DrungoHazewood

Baseball might be more fun if an average steal was worth the same number of runs as an average homer. Instead of how it is in real life, where a homer is worth seven times as much.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't you consistently advocate for Duquette's and Showalter's firing throughout the 2012-16 period?

Correct, Sheets was a far better prospect. Before Sheets' breakout season he hit better in the majors than Yaz did in AAA. Sheets was the best hitter on the '84 Rochester Red Wings at the age of 24. At 24 Yaz had a .688 OPS in AA Bowie.

1. Smith's AAA OPS: .765. Yaz's .783. Yaz is 28, Smith is 26. 2. Keon Broxton was acquired after Yaz was released. And he's an actual plus centerfielder. 3. Again, after Yaz was gone and Broxton failed to hit. 4. Santander was a Rule 5 pick whose development was disrupted. And really, you're going to gig the O's for calling Santander up after not hitting particualrly well in AAA? Isn't that the whole reason for this thread, that the O's should have given Yaz an extended look despite mediocre AAA stats as an over-aged prospect in over 1200 PAs?

He's two years older than Manny Machado or Bryce Harper and has a .783 minor league OPS, 100 points less than Steve Pearce. Last year, at 27, he spent a month with the Baysox OPSing .603. In 2017 he had a .739 at Norfolk. In 2016, at 25, he had a .680 at Norfolk. If you want to blame the Orioles on not developing him, go for it. But don't pretend this is a Jon Knott, or JR House situation where Yaz kept putting up .900-1.000 OPSes in the high minors and everyone kept ignoring it. He's a 28-year-old corner outfielder who had a resume prior to this year that was 5% better than 26-year-old Dwight Smith Jr.

The 40 games at short cost Manny probably half a win or so.

I have a lot of disconnected, disorganized thoughts on this subject. I like Tony's suggestions, or at least the acknowledgment of the idea that there are alternate ways of developing players that might be more efficient or at least more cost-effective. A few points: - I've never thought that the current setup was optimal, but rather formed by a series of events more related to economics than player development. In the beginning all minor league teams were just like major league teams except in small cities. Only in the 1920s, and then accelerating in the 30s because of the Depression, did the majors start buying up the minors and turning them into development squads instead of teams trying to draw fans and win their pennant. For 50+ years MLB teams didn't have any full-time affiliates. That was probably less successful at wringing out all the talent, but MLB got along just fine. The majors wanted to own the minors to keeps costs down. They got tired of having to pay $100k for Lefty Grove after a protracted negotiation with Oriole owner Jack Dunn. Much easier if they just owned Jack Dunn and all the rest of the Orioles. - I think one reason for the sprawling system we have today is MLB contracts, options, and related issues. I think most good prospects would do just fine as part-time major league players at 20 or 22. They spend that time in the minors because nobody wants to burn service time. We've convinced ourselves that prospects would stall if they were utility infielders or relievers at 18 or 20. But we don't know that, in fact we know many successful MLB players did just that in the pre-draft era, and some even became MLB stars as teenagers. If service time wasn't a thing (for example, if everyone became a free agent at 28), I think lots of players would shoot through the minors in record time. And there would be much less need for eight levels of affiliates. - Japan has one level of minors. I don't know that this is seen as any kind of impediment to development. Ichiro was in the NPB as a teenager. They do have more teenagers in the NBP than we see in the US. But they also don't get to free agency until something like eight or nine years in, so they don't care as much about service time. - Mexico, Korea, Taiwan, the rest of the world... no minors at all. At least in any cases I know of. Of course they top out at the equivalent of A or AA levels, so not quite the same. But nobody else has the resources to have huge, sprawling development systems. Maybe not optimal, but the world doesn't end when you regularly have 18-year-olds playing alongside 36-year-olds.

He's a two-and-a-half win player. He's going to get paid, what, $7M in arb. Or something like that. So he's worth $15-20M, and he'll be paid $7M. His surplus value is $8-13M, or around that. Let's call it $10M. That's a little over a win in free agency. That's the value of the #30 overall pick on draft day. Or a lesser player after he's run the gauntlet of a few levels of the minors. So, what... maybe a single grade B-ish prospect in A or AA? Someone in the Keegin Akin, Ryan McKenna range, I guess?

All "last 30 games" does is help to define the limits of someone's peaks and valleys. Ruiz has a .657 in the majors, and a .744 in AAA. He's 25. Odds are that he's a mid-.600s OPS hitter, with the potential to grow a little bit over the next few years.

I believe his actual production as measured by tangible metrics, contract situation, and age over a general feeling that he's not a winner.

Villar's surplus value is maybe $6-8M. You're not getting six years each of two reasonably good prospects for that. You might get one guy ranked #10 in a decent farm system.

How can you be so sure that they won't see him as a guy who takes just enough risks to be a positive contributor? You don't necessarily get to the playoffs on the backs of guys who staunchly refuse to take any chances on the bases.

When I do projections I weight the last four years by 4, 3, 2, 1. What someone did five years ago is irrelevant. And four years ago only gets 1/10th of the overall weight. To me Villar has an established production level of 2.7 wins. I think over the next three years he'll be worth something like 5-6 wins.

