DrungoHazewood

That should be the penalty for swapping pitchers. The new one has to take a batter or two to figure out the slight nuances of the game mound.

Didn't the Mets have baseball day that they had to forfeit, or almost forfeit, sometime in the last 10, maybe 15 years? Balls thrown everywhere. Last time that will happen. (I might be thinking of the Dodgers, and it was 1995).

And it was a bus trip with Dad's work, so I'm sure we didn't get home until between 1 and 2am. I was eight, so yea, well past my bedtime. I think somewhere I still have the felt pennant he bought me that night. And I definitely have the program. We sat in the yellow mezzanine seats on the third base side.

I was lucky that my Dad bought a program and wrote down the lineups and made a note that the game had the highest regular season Oriole attendance ever up to that date. So thanks to bb-ref it was pretty easy to track down.

Doc Cramer got HOF votes in five different years for an 8-win career. He did end up with 2705 hits, which I'm guessing is some kind of all time record with 338 hits per win. Walt Dropo, who had 144 RBI as a rookie, got a few votes on the '67 ballot. 84% of his career value of 3.1 wins was in his rookie season. Willie Montanez (1.7 win career) appeared on the ballot in '88 but didn't get any votes. Same with Ed Kranepool (4.4 wins) in '85.

I was in the stands at Memorial Stadium for Mussina's 1st MLB win. The first game I saw in person involved Carl Yastrzemski and Don Stanhouse. I think @El Gordo was there when Matt Kilroy struck out his 500th batter of the 1886 season.

11 "years" in the majors, with three of them where he appeared in 20 games or less. Did have a nearly 5-win season in 1968. About 50% of Brian Roberts' career. 14 wins in total. I wonder what the lowest WAR total is for someone who appeared on a HOF ballot, or got a HOF vote? There has to be someone under replacement.

Players who have appeared on at least one Hall of Fame ballot include Al Hrabosky, Grant Jackson, Lynn McGlothen, Del Unser, Rick Dempsey, Scott Brosius, Bobby Witt, Woody Williams, Jose Mesa, Mike Stanton, Todd Walker, Hubie Brooks, Mike Jackson, David Segui, Casey Blake, Matt Stairs. In 1980 Frank Linzy, Bob Miller, Norm Miller, Ivan Murrell, Rick Reichardt, Dick Selma, and Duke Sims were on the ballot and I have no idea who any of them are, and I'm the guy who knows all the meaningless baseball history.

As he should be. Roberts was a fun player to watch, really good for a while. Usually I can come up with a plausible HOF argument for almost anyone with a decently long career. But Roberts would be the lowest-scoring second baseman in the Hall in both straight rWAR and JAWS. Bill Mazeroski is in the Hall because of legends and stories and stuff but he hit kind of like Ryan Flaherty. Roberts has a lower JAWS score than Mazeroski. Roberts had a very short career for a HOFer. The only ones below him in career games played are 19th century guys, Vet's committee mistakes, and players who had their careers artificially shortened by the color line or ended by death. Hoyt Wilhelm, a pitcher, is only about 300 games behind Roberts.

Who's going to pay to subsidize the teams that MLB doesn't want to any more? Is everyone signing the petition going to buy a bunch of full season tickets?

In theory I think you could have a business model where independent teams get a strong following. It's the community's team. It's not the impersonal group of millionaires in the $billion taxpayer funded stadium in the city. They're signing players to try to win the league. They're not selling off or promoting players at the drop of a hat. They might have players who stick around for 3-4 years or longer. Teams could have an identity, a personality. It could be like college sports where half the fans have nothing to do with the college, it's just their local team. But I don't know how well that would work in today's entertainment climate. It's not 1920 or 1950, there are a million things to do, baseball isn't everyone's favorite thing, and community ties might not be as strong as they once were. And it's hard to establish that kind of tradition. People are used to minor leagues being fake baseball where the Orioles prospects hang out for a while. It would be a steep curve to get a foothold and build on it.

MLB would love to emulate the NFL or NBA and have colleges serve as their free minor league system. Offload a ton of risk and development costs to someone else. Instead of paying for the minimal care and feeding of hundreds of 18-to-25-year-olds, they just buy players as they need them. Instead of praying Hunter Harvey gets through the injury nexus unscathed, you only sign players who've already run the gauntlet. The perfect situation for the majors would be to delay signing anyone until they're almost MLB-ready, but at a discount cost, of course. In the beginning all minor leagues were independent, and MLB teams bought players as needed. The problem was they players cost a lot of money, and teams didn't want to pay. So they bought out all the minor leagues. Now the players come relatively cheap, but you have to pay for seven minor league teams and take on all of the development risk. I'm sure the majors would be completely fine with a much smaller affiliated minor league system, some indy leagues, and many more players in college. Just so long as the indy leagues can't demand $5M for their hot prospect.

When I was 10 the worst problem I had in the world was that my bedtime was 8:30 or 9:00, which meant I went to bed in the 5th or 6th or 7th inning all the time, and had to sneak a transistor radio under my pillow to make it to the 9th. Today 8:30 is sometimes the bottom of the 3rd. Now that I'm 48 it's an annoying problem that my kids can't stay up for the 5th inning, and I'm often asleep before the game is over. They don't own transistor radios, and they probably couldn't pick up the O's game anyway.

In the 1920s the International League Orioles were probably among the top 10 professional teams in the world. Jack Dunn refused to sign affiliation agreements. He had all stars and Hall of Fame caliber players in their prime. But eventually he was pressured by the rest of the league into caving. The PCL made a little run in the 1950s at going independent and hinting a going major, but expansion and the Dodgers and Giants put an end to that. Besides the relatively low-level indy leagues today there haven't been real minor league pennant races in my lifetime.

I think their short-term plan would be to just have complex type leagues in Florida. Use the spring training sites. Intersquad games, eventually set up schedules to play other teams. And release all the random organizational guys. MLB has all the leverage here because a large number of MiLB teams need MLB money to exist, and the majors don't really need the minors. MLB would be largely unchanged if the minors disappeared tomorrow and was replaced by all the real prospects just hanging out in Florida and working out, playing scrimmages. But... maybe way back in the MLB owners heads is the idea that if they totally dumped bigger minor league cities new, bigger, more powerful independent leagues could spring up. Players who don't like their draft position or bonus could have an alternate place to go, at least for a while. I don't know if a 3rd major (really 2nd since AL and NL are just one league) is even marginally viable, but a fully independent AAA-ish league could seriously annoy the majors.

I'm sure they all diligently did research and made analyses of various value metrics before struggling to come to definitive conclusions. And I'm guessing the voting model was rock-solid, too.

Don't you think this is part of the strategy to combat the "pay minor leaguers a living wage" issue? They're basically saying that if they have to pay their minor leaguers anything approaching minimum wage they can't keep all these teams. So here... you want your pay raise... you get it, if you still have a job.

It's almost like MiLB teams and owners should have thought through this contingency when they signed up for a business model that completely relies on MLB to subsidize them enough to make a profit, but on limited-term contracts that might not be renewed. I know this is water long under the bridge, but nearly a century ago almost all MiLB teams traded being a real team hat fights for championships and players for the supposed security of being affiliated and subsidized. I guess it's worked for a long time. But maybe not any more. And there are almost no fans left to root for independent teams who try to go it on their own and make money by playing exciting baseball.

That was 75 years ago. Teams didn't have sprawling networks of scouts, connected online, sharing video and reports nearly instantly. The Dodgers and others had like 40 minor league teams because they signed everyone they could get their hands on and then sorted out who was good from there. The minors have never been quite the same since TV. In 1948 there were 70-some leagues, as tracked by bb-ref. By 1965 it was down to 34, literally half of the professional leagues went out of business in less than 20 years. We're at 34 today, and that includes four Japanese Leagues and the Korean League. And many of those leagues, unfortunately like the Appy League, probably couldn't exist without MLB financial support.

He didn't have a particularly good year this season for the LG Twins, just .304/.370/.437, good for an .807 OPS. In '18 he hit .362/.415/.589, 1.004. Although the KBO league as a whole was down a full run a game from 5.53 to 4.56, and OPS down from .806 to .723. So his offense roughly went from 24% better than average to 11% better.

I still want to know what MASN's commercial revenues are. Does Stanley Steamer and 876-LUNA really pay the Orioles millions a year? I'd guess it's more like low six figures, but just a guess. Any difference between 6:30-7 and 10:30-11 could well be in the thousands of dollars a year.

Because unrestricted substitutions that come with 3-minute timeouts is a detriment to the entertainment value of the sport. I'd be fine with an alternate rule that allows as many LOOGYs as you like, but they have to be ready to pitch in the same amount of time it takes a pinch hitter to walk to the batters box from the on-deck circle. Or you could give managers three timeouts a game. He can use them any way he wants. Mound visits, pitching changes, arguing, whatever. But if he's out of timeouts and he wants a new pitcher, if the new pitcher takes longer than the time allotted in the rules for the next pitch, the batter gets an automatic ball. And another if necessary.

Is there a reason to think the MLBPA would rather have more specialist pitchers than platoon outfielders and pinch hitters? Besides the current makeup of the MLBPA is more LOOGY-heavy...

Or just eliminate the concept of partial innings. Pitchers are only allowed to pitch in increments of three outs. Unless injured, in which case they can't pitch again for a week.

The rule should be that if you step out of the box with both feet during the at bat it's an automatic strike. Unless you're clearly broken, or your bat is clearly broken, or you're diving out of the way of a beanball. And pitchers need to be told that they should never wait for the batter. If the ump is ready to go, pitch. The batter will get ready after he's down 0-2 several times, or even strikes out without seeing a pitch, because he's goofing around. If batters need more therapeutic exemptions for ADHD medicine to keep from having to perform a complex ritual between each pitch, so be it.