redirecting them to a few extra wins for a 5th-place team next season.

I know, I took things off topic because I hate those Chevy commercials. Sorry.

Are these one year or multi-year? And what timeframe. If it's one year that explains a lot of the weird outliers (like Yankee being a very poor hitter's park and HR park). If it's multi-year... well, a lot of it is very surprising.

Someone needs to run a study of young pitchers, controlling for park. Take those who pitched in extreme hitters parks, and those in extreme pitchers parks and see if there is a significant difference in context-adjusted value and career length. Also... OPACY won't show up as an extreme hitters park because it's a poor park for singles, doubles, and triples, but excellent for hitting homers. A difficult part might be separating out quality of team and quality of coaching/development from the pitcher. It could be that there are groups of teams that happen to play in one kind of park or the other that are really good (or bad) at developing pitching completely independent of park.

Oh no, Davis may stop us from acquiring that 3rd Rule 5 pick this year.

Okay, so it's 98% style over substance.