There have only been 27 catchers who hit 25 homers in a season since 2000. In 2000 Pudge Rodriguez hit 27 homers in only 91 games. He also threw out 20 of 41 basestealers, leading the league in percentage. In 2001 he hit 25 homers and caught just 106 games. He threw out 35 basestealers. Pro-rated to 140 games his numbers are 33 and 46. Pudge threw out 40+ basestealers in a season six times while often leading the league in CS%. I'm sure if give 2019 balls he'd have hit 25+ homers a few more times. In 2012 Buster Posey hit 24 homers, threw out 38 opposing basestealers, also led the league in batting average, OPS+ and was the league MVP. But of course not on this list since he just fell short of both qualifiers while having a far superior overall season.

Records like this are less contrived if they involve just a few categories and round numbers. So the Realmuto number is better than the previous one. But as Frobby points out, raw caught stealing numbers involve a number of factors including nobody runs much on a very good defensive catcher. And the pitching staff. We joke about TTP, but there are real differences in steal attempts between pitching staffs even after controlling for the catcher. The other thing is Realmuto is at the very bottom of this list of qualifiers. He just hit his 25th homer, and threw out his 40th baserunner in the past couple weeks. As TonySoprano mentioned, a number of catchers cleared the homer mark by a lot more, just prior to 2000. I think Yogi's is the most impressive (or at least most interesting) since basically nobody stole any bases in '51. The average AL team attempted 90 steals in '51 and was successful 57% of the time. So teams attempted to steal more often than average on Yogi despite him throwing out 55% of opponents. That's one benefit we have today - people actually have access to and look at that data and think, huh, maybe we shouldn't steal so much off that guy.

That explains his sudden success. John Means body, but Sandy Koufax' cortical stack.

Also, why the "live ball era" qualifier? Clearly this would go back to the beginning of time, since in the dead ball era there were pitchers who threw 464 innings in a season without allowing a single homer. From 1908 (start of bb-ref single game data) through the end of the deadball era in 1919 no pitcher allowed more than four homers in an entire game. Also, the all time record for homers allowed in a game by a single pitcher is six. And, actually, in 1936 Tommy Thomas had a game where he threw a complete game where he gave up 16 hits, 10 runs, and six homers. Earlier this month Mike Fiers gave up nine runs and five homers in a single inning. In 2017 Michael Blazek threw 2.1 innings and allowed eight runs and six homers. And of course there's Dylan Bundy's start of no outs and seven runs/four homers in May of last year. So as I said in the previous post, there have been similar or even worse starts but if you acknowledge that then Jeremy Frank wouldn't have had a tweet to draw attention to himself.

There's a whole subculture of made-up, impossibly specific records, usually designed to favorably compare Avisail Garcia with Ty Cobb. I don't know Jeremy Frank at all, but I think the only purpose of the Elias Bureau today is to let us know that someone became the first player since 1955 to have 24 doubles, 4 triples, 23 homers, 61 walks and 14 HBP in a sixteen-week period. Of course 17 others did almost that or something more impressive, but then they couldn't tweet it out like it has meaning.

Right. You'll sometimes hear of a player being a huge gate draw by himself. Once in a long while there's a Fidrych, Fernando, Strasburg. But 99% of the time the impact is so small you could round it to zero.

Already answered by EricK. Here's the top 10 Orioles in Power-Speed Number: Rk Player Year HR SB Age PS# 1 Brady Anderson\anderbr01 1992 21 53 28 30.1 2 Brady Anderson\anderbr01 1996 50 21 32 29.6 3 Brady Anderson\anderbr01 1999 24 36 35 28.8 4 Don Baylor\baylodo01 1975 25 32 26 28.1 5 Reggie Jackson\jacksre01 1976 27 28 30 27.5 6 Jonathan Villar\villajo01 2019 21 33 28 25.7 7 Manny Machado\machama01 2015 35 20 22 25.5 8 Corey Patterson\patteco01 2006 16 45 26 23.6 9 Albert Belle\belleal01 1999 37 17 32 23.3 10 Paul Blair\blairpa01 1969 26 20 25 22.6 Power-Speed number is just the harmonic mean of steals and homers. (2*HR*SB)/(HR+SB). You get a bigger value by having both of them high, less bonus for one really high and one kind of low. 55/20 is about the same as 30/30.

At least as much (percentage-wise) as BJ Surhoff was. I'd buy into him increasing attendance 0.1%, maybe even 0.2%.

But if he doesn't appear in the commercial, doesn't that signal that he's not in the team's future and is about to be traded? It's a vexing problem, hurt if he does, off the team if he doesn't.

- Trout would certainly play for $17M a year. But would Mike Yaz spend nine years in the minors if the salary he was chasing for his first (and maybe only three years in the majors) $250k? And if he could make that much in another sport? - Baseball lost a lot of relative popularity in the 60s-80s, but made up for it with new revenues from cable and other TV deals. Perhaps they could make up for loss of fans through online revenues. But I kind of doubt that's going to be as big as $100s of millions in cable deals supported by mandatory fees from non-fans. We'll see what happens, but I think it's clear baseball is thinking about the graying of its shrinking fanbase with the talk of rules changes and experiments in the minors. Baseball has a huge advantage over some other sports, in that its players usually have all their faculties and can walk at 70. But people have to want to play and watch something engaging and fun.

Yesterday I checked and their road record stood at something like the 639th-worst of all time. It's only about 5th-worst in modern Oriole history. They already have five or six more road wins than in '88 or '18. I think they're already better than the 2009 O's on the road.

Baseball didn't have as much competition many years ago. If average salaries fell by half or 2/3rds some of the talent base goes elsewhere, to basketball or football or (especially) soccer. There will always be baseball, but how good will it be?