DrungoHazewood

John was just legitimately concerned that when all the other mega-casino/sportsbook owners had their own baseball stadium as part of their 500-acre gambling complex he'd be left out.

Who's with me in boycotting the playoffs because of the Orioles' cowardly tanking?! I know my fandom was ruined forever because they won 52 games instead of 68 because they didn't sign Jay Payton, Danys Baez and Kevin Millar, and instead wasted the some of that cash on so-called player development and nerd-ball "analytics". #jokeofateam #neveragain #movetonashvilleandgetusrealbaseball

Of course Mack owned the Philadelphia A's throughout most of his tenure as manager. In 1915-16 he tore apart his first dynasty because of competition from the Federal League (cue: @Moose Milligan, Federal League reference of the day), and they went 43-109 and 36-117 (this being the equivalent of 38 wins in a 162-game schedule). Which would have gotten pretty much every other manager in history fired. From 1915-21 Mack's A's had loss totals of 117, 109, 98, 76, 104, 106, and 100 in 154-game schedules, except the 76-loss season was just 128 games because of WWI. So, Hyde is the only guy to do this without having "can't be fired" checked off in the setup page of the sim.

Heck of an accomplishment. They've put themselves right up there with '89 and '12 in my book. Wasn't sure I'd ever say that about any O's team.

Brooks did certainly have some years at both the start and end of his career where he wasn't a good hitter, even after adjusting for context. In '58 and '75 he was more-or-less a full time player with OPS+es of 69 and 58. Jorge Mateo this year has a 69. But you can get away with that when you have as good a glove as Brooks. Also, Brooks played in the reserve clause era, so there was no consideration whatsoever for service time. Years of team control were as long as they wanted to keep you. So they'd sometimes call up teenagers or guys otherwise clearly not ready for the majors. if Brooks had been born in 1990 he would definitely not have had 200 PAs spread across his age 18-20 seasons, he'd have been in A or AA ball. I think that many excellent fielders are/were essentially ambidextrous. In the game's early years, prior to gloves, a good number of infielders would field and throw the ball with whatever hand was most convenient to get the out. Jerry Denny was the last non-pitcher to not use a glove and there are stories of him throwing with either hand.

Just know