DrungoHazewood

Now that would have been something!!

We're going down for the Wake game in a few weeks, I haven't been in almost 10 years after having gone to 95% of home games from roughly 1996-2008. Back in the day I had a friend who owns a house in town and we'd stay there. Renting an Air B&B in Christiansburg with a bunch of people this month. Bringing my boys so they can see a real college campus, they're 16 and 15 and have no idea what they're doing after high school. Probably not Tech, but you never know. My nephew is a freshman and for out-of-staters it's over $50k a year.

I expected them to hold serve or fall back a little bit because they didn't really add anything in the offseason and I didn't think we could count on the pitching to be enough. And teams that improve by 30 wins in a season usually fall back at least a little the next. The 1990 Orioles were 76-85, and the 2013 Orioles declined by eight wins. When they signed O'Hearn I assumed that either he would spend the year in Norfolk, or they were nuts. I totally missed that his no-shift splits were really pretty good with the Royals.

Somehow I blocked that from my memory, have no recollection of it. That was the day we went to the Tech-BC game, which was an afternoon game in Blacksburg. Drove to Cleveland first thing the next morning. We had to have found somewhere to watch the Orioles... but I have no recollection at all. But it was clearly a foul ball. Webster reacted exactly as if everyone knew it was foul. I say the O's challenge the call, they can just start the game over from that point. Randy Myers is only 61, he can probably still bring it.

Doesn't he have a side gig working the 10-6 shift at the Royal Farms in Odenton? Didn't want to be late.

But they totally rocked some belt wrestling. John Cena ain't got nothin' on Shugli of Ur.

I want a Jackson Holliday cameo. He doesn't turn 20 until December 4th, and Dylan Bundy is the only Oriole in my lifetime to play for the O's as an actual calendar-year teenager. Manny, Gene Kingsale and Matt Riley played during their age-19 seasons, but after they'd turned 20. I know, he's not on the 40-man, they're never going to do it.

Isn't winning the division implied when you have clinched the best record in the league? There's no way to have a better record than all the other teams and not win your Division. The Braves have exactly the same asterisk.

Yea, he needs to search the archives for "how the 2012-2016 era seemed fun at the time but was actually hugely counterproductive and we should have burned everything to the ground in 2011."

He signed with the Marlins a looooong time ago.

Based on run differential the best O's team of my life was probably '71, but I don't remember a whole lot because they won their 100th when I was 102 days old and was still trying to catch up on the 1800s Orioles history.

What they mean is that when you field a professional sports team the object of the game is to win and bring entertainment and joy for your fans, and there shouldn't be an environment where its advantageous to intentionally not win as much as you can for a number of years. And I agree with that. MLB shouldn't have set itself up such that losing 110 games for 3-4 years is more advantageous than trying your best to win. It's ugly. We had to endure a lot of comically bad baseball the last few years. It drove off a substantial chunk of fans. Many came back this year, but many still haven't and may not ever. Yes, in the context we have they did what they had to, and they did it very well. But there are other ways to run a league.

The franchise we now call the Atlanta Braves has won 100+ 10 times, but their only World Series win among those wasn't really a World Series win. They won 100 in 1998, 1993, 2023, 1999, 1898, 1892, 2022, 2003, 2002, and 1997. The only time they won the Series among those years was 1892, and that was really a proto-World Series between the 1st and 2nd half winners of the National League in the only split season prior to the 1981 strike. It was odd to modern eyes, in that the Braves (Beaneaters at the time) won the Series 5-0-1, as it was best-of-nine, including a game one tie due to darkness. None of the games drew more than 7500 fans, and the 13 players on winning side split $1000 in prize money, taking home $76.92 each. The best record of any modern World Series-winning Braves team was 95-59-1 for the '57 Milwaukee Braves. And the 2021ers won despite being just 88-73 in the regular season.

Plus you get to win your 100th game in early April. Unless it's 1988 and you win your 100th on May 8th.

That's probably true, the owners have more of the blame than the GMs. As late as the 1987 collusion scandal it was clear the owners as a group treated free agency as something that they'd eventually get rid of, and they could go back to the reserve clause as God intended.

Hank Peters seems to get a fair amount of love for overseeing the successes of that era, but: This was the timeframe where the O's farm system went from epic to abysmal This was the dawn of free agency, and for the first 5-6 years the Orioles acted like it was a passing fad so they hemmoraged stars while Earl had to cobble together lineups with Pat Kelly and Benny Ayala. And starting in '84 or so they signed some free agents, but only 34-year-olds.

He did some things well. But he was also the GM who either championed or was okay with the idea that the only source of talent that met his ROI threshold was at-slot draft picks. No overslots. No international signings. Little in the way of creative trades. Basically no innovative scouting, analysis, development. Very little successful reclamation projects or Grade C prospects turning into solid MLB players. Pitching development and sustainment was terrifying under his leadership, at least at times. The 2008-10 teams were not only trainwrecks, but directionless trainwrecks with half a dozen so-so 30+ year-old players on $7M contracts. He gets a full letter grade deduction just for starting a season with Luis ".592 OPS in Bowie" Hernandez as the only plausible option at SS.

It's only a big deal because we have 10 fingers and count in decimal. In octal 100 is just 64 wins.

Ned Hanlon is also on the shortlist for taking a mediocre American Association team and turning them into one with three consecutive NL Championships followed by strong contention in the following three years. But he does get some negative marks for his actions that directly resulted in the dismantling and contraction of the Orioles in 1899. So a little like if Elias' teams won the 2023-25 World Series, then moved to Nashville in '28.

It's hard to say because the landscape has changed so much in the time the modern Orioles have been in Baltimore. I think Paul Richards was in a similar situation, taking over a team that the Browns left with almost nothing and building the foundations of a dynasty. Certainly every GM from about 1980 until Elias has to take serious demerits for overseeing a farm system that's rarely been even average despite regular high draft picks. Although it's always hard to disentangle ownership from GM in many ways. I'd argue any kind of success under the Angelos family gets you an automatic letter grade bump up. Elias' final transcripts aren't set yet. He's done a fantastic job rebuilding, but with any luck he'll be here quite a bit longer. That could move him solidly towards the top of the list, or maybe not.

Why, for accepting the fact that he probably wasn't going to extort another $300M out of the taxpayers of Maryland and after many delays and attempts to use hints at moving as leverage he finally, grudgingly agreed to take only $600M in free money?

The 1980 Orioles were one of just nine teams to win 100 and not play in the postseason. This list is misleading, as it says there were 13 teams, but the 1800s teams listed didn't have a post-season to go to and the 1904 Giants didn't play in the post-season because John McGraw was in a feud with AL President Ban Johnson and refused to play. In the lifetimes of anyone still alive there have only been five 100-win teams that missed the playoffs. And with expanded playoffs it's highly unlikely it'll happen again in any of our lifetimes.

I think you're right, but these awards are like figure skating medals. There's always a chance the Uzbek judge is going to give him a 6.8 and Bruce Bochy a 9.7. Buck took the '12 team from complete generational mocking irrelevance to the playoffs in one year and they gave it to Bob Melvin because the A's were just about as good as the O's after having been slightly below average for a brief while.

I don't know if that word means what you think it means. It could have been better.