DrungoHazewood
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O’s claim IF Hanser Alberto from Yankees; DFA Susac
DrungoHazewood replied to Frobby's topic in Orioles Talk
If we're going to have another couple years of rebuilding I'd highly encourage Elias to target hilarious, weird players when he's looking for random placeholders. My #1 target for this coming offseason would be Willians Astudillo. -
O’s claim IF Hanser Alberto from Yankees; DFA Susac
DrungoHazewood replied to Frobby's topic in Orioles Talk
In '00 Deivi hit .302/.318/.449 with 61 extra base hits, but just 13 walks, and was a +4 shortstop. But that was as good as he ever was. When the O's signed him he was coming off two seasons of -12 and -14 defense with 81 OPS+es. -
O’s claim IF Hanser Alberto from Yankees; DFA Susac
DrungoHazewood replied to Frobby's topic in Orioles Talk
That is a pretty good comp. Deivi was a good fielder early in his career, and sometimes hit .300, but he had little power and his career high in walks was 22. Some of you may remember ancient history when I used to write articles for the Hangout. My first one in late 2002 was entitled "Deivi Cruz. Was he really the best of a mediocre bunch?" I was pretty critical of the Orioles for spending exorbitant amounts of money on Cruz ($1.2M) instead of going with a younger, cheaper player like Mike Moriarty, Brian Roberts (at SS), David Lamb, Mendy Lopez... In retrospect I don't even know if I came to the right conclusion. But in '03 Cruz and Tony Batista combined to make 947 outs, which couldn't have been helpful to anyone. -
In youth soccer if you're going to scrimmage a boys' team against a girls' team you want to have a couple levels of separation to make it competitive. For example, I help coach what we call a RecPlus team, slotted in between Rec and Travel. U12, so 10-11 year old boys. We will sometimes scrimmage a U13 girls travel team and the games are competitive. When DC United would play doubleheaders with the Washington Freedom the difference in level of play was immediately obvious. The Freedom were entertaining, they had Mia Hamm for a while. But you wouldn't want them to try to play DC United, which was then an okay team in a 2nd or 3rd tier league.
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Probably. The training, and nutrition, tactics, fitness are certainly in the women's favor. But the men of 1910 will still be larger, faster, stronger, just because of genetics. Alex Morgan towers over many of her teammates, and she's 5' 7", 137. Honus Wagner was 5' 11", 200. One major advantage today's women would have is that the 1910 US men's national team was kind of a disorganized thing that played Canada once a year. They didn't play their first official, sanctioned match until 1916. Dick Spalding was a guy who scored in that first official match and he's listed at 5' 11".
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High-level women's soccer basically didn't exist 30 or 40 years ago. The current pro league was founded in 2012. As organizations grow over time they optimize, every day they do little things to improve. MLB has spent the last 150 years optimizing how it grows, funnels, and develops talent. They are quite excellent at getting kids to want to play baseball, and all those players want to play in MLB. We saw how quickly things improve and change by watching the Orioles stay in 1985 mode for 25 years and fall hopelessly behind. The NWSL has been optimizing itself since about the time Manny Machado was called up to the majors. And they're doing that with a tiny, tiny fraction of the resources that the men's leagues have. That's why salaries and attendance matter so much - they're sources and indicators of resources available to pour back into making the league and the sport better. The current USWNT has a lot of talent. It is hugely entertaining. I loved watching the last several women's World Cups. But I fully expect that over the next 20, 40, 60 years women's soccer will go through the processes that the major men's leagues have been going through for 50, 100, 150 years. The NWSL players of 2040 will wipe the floor with today's players. Because of where they're starting they will almost certainly grow more than MLB or the NFL or NBA will over that same period, maybe exponentially more.
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Go through an objective checklist. Women's soccer today is a lot more like 1800s or early 1900s baseball than it is today's major leagues. Small crowds, small salaries, leagues folding, limited history, teams playing in essentially community parks. Just the salaries are a big indicator - the max individual salary for the league is $46k, and this is one of if not the top league in the world. I have administrative assistants who make more than stars in the NWSL. The minimum salary is $16k - you can make that working fast food. I'd guarantee you players have dropped out of the league because they can't make any money. The talent pool expands and contracts with salary, and $46k isn't buying much talent. The USWNT players make a lot more, the rank and file make the kind of salary you get as a starting elementary school teacher in Alabama. In 1871 many of the best players in the world were in the National Association. It was the best baseball league in the world. But objectively the NA is a low-level minor league compared to today. You can wish and want that today's NWSL is a high-level pro league. But it simply is not. Objectively it's on par with the BaySox or the Baltimore Blast. It's a minor league paying minor league salaries, playing in front of minor league crowds, and on shaky financial footing.
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You are something else. Professional baseball started in the 1870s. Teams like Tottenham and Arsenal started in the 1800s. The NWSL was founded in 2012. There were two other unsuccessful women's leagues in the 2000s. Women's soccer is exactly where baseball and European soccer was more than a century ago - trying to figure out if their product can be a successful commercial venture, and how to do that. Saying that's misogynistic is insulting, at best.
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I'm sure there were a lot of people who followed the O's from DC or NoVA who seamlessly transitioned to the Nats. But things like those Facebook maps fairly recently indicated that most of Maryland was still Orioles territory. No matter what the impact was to the Orioles, I don't think that it was right to expect people in DC or Alexandria to trek around the beltway and up 95 for the rest of their lives to see baseball when DC could support their own team. Any more than it was right to expect Colts fans to root for the Redskins and travel from Odenton or Cockeysville or Towson to RFK.
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I don't even know what your point is. Relative to world women's soccer the NWSL does have a higher quality of than MLS versus the world. But that's only because women's soccer in the world is at the same point men's pro sports were in 1910. I would continue typing but I'm not sure what you're saying... that you'd convert OPACY into an NWSL stadium and your life would be better? Or something.
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But pre-Nats was mostly still the OPACY honeymoon, Cal Ripken era. The O's were coming down off of unsustainable highs when OPACY opened. In 1997 the Orioles out-drew the Yanks by 1.2M. I'm sorry, but you could eliminate the Nats, Phillies, Pirates and Braves and have the O's win 97 games and they aren't outdrawing the Yanks by 1.2M any time soon.
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Do they? Prior to the current incarnation of the Nats there were long periods where there was just one team in the area, or one or both of the Senators and Orioles weren't good. From 1903-53 the Senators had the area to themselves and were mostly bad by themselves. The one year the expansion Senators were over .500 ('69) the Orioles and Senators were 5th and 6th in a 12-team AL in attendance. Since the Nats got good in 2012 they've drawn well over 2M fans a year. When the O's were good from '12-17 they also drew over 2M fans a year. I think the history of the Nats, Senators, and Orioles shows that bad teams tend to draw poorly, and when they win they do pretty well, whether or not they have another team 40 miles away.
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What you're saying has nothing to do with making a viable commercial product. The US has good women players in the NWSL. Few people pay to watch that. You can blame that on misogyny or just the fact that the women are playing at a lower objective level, or that the women's league has little history, but it's still true. MLS is, at least relative to the NWSL, a huge commercial success. Many people are interested in watching MLS, which is a growing league with American players. No one particularly cares that Colorado isn't on par with Arsenal, just as no one cares that Alabama or Clemson would be wiped off the field by the Redskins. People often feel some connection to their hometown team and players and won't quit on them just because they're not the best in the world this very moment. I see your take on building is the same in soccer as it is with the Orioles. If you're not the best right now you're a total failure. What a myopic point of view.
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What do you mean? Have you ever been to a women's pro game in the US? Are you familiar with the NWSL? Crowds are small, and each team might have one or two players from the USWNT. The league from the late 90s and early 2000s folded because they couldn't draw crowds or otherwise make money. The newer league is scaled back from the earlier modest ambitions. The current Washington Spirit plays at the Germantown soccer complex (a place where youth leagues and travel teams usually play) in a "stadium" that seats 4000. The NWSL is only slightly higher profile than something like the independent Atlantic League in baseball. Median per-game attendance in 2018 was about 4300. In contrast the men's MLS median per-game attendance is about 20,000, and both Seattle and Atlanta are among the top 20 or 30 best-attended teams in the world.
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Baseball isn't going anywhere. It'll be quite a while before record profits turn into MLB not being a viable business interest. Baltimore tried to steal DC United while they were negotiating how and where to build Audi Field. Obviously didn't work out. It's still very much an open question as to whether the NWSL will be around in five years. The women's' World Cup is fun and fairly high level of play, but an NWSL team is full of players you've never heard of and a pretty low level of play. The Freedom used to have doubleheaders with DC United, and the difference between the two was cringe-inducing.
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They could have played hardball and had MLB just tell them to pound sand and they'd still be trying to compete with Home Team Sports covering the smaller, less affluent part of the DC-Baltimore area. I have little sympathy for an owner who goes to the mat to protect his right control the baseball fortunes of another city 40 miles away. It's only a thing because baseball has a monopoly and doesn't shy away from using it.
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It's fairly amazing that you can be on hard drugs, at least on and off, for 30 years and still be alive and not in jail up to now.
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I wouldn't release Wells, he's getting results. But I wouldn't delude myself. If he's striking out 7 per nine in AA that might drop going to AAA and the majors, and there aren't many guys in modern baseball who can succeed at five or six.
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And Bleier is beyond horrible this year. Eschelman was acquired for a bit of international money, he's not a prospect. Ynoa has a 5.50 in the majors. In 2018 the median ERA of pitchers (min 50 innings) with between 7 and 8 K/9 was 4.15. The median ERA of pitchers with less than 6 K/9 was 4.50. Those with 8+ Ks, the median was 3.66. TJ McFarland and Matt Koch were the only pitchers last year with less than 5.5 K/9 and an ERA under 4.48.
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Tyler Wilson had 5.4 strikeouts per nine at Norfolk in 2017. No tweaking command and control was going to make that a major league pitcher. 5.4 was marginal 20 years ago. Today you'd better be a submariner if you expect to succeed like that.
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You should always take a mediocre project pitcher who throws hard over a mediocre project pitcher who is a finesse pitcher. All else being equal the guy who throws harder is a better pitcher. I saw Wilson pitch for Norfolk a few years ago and he had nothing. I think he gave up three or four runs in five innings, was almost never missing bats. He looked like a pitcher out of casting 101, but besides that you had to wonder how he was any kind of prospect at all.
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I thought that Wilson's problem was that he pitched to a 5.00 ERA in Baltimore, and an almost 5.00 ERA in Norfolk with the old dead AAA balls. He would have gotten more of a chance if he'd shown the ability to pitch better.
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What hitter wouldn't benefit from AAA pitching in a league that OPS's .850? That's some good scenery.
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I think they might be using the old AAA balls in Korea this year, as scoring is off almost a run a game. This year's KBO is averaging 4.7 runs/game, compared to 4.8 in the majors. Last year the KBO was over 5.5 runs/game. And the Korean league is roughly the talent level of AA ball - wider spread, but the average talent is probably on that level. I don't think Tyler Wilson's 2.62 ERA and 6.2 K/9 in more-or-less a AA league is terribly impressive. And Hyun Soo Kim is having a poor year, only OPSing .800. Last year he hit .362/.415/.589. Five homers so far this year, compared to 20 last year.
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Sure. It's the affiliated minor leagues. Any particular roster stays together for minutes at a time.
