DrungoHazewood

Probably no worse than spending nine years in the minors never making more than $50k in a season and most years under $10k. At least in football with no minor leagues you don't find yourself doing a fourth stint in Kalamazoo. You've already moved on to coaching middle school gym.

It seems fantastically ridiculous that the O's could land a guy ranked somewhere between #14 and #37 in all of MLB on the pre-2018 prospect lists for a 2-3 month rental of a replacement-level 32-year-old CFer making $17M a year. Crawford wasn't having a good 2018, but even if he'd fallen 50 spots that seems like a huge steal.

I like Adam Jones a lot, but it looks like he didn't learn the lessons of last offseason: if you are a replacement-level player, which he is, you can't be picky. If he wants to keep playing it'll be on a one-year deal for a few $million, and maybe not where he wants to play.

Do you not understand that there is a substantive difference between a .950 OPS player and a .550 OPS player?

I remember going on a work trip for a week or so when my oldest was about a year old, my wife was pregnant with #2 and not enjoying it, and we were working on buying land for a house. All the political capital was gone. For a good while.

Hint: that was just an example of the headaches of spending half the year living out of a suitcase. Even a gold-encrusted one.

I'm not saying it's breaking rocks on a chain gang, but once you already have many millions in the bank your perspective might change. The coaches generally don't have giant nest eggs, nor the background to go out and get lucrative jobs outside of baseball. And maybe a few of them actually like the 1000-person queue of bitter, tired, sick people at passport control at the airport every time they come back from Toronto.

Needs to make some adjustments at the plate? Searching for an analogy here... Like saying you need to tweak some things under the hood of your Honda Fit, otherwise it'll never compete in the Indy 500. Like saying the Hindenburg needed to make a few adjustments to lightning protection and flammability. Like how John Hickenlooper needed to make a couple adjustments to his presidential campaign to win it all in 2020. If the Earthworm Burger Truck just made a few adjustments to the menu they'd be overflowing with business.

I've worked on a military base for over 25 years and I know a lot of guys who got out of the Navy and immediately grew their hair down past their shoulders and kept it there. They didn't really like people telling them how they should look. It's America after all.

Which is but a small fraction of even baseball history. One of the lessons of the 1970s is that if you tell folks they have to look like a Marine for too long they'll end up looking like Ross Grimsley.

It's higher than zero. The process of traveling generally sucks, even if you're flying charters it's probably not great. You do it because you have to or there's something cool like a vacation on the other end. If hauling a suitcase around to hotels and airports, sitting the bench and occasionally getting into a game to strikeout is all that's there after a few years he might decide the $100M he's already earned in his career is enough.

This is the 150th anniversary of the '69 Cincinnati Red Stockings, and mis-identified as the 150th anniversary of Major League Baseball. They should be encouraging 1869-style whiskers in celebration.

Maybe baseball should occasionally consider demographics besides 74-year-old men. With that segment of the population shrinking over time and all. Not everyone thinks every athlete or ballplayer should look like they stepped out of a 1950s period piece.

If you restrict "old" to "when baby boomers were young". The idea that gentlemen should only have close-cropped, short hair and limited or no facial hair is something that came about in the last 100 or so years out of hundreds of thousands of years of human existence. Perhaps also sporadically in other times and places, I've heard ancient Egyptians were fond of removing most or all of their hair. But someone in Baltimore in 1776 probably would have thought someone with Boys' Haircut #1 from Floyd's Barber Shop was quite strange.

How old?

Yes, but apparently with a 175 PA qualifier which Alberto just passed last night. There are an awful lot of full-time players who didn't get 175 PAs vs lefties in a whole season, presumably because when someone like Nolan Arenado comes up in Denver against a lefty after about the sixth inning they change pitchers to a righty. Arenado hit .420 against lefties in 2015, but in just 165 PAs. Bret Boone hit .444 against lefties in '01, in 165 PAs. Edgar hit .433 against lefties in '95, in 169. In '96 Frank Thomas hit .403/.544/.798 against lefties. In '27 Harry Heilmann hit .464 vs. southpaws in 128 PAs (51-for-110). In '94 Jeff Bagwell OPS'd 1.639 vs lefties, but the lockout kept him to 125 PAs. Al Simmons had a two-year run in '30 and '31 where he cumulatively hit .439 against lefties in 213 PAs, and actually hit .488 against lefties in 93 PAS in '29. For his career Simmons hit .380 against lefties. In 1955, as a full time player, Hank Aaron hit .440 against lefties in 93 PAs and .284 against righties in 524. George Brett hit .437 against northpaws in 1980 in 320 PA, which is the highest mark in the bb-ref data, even going down to a minimum of 100 PAs. The vs righties list (min 100 PAs) is fun: Brett, Lefty O'Doul, Dave Dellucci, Gehrig, Babe Herman, Gehrig, Williams, Chuck Klein, Todd Hollandsworth. In the top 50 both Babe Phelps and Babe Herman appear more (twice) than Babe Ruth (once).

No, because they totally value the last 30 days over all other evidence.

It's hard to be embarrassed by something you're completely unaware of.

Didn't tens of people get up and walk out during a game, and Angelos immediately sold the team to The Sultan of Brunei, who then poured hundreds of millions into payroll and infrastructure and the O's became a dynasty and the Yankees gave up and moved to Des Moines? The last four or five things may not have actually happened.

Did that rascally @OFFNY bump another thread from 2003?

He's 5-for-20 with a .638 OPS. And, yes, he had a 1.000 OPS at Las Vegas, but doesn't everyone? He's 4th on the team (min 50 PAs) in OPS, and the team has a .909. Some guy named Seth Brown has 37 homers and 103 RBI in 107 games and the A's haven't even bothered to call him up. The PCL has 23 players OPSing 1.000 or more in 125+ PAs this year. Someone named Gavin Lux in the Dodgers' system is hitting .417 with a 1.262 OPS. AAA is so crazy this year that both Caleb Joseph and Ryan Flaherty are OPSing about .850.

Fans tend to value baserunners who're never thrown out. Baserunners who're never thrown out are probably so conservative that they're costing the team runs. Same thing applies to third base coaches; fans invariably think the break-even-point is never getting thrown out.

I think people forget that Todd Cruz started for the World Champion Orioles. The '97 O's had Mike Bordick and his .601 OPS starting at short, and they gave over 30 starts to pitchers with 6+ ERAs. Jonathan Schoop hit .209/.244/.354 for the 96-win 2014 Orioles, and Ryan Flaherty got 312 PAs for that team. Even very good teams aren't wall-to-wall great. They just have more good than bad.

I think any long-term Chris Davis injury would be highly, highly scrutinized given the fact that he's far more valuable injured and off the roster than healthy and playing. The odds of him getting a legitimate career-threatening injury while being a part-time first baseman seem very small.

Villar is a 2.5-win player, on pace for 3+. There can't have been five teams in MLB history who had 3-win players at every position. There may have been none. An average 90+ win team has multiple positions where they're below-average. The '27 Yankees gave about 1000 PAs and 450 innings to below-average players.