DrungoHazewood

You were the one who decided post-facto that the very vague "high pick" meant top five. I thought it could be top five rounds.

That's a good point. I had to go look at the effect... At Colt Stadium the Astros never drew 1 million, with 758k in 1964. Then the first year in the Astrodome they almost tripled attendance to 2.1M. That fell off over a couple years to 1.3-1.4M. Then fell again in the early 70s, to the point where in 1975 they were down to almost where they'd been in the old park. Then they got good in '79-80 and it went back over 2M. So the real honeymoon for the Dome was only a couple years, since by '67 they were back to 5th in the NL in attendance.

So you would have missed out on high school draftees Maddux, Blyleven, Ryan, Glavine, Smoltz, Halladay, Eckersley, Gossage, Lee Smith, Bruce Sutter. Also Greinke, Kershaw, Pettitte, Hamels, Cone, Wells, Kenny Rogers, Lester, Radke, Al Leiter, Peavy, Wainwright, Beckett, Chris Carpenter... Like Andy MacPhail proved, if you try hard enough you can convince yourself that no avenue of talent acquisition has a high enough ROI to take a chance on.

You got me. Baines is good, too. The Eastern Shore is probably pretty far up on the HOFers per unit of population list.

Until they blew up the team in the 1990s and let Stade Olympique fall into disrepair Montreal drew pretty well. In '83 they were second in the NL in attendance. From 1979-84 they were never lower than 4th. Even in 1996 they were below MLB average but out-drew the Giants, Mets, Twins, and others.

Although they played in Stade Parc Jerry, which had been a 3000-seat minor league park expanded to 28,000 or so when the Expos were invented. Imagine throwing up a bunch of metal bleachers around PG County Stadium or Grove Stadium and calling it a major league park. I'm sure it was great for Quebec to have a team, but it's not like anyone came out for the stadium. But I suppose in 1969 nobody came out for the stadium anywhere.

But for most of the time the Orioles were at Memorial they drew like 13,000 fans a game to see 90+ win teams. In some ways 13,000 fans in a 54,000 seat stadium can be more fun than a sellout. Especially when you could bring in a huge cooler full of whatever to drink.

The week I graduated from high school two friends and I drove the family station wagon to go see the O's beat Nolan Ryan and the Rangers. Long before GPS. We knew how to get there, but they blocked off 33rd St. going east after the game, so we didn't know how to get back. We just drove south until we hit the harbor and were fine, but there were and still are some very dicey areas between 33rd St. and the Inner Harbor. Especially at midnight, with three St. Mary's county boys driving Clark Griswold's car.

I'm sure Girardi was a veritable wizard to coax 84 wins out of a $258 million payroll in '14. Wasn't that the highest payroll in the history of baseball? That was the Yanks version of the 1998 Orioles.

This will forever sum up all Yankee fans always.

Is that where Home Run Baker and Jimmy Foxx got started?

I think that was about my bi-weekly take-home pay as a 21-year-old engineer with mediocre grades coming out of college 26 years ago. After inflation and deductions that's about a quarter of my starting salary a quarter of a century ago. But they might have better stories, and that's really what counts in the end.

Memorial Stadium had a lot of good memories, for the Orioles and me, but it was basically a big concrete horseshoe that was clearly designed with football in mind as much as baseball. More than once I had seats with huge concrete pillars obstructing the view, and/or overhanging upper deck that made flyballs disappear. The amenities were straight out of 1950. But luckily I was a kid most of the time I went there so it was great. I didn't know anything different; there wasn't anything much different in that era. I would have liked to have seen it in 1950s configuration when the LC-CF-RC "fence" was a hedge 450-some feet away.

Isn't the going rate for a SoMd Blue Crab $1200 or $1500 a month? Maybe $1000 on the low end? That would have to be some real good apple butter to make up $500-$800 a month.

Sorta, it's from the Brethern Church up the holler. Those old women boil that stuff in the 50 gallon copper kettle for like 14 hours. It's good. I'd play a season of indy ball for apple butter.

1. Indy ball has a higher threshold for fiscal viability than affiliated ball because they have to pay for players and coaches salaries. If the Appy League got contracted there would be no indy league replacement because 887 fans a game means you'd be paying players $15 a day and jar of apple butter. 2. How many baseball scholarships does a D-I team have? Like, six or something? I doubt that changes if there happens to be 40 minor league teams worth of kids who want to go to college. For a lot of guys who would have been 33rd round draft picks they're now going to have to figure out a way to pay to go to college. For better or for worse, contracting 40-some teams means probably 400 or 600 guys aren't baseball players any more, and they won't even get to tell their grandkids they once played for the Pulaski Braves.

I could be wrong.

Are you saying that there have been Yankee teams in the last 25 years with middling talent, despite mostly the highest payroll in baseball?

Hard to believe that 25 years ago most of the league played in multipurpose football arenas.

Moving within the Bay Area to an actual baseball stadium with decent access and transportation options would seem to be a great option. But then there's territorial rights and the fact that the Giants appear to believe that San Jose belongs to them for all eternity. Maybe they can work out a MASN deal where the A's get 75% of the Giants' TV revenues forever. Or I guess it would be the other way around.

Perez isn't a major league catcher. At 28 he spent the whole year in AA. He has a .576 MLB OPS. I'm sure he's a good defensive catcher, he better be if his MLB OPS is 50 points behind Caleb Joseph. You can read all you want into Buck Britton's comments, but to an outsider Wynns and Perez are the same player. And neither of them are more than a 3rd-string MLB catcher.

Isn't on-field stuff about 15% of a modern manager's job? And like 80% of that 15% is keeping the bullpen straight. The manager is mainly there to handle the press and interactions with the GM and front office and keeping the clubhouse from devolving into Dick Allen vs. everyone.

While I'll never root for the Yanks, part of me almost wanted them to demolish everyone else and stand astride MLB with a metaphorical spear driven through the league. Cackling maniacally, flaunting their $650M in revenues. It's not completely a coincidence that the Yanks utterly dominated the 1950s, and in the early 60s we got expansion, the draft, teams moving everywhere... Only when the Evil Empire crushes everyone do we stand a chance of MLB really taking proactive steps to subdue them. But I'll take them losing the pennant.

WAR is just a framework. And an open source one at that. As better metrics evolve you just plug those in. Right now there's nothing stopping anyone from using Statcast data for outfielder defense in WAR. Someone may not like how bb-ref or Fangraphs implements some part of WAR. That's fine. They should come up with their own value and use that instead. But they should be prepared to defend it, because like I said, this is all open source.

I don't think it's much of an impact. Outside of the Hangout there can't be 1000 Marylanders who know who Adley Rutschman is. Yes, that includes the 442 people who went to a Delmarva or Aberdeen game specifically to see him.