DrungoHazewood

There's always the conflict between creative use of rules and rosters, and not wanting to restrict competitive advantages small market teams often want to use. At some point you have to say just go play an engaging form of baseball instead of doing 11 mid-inning changes a game. And figure out other solutions to market imbalances. It doesn't do us much good to have five hour games that nobody wants to watch just so long as the Orioles have a 10% better chance of winning those unwatchable games. My idea was to just disallow all mid-inning pitching changes. You can use as many pitchers as you like, but unless you're injured you can't come out until the inning is over. And if you're injured... see two answers below. Or you use a position player. That's easy. Make the rule that if you're removed from the game for an injury you can't pitch for five days. Or 10. MLB has always dictated every aspect of how the game will be played!! All rules in all sports are arbitrary. They are what they are because a bunch of people on some committee decided that's what they are. Moses didn't come down from Mount Cooperstown with the rules on stone tablets. Mostly they're what a bunch of guys from the 1800s came up with, fumbling around, trying to come up with something that made them money. They were pretty spot-on about a lot. But they couldn't foresee every loophole and every change that would happen 120 years later. They certainly didn't envision managers doing six mid-inning pitching changes a game. Prior to the last major changes in the rules around 1900 it had been less than a decade since they allowed any unchallenged substitutes at all. In 1890 if you wanted to bring in a LOOGY he'd better also be your RFer because the other manager was just going to say no. But here in 2019 the primary goal of the rules is to foster an engaging, entertaining, money-making sport of baseball. If they allow every single rule to be stretched to its logical conclusion we may well end up with a sport nobody wants to pay to see any more.

I don't know what this means. Maybe I shouldn't ask.

I think it's far more likely that the Toronto, Chicago and other beat writers wanted to give a little shout out to their guys.

What are you actually recouping? Davis as been about as bad as anyone has ever been in 1000+ PAs. You're giving up a roster spot and playing time to younger players on the hopes that he becomes not quite so terrible. The theoretical recouping is that he's worth $0 and being paid $23M, instead of being worth -$10M and being paid $23M. But that's all hand-waving and sabermetric calculations that have little bearing on a 50-win team. No one cares if you have a slightly better ROI on wins 49 and 50.

They wanted Biggio or somebody to get some love, and there's just three slots. And a tiny subset of Orioles fans are the only ones slightly outraged over Means not being a unanimous vote getter.

They wanted Biggio or somebody to get some love, and there's just three slots. And a tiny subset of Orioles fans are the only ones slightly outraged over Means not being a unanimous vote getter.

The story is that he's a 28-year-old rookie who's been bouncing around the minors for eight years and could have been picked up by any team in baseball somehow hits twice as many homers as he did in any prior season, most of that in the majors. He's the new Luke Scott or Garrett Jones, old rookies with power, except both of those players had multiple 20-30+ homer seasons in the minors.

About to turn 30. Career MLB ERA of 6.49, 6.5 K/9, low-90s fastball. If the Kia Tigers want to pay him $800k or $1M, then good for Aaron Brooks. There was no guarantee he was even going to make the Orioles' roster. Hopefully he ends up like Tyler Wilson: below-replacement MLBer, but one of the top 10 pitchers in Korea last year. It's nice that there are leagues where these kind of guys can find some success and earn some money at a level befitting their talents. They're really good pitchers, just not quite major leaguers. As a bonus he gets to hang out in a cool culture with great food and the world's fastest internet connections.

Fans don't come out and get excited about wins, they get excited about 30-something-year-olds telling the media and their younger teammates engaging stories about that year the Nats won the Series. That's why The Ray Knight Orioles were everyone's favorite Orioles of all time.

#1 comp on bb-ref is U.L. Washington. If Hechavarria will play all season chewing on a toothpick I'd sign him.

I think it goes back to the bunting thing. He's completely out of his element if he's trying to do something wildly different than what made him successful. For 20 years every rep has been to do this one thing. Now at 33 different stuff does not compute, and it probably won't work anyway. Not unlike the occasional college QB who clearly isn't going to cut it as a D-I QB, and the coaching staff asks him to move to safety. A lot of guys are like "uhh... safety? I think I'll just transfer to JMU or something."

Carew also had a totally different approach than pretty much any modern hitter. He was vaguely like Ichiro, but not exactly. A modern hitting coach schooled on max bat speed, loft angles, balanced stances, etc, would look at Carew and say "I'm not sure what that's supposed to be. Cricket? Jai Alai? Huh?"

Remember how Mantle and Mays got all homer-happy after that, messed up their swings, the media coined the phrase "Derby Curse", and they were never the same again. Oh wait, that was Brandon Inge and Dan Uggla. I always get them confused.

Kind of, at least on the team mistakenly thinking a poor signing will give them legitimacy front. Werth was better, but four years older, and in 2019 dollars more expensive.

He could be the new Cesar Izturis! But you know... Luis Hernandez is only 35. He played in the Atlantic League in '17. I bet Elias could lure him out of retirement with a $550k deal. I hear he's still way better than Miggy.

Nats take was Werth would bring "moxie" or legitimacy to them. See we can spend money, and if we spend way more than we should pretty good players will come here. We're not Cleveland or Pittsburgh! My take was they signed a 31-year-old coming off a career year to a 7-year-deal for more than $100M. That's a cardinal sin for a GM. You're basically saying "I don't understand how aging in baseball works, or I just don't care." They were lucky they got two good years out of seven.

I don't know if Cal's tinkering (which was often rumored to be driven or aided by Cal Sr.) helped or hindered. Cal wasn't the most consistent hitter (cue Drungo chiding people for citing (in)consistency without any definition or metrics or evidence) and I often thought that he'd be better off just picking a reasonable, balanced stance and sticking with it rather than completely altering his baseline hitting setup every 45 seconds.

I see you've volunteered to be the Hangout's new tech editor. Congrats!

I've thought of that quite a lot. I could personally live in 200 square feet, as long as I have a full garage. The hundreds of thousands of dollars saved would have paid not only to restore the split-window, but also a whole fleet of cool and unusual cars. The issue, as is often in life, is the strongly-held counter-opinions of the wife and kids. Although I could get my 11-year-old to buy into almost any plan that involves us acquiring a Lamborghini, Lotus, Morgan, etc.

Just taking every opportunity to mess with the olds before I turn 50.

I guess I get it if it was going on a century ago and the alternate form of entertainment was reading Chaucer by a dim and malodorous whale-oil lamp.

Nowhere is the generational divide more stark than boomers riding donkeys in softball games, and the rest of us.

So another half-remembered, probably half-true story, I'm sure from an old Bill James abstract... Cap Anson was the big, loud blustry star of the NL in the 1870s-90s. In the days before modern groundskeeping one of the other teams in the league kept a donkey to munch on the outfield grass. During a game against Chicago the donkey slipped back onto the field through an open gate without anyone really noticing. The ball got hit past Anson at first, he went to chase it down and came face-to-face with the donkey. Anson was a big man, who often bullied his way around But he didn't want anything to do with with this kind of surly old donkey. So the ball sat there on the ground near the donkey as the runner ran all the way around the bases for an inside-the-park homer.

Nickel beer night in Cleveland. Throw down a $5 bill and ask for 100 beers. By the late innings fans were chasing players around the field, the game was forfeited, and the league president told the Indians in no uncertain terms that this kind of thing wasn't going to happen again.

So... what about the marsupial?