DrungoHazewood

Gonzalez had his Brady season at 33, and never hit 30 homers in a season again. Nelson Cruz just had his highest OPS+ in a full season in a year where he turned 39. Hank Aaron aged exceptionally well, and he didn't do that. Babe Ruth's age 38 season was like his 14th-best. David Ortiz came close, but not quite. Willie Mays was magic in his 30s, but had a 124 OPS+ at 38.

I'm skeptical of the defensive metrics that frequently don't make any sense. Saying that Jonathan LuCroy or the Molinas' framing is worth $20M a year and nobody noticed that before is quite a claim. Especially when teams don't pay players like that's real, and teams/pitchers don't have noticeably different outcomes with wildly different framers behind the plate. The whole thing is like discovering plutonium by accident. You're skeptical of all defensive metrics, even the ones that match up to subjective observation and the new tracking systems the vast majority of the time.

By ~1985 it was pretty well documented that the average major leaguer peaks around 27 and declines to the point that even most stars aren't productive at 35. It must be a really hard lesson.

In 1940 Major League Baseball hadn't expanded, contracted, or allowed a team to move in 38 years. And they wouldn't do any of that for another 12. Baseball decided that it was divine providence that Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and St. Louis had multiple teams, but California, Texas, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Seattle, Canada, the Mountain Time Zone, and the entire South had none.

That's nothing. Jonathan LuCroy's framing was worth $18M in 2011. And in 2014 Dioner Navarro's framing was worth minus-$22M per 162 games (also known as "an entire Chris Davis").

Excellent work. We need some charts and graphs. And a clickbait headline.

Yes, I know. If you prefer some other example of players that Steve Finley out-homered after age 30 you could instead choose Albert Pujols (at least for the moment), Manny Ramirez, Harmon Killebrew, Frank Thomas, Andre Dawson, Alex Rodriguez, Fred McGriff, Jim Edmonds, Eddie Murray, Jeff Bagwell, Adrian Beltre, Carl Yastrzemski, Dwight Evans, Billy Williams, Tony Perez, Norm Cash, Harold Baines, Ken Griffey Jr, Jose Bautista, Mike Piazza, Frank Howard, Joe Adcock, Cal, George Brett... Finley was on par with Don Zimmer through 30, and out-homered all but 20 other players in history after that.

I loved Steve Finley. His catch on opening day '89 set the tone for the whole year, and hated when he was traded. But going into his age 31 season he had 64 professional (including minors) homers, comparable to Don Zimmer or Kurt Suzuki. And a career high of 11. From 31-on he hit 260, one more than Ted Williams hit at those ages. Launch angle. Coulda been launch angles.

And when you start to call the players only by their first names, and the other team as the bad guys or the enemy... only the White Sox will hire you.

He and Brady probably hung out a lot.

I know multiple people who are what I'd call die hard Nats fans. One guy I work with who goes to opening day every year, playoff games, constantly watches them on TV. We have a friendly sparring thing between the O's and Nats, which has been pretty one-sided lately. And I know any number of O's fans who basically said "call me when they get good again" a couple years ago.

Part of this is the independence of the Orioles. They were a minor league team from 1903-53, but bb-ref doesn't list them as affiliated with any MLB team until they were a Phillies farm team in 1940. I think they started some kind of arrangements maybe a decade prior, but for most of the time they weren't developing someone else's prospects, they were trying to win the pennant. Today basically nobody cares about the record of the Norfolk Tides, or the Rochester Red Wings. Not really. The SoMd Blue Crabs draw more for promotion nights in July than they do for playoff games in September. In 1925 everyone who was a baseball fan in Baltimore cared about wins and losses, just like they were a MLB team. It's roughly analogous to cheering for a mid-level college football team. They have zero chance of unseating Alabama or Clemson, but everyone at East Carolina wants to win the AAC. Nobody is happy if they go 3-9 but their QB and RB end up in the NFL.

I think the difference is that Baltimore had a famous major league team in the 1800s, then a dynastic International League team in the teens and 20s. And I think Baltimore always saw itself as a "big" city at least on par with Washington and others. Akron had few or none of those things. Even in the chaotic 19th century they never had a major league team, even briefly. Butts Wagner (Honus' brother) played briefly for Canton in the low-level Interstate League in 1895... Akron had a team in the 1920 IL featuring Jim Thorpe, but they didn't have one in '19 or '21. Apparently they had a Yanks' affiliate in the 30s. I'm guessing the sporadic fielding of teams in the area made it hard to be a fan of the local team. And in 1940 Akron had 250k people, Cleveland 900k.

Ryan Flaherty and Stevie Wilkerson currently both have a career OPS+ of 71.

It could be anyone. Every organization has multiple guys like Stevie Wilkerson. Ryan Flaherty spent almost the whole year in AAA, we could bring him back for a trivial price.

In 1987-88 I had a brief dalliance with the Indians as my 2nd team. But I just couldn't do it, it felt wrong. And when the O's lost the '97 ALCS to the Indians I dug my Cleveland hat out of the back of the closet and burned it.

Or they'll be like Red Sox Nation and become both insufferably entitled and biased.

Everyone except the A's and the Rays have a really nice stadium now. It loses some impact to be the 24th team to say "ohh look, we have a brand new stadium about as nice as Pittsburgh and Baltimore!"

I was just amazed that atomic jumped in with a semi-insightful post before you got to it. But then he made up for it by talking about how most Elias transactions are rearranging the deck chairs and correcting you for not phrasing it right.

I don't like mocking transactions just because they are likely to have little or no impact to the success of the major league team. The Nats' and Astros' AA teams have to have utility infielders, too. Do their fans react with howling and cackling when they acquire one? I guess folks would prefer that nobody is competing with Stevie Wilkerson in the spring? Or that the O's should skip all acquisitions that don't add 3-4 wins this year?

Has the world come to this? atomic said the same thing a page back, and I actually positive repped the post. It is true that no transaction is small enough to avoid mocking that it isn't the next Scherzer signing.

I intuited that Palooka had a 6.33 FIP. And was the 9th-best starter on the Iowa Royals. Oh, and did I mention that his great-grandfather pitched (underhanded!) in the Three-I League in 1933?

I tell myself I can't root for more than one team in a league (MLB being a league). But then 1860 München and Unterhaching found themselves both in the 3. Liga. I can't dump one of them. If rooting for both is wrong, I don't want to be right. But I still won't have a 2nd MLB team.

The last one is me. Moose missed a couple really obvious ones: "Palooka had a 1.63 ERA with Oklahoma City in two starts and 11 innings at the end of the year, so he's a lock for the O's rotation." "I don't understand why Elias is trying to win 28 games again next year. It's a disgrace. When are we getting a real GM/owner/players/fans/universe?"

I hear Paul Bako and Keith Osik are available.