DrungoHazewood

It wasn't his fault, he had a .343/.443/.742 line in AAA. And pretty much from the day he was called up he was one of the best hitters in the league. If you average rWAR and fWAR Alvarez and Means are very close in total value, but Alvarez lapped the field in production per unit of play. I couldn't find any definition or guidance on voting for the ROY, but I doubt it says somewhere that the voters should prioritize total value over per-game impact. If that was the case they wouldn't have given McCovey the award in '59 when he only played 52 games, they should have given it to the Phils' Jim Owens who started 30 games and had 221 innings pitched. Or Joe Koppe or George Altman, who each played the whole year.

I want them to tweak the game so that it's more engaging to me, which means more balls in play, fewer homers and strikeouts, more athletic action on the field. And games that take closer to two hours than four. But I think what really has always been the biggest thing is knowing that your team has a chance. Competitive imbalance might be the most important thing to fix. But it's also very, very hard, because wins and losses are a zero-sum game. If you make everyone who isn't competitive today moreso, then the teams that are (predominantly the teams with more resources) become worse. So you have to convince the richest and most powerful that they need to give up some of that for the good of all. Good luck with that.

It will be interesting to watch what happens if the cable bubble bursts and the streaming revenues don't make up for it and attendance continues to decline. It's been a very long time since baseball has had significant declines in revenues. Briefly after the '94-95 lockout, but previously it was before free agency. We could see bad blood between the MLBPA and the owners, as the owners try to hold on to their revenues, and the players finally trying to go to the mat for a fixed percentage of them. I don't think a MLB team has declined in value in my lifetime, but it could happen I suppose.

That probably helped attendance some. But we can't pretend that this wasn't a divisive issue at the time. I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing some segment of the population stayed away because of integration.

There was a huge, pent-up demand for entertainment in the immediate post-WWII era. The country had been at war or in the Depression for more than 15 years. The GIs got back from Europe and the Pacific and baseball attendance absolutely boomed. But then it rapidly fell off with the introduction of TV, suburban flight, urban neglect, uncompetitive teams (especially 2nd teams in Boston, Philly, St. Louis, etc). Other sports started gaining traction like football and basketball. Also, I think people just got tired of the Yanks running away with the league almost every single !@#$%^ year. Free agency, good pennant races, and teams marketing and trying to generate revenues to keep up with the Yanks and Dodgers started to build interest in the 70s. Also helped that in the 60s MLB got better aligned with the population, although franchise movement and expansion was chaotic and at least in the short term caused some harm as well as good. See: the millions of people who still claim to be Brooklyn Dodgers fans, despite them drawing less fans than the 2019 Orioles just before they moved.

Sure, a lot different. But salaries are driven by popularity and revenues, not the other way around. If revenues go down, so do salaries. But I doubt baseball will fall off a cliff and people will laugh if the average salary ends up at $1.5M instead of $4M or whatever it currently is.

There are 330 million people in the US. There are, what, 7 billion people in the world. It doesn't take all that many of them as fans to have a viable sports league. There are many young people who play and watch baseball, just not the percentage there were in 1950 or 1910. For a lot of reasons. St, Mary's County probably has more kids playing soccer, but it's not by a lot, and they have no problem fielding a robust Little League program. I just had a coach and two of the better players on my son's RecPlus soccer champs announce that they're not coming back in the spring because they want to concentrate on baseball. Baseball can decline in overall popularity and still be a very robust thing. Part of this is we need to get over the idea that everyone was a baseball fan in 1950 and it's all downhill from there. Forget 1950. Baseball can do just fine in 2030 as long as your baseline for "just fine" isn't "everyone likes us more than all the other sports".

So if there was evidence that your team could cut a third of a run a game off by switching to a six-man rotation you'd say no because... because? And aren't some teams already moving to openers for the playoffs? Seems kind of inevitable that most teams will just have their best pitchers throw to 10 batters every few days in the postseason.

Baseball once operated on a model that included 25 cent tickets and no media revenues whatsoever. Indoor box lacrosse and 3rd division Arena Football and Pecos League Baseball all survive on 1/10,000th the revenues of MLB. People play cricket in the US with essentially no revenues, they just built an oval in suburban DC that cost $7M. Baseball will exist in 100 years, we just don't quite know what form it will take.

I think in the name of science the Yankees and Red Sox should respond to all reports of shooting pain in their pitcher's elbows with "suck it up crybaby, we're throwing you on two days rest and letting you go 165 pitches this week."

I'm totally astonished that an old ballplayer can't believe how soft today's guys are. I could trace back through the last 140 years of baseball with quotes like that, and then come to the conclusion that in 1860 every pitcher was 11 feet tall, and could throw max effort for 772 innings a year to no ill effect.

Bundy and Cobb? Bundy who pitches worse over his career on longer rest, and Cobb who is part android now?

When I read that as a much younger man I thought that Earl's Seventh Law made a lot of sense. But then thinking through it I'm no longer sure it is easier to find four pitchers who can start every four days in a modern context than it is five. In a four-man rotation you'd be asking someone to throw an extra 800 pitches a year, give or take. How many pitchers can seamlessly give you 25% more pitches and starts a year? Edit: As I mentioned before the whole concept of a regular rotation, and of regular work being a big benefit, wasn't really a thing until at least the 1950s. Robin Roberts debuted in 1948 and in his career he started three games on days he'd pitched the previous day, sixteen games on one day rest, 46 games on two days, 219 on three, 192 on four 71 on five, and 62 on 6+. He pretty much pitched whenever he was asked to, and it was something other than three days rest most of the time and often it was four. But as for spreading around the work... as early as 1906 the Giants had five different pitchers start 25+ games. The '22-23 Yanks each had five pitchers start at least 25.

Does it? Bundy in his career has pitched worse on five days rest than on four. We'll see if or how much Cobb pitches this year, and he's not the pitcher he was earlier in his career. Means has eight starts on four days rest in his MLB career, and Wojo just 10. Last year all MLB starters on four days rest had a 4.46 ERA. On five days it was 4.52. In general, although it may vary by individual, there isn't a whole lot of difference in performance by days rest with modern use patterns.

Doesn't that depend on how much better they are with five days rest, and who would take the starts they would now miss by pitching less frequently? If Cobb and Bundy were 0.20 runs/game better, but that means you give 20 starts to a guy with a 6.24 ERA you're probably better off with a 5-man.

I really just want someone to implement The Winner, who only comes in following the opener when the team is tied or ahead. Because some pitcher will go 44-9.

I assume any study commissioned by an organization that has a huge stake in the outcome will exaggerate its findings. It's like the studies that always show a new stadium will bring $billions of new business to the city, while ignoring how difficult it is to find those revenues after the fact, and failing to point out that the stadium will be hugely profitable for the owner who commissioned the study. Maybe 25% is right, it seems plausible. But I'd guess it's more like 15% because the Orioles had every incentive to exaggerate.

The current win rule hasn't made a lot of sense since about 1925. I guess one of these evolutions might eventually convince them to modify it. For a long time I've advocated that the rule should be this: "The official scorer uses his best judgment to award the win to whichever pitcher from the winning team he thinks most contributed to the victory." If John Means throws eight scoreless innings and they win it in the 9th after a reliever came on, he still gets the win. If the opener throws two perfect innings and everyone else allows a run or two in a 11-10 win, give it to the opener.

The four-man rotation was only the standard for everyone from the early 60s into the 70s. Prior to 1960 there were more rainouts, more train travel, many more doubleheaders, and teams readjusted the rotation on the fly all the time. Prior to WWII you had different ideas about pitching staffs, like Carl Hubbell would start 33 games, relieve in another 12, and lead the league in wins, ERA, saves, and innings. In the 20s and 30s it was common for even a good team to have one or two guys make 30+ starts, and all of the relievers would start sometimes. Firpo Marberry is sometimes thought of as the first real, kind of modern reliever, and he had multiple years where he led the league in saves and started 15-20 games. Pick out a Yanks team from the 1950s... say, the 1954 team that won 103 games. Whitey Ford led the team with 28 starts. Eddie Lopat was 2nd with 23. They had 13 pitchers make starts. 154 divided by four is 38.5, so in a strict four-man you'd expect regular starters to get 35-40 starts. From 1946-1960 there were only 16 teams, or about one per year, that had as many as two pitchers make 35+ starts. From 1961-75 there were 115 such teams. From 1976-90 that was down to 66, and from '91-2005 it was back down below the 1950's level to 17 (with many more teams).

I think we eventually get to the point where most teams have their entire staff set up to throw once through the order. You might have Strasburgs and Verlanders throw two times through, but most teams, most days will have each pitcher face nine batters. With a LOOGY and/or a long man hanging out somewhere. Mostly four pitchers a game, they'll go every three days. The long man absorbs innings in case you're down 8-0 and don't want to get off schedule for everyone else. A healthy regular guy in that kind of setup will get 54 games and about 126 max-effort innings a year. And if you have someone good slotted in to the 3-5th inning role they could win 30+ because the starter is really an opener and ineligible for the win under current rules.

I don't belittle it, enjoy it. I just think that you overstate its impact and popularity to try to make a point.

While there's a lot of truth there, the 1948 Indians drew 2.6M. Although attendance took a huge hit in the 50s, probably due to TV more than anything else. The Dodgers and Giants moved because they couldn't draw fans. The Dodgers were in the biggest city in the US, winning 90+ games most years in the 1950s, but even after the Korean War and the advent of night baseball they had years where they barely broke 1M at the turnstiles. TV, and the beginning of the decay or perceived decay of inner cities. People fled to the suburbs in this era. And while we think of places like Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds as famous, historic places, by the mid-50s they were 40-50 years old, built to 1910s standards or worse and shoehorned into little blocks in neighborhoods that were getting a little neglected.

That's what I was trying to get across with the International League Orioles. Everyone knew the majors were a little better, but the Orioles were really good and they were local. The PCL tried pretty hard in the 1950s, successfully lobbying for an Open classification instead of AAA. That pressure was a big part of the Majors allowing teams to move west, and then expand. And even before that they were pretty good at keeping players for a long time, even though many could have gone east and become MLB regulars. I think that the PCL could/should have tried to go major earlier and it would have worked. In a lot of ways the structure of MLB would make more sense with 3-4 leagues that are more geographically compact. And the Federal League gave it a go in 1914-15, but with no real western teams. I think the travel times were a big hindrance before jet airline travel became common. Washington to LA on a train probably took 48-72 hours. Jet travel really started in the 1950s, and by the end of the decade there were MLB teams on the West Coast.

I think the next step would be to break up the contracts not only by age at signature, but also age when contract expires. My guess is that the best ones are relatively short and signed early. The worst are the ones that last until a player is around 40. I should run some data on the last two-win season for each Hall of Famer; the average is probably 34 or 35. Most of these big, long deals are paying 36, 37, 38 year-olds for 4+ win seasons. Before the ink is dry you know most of those contracts will fail.

Asher Wojciechowski has made nine starts on five days rest in his MLB career. Drawing conclusions based on nine starts spread over three seasons is a huge stretch. You'd be more accurate if you just said we basically have no idea how moving to a six-man rotation would impact Wojciechowski, and have almost nonexistent meaningful data on Means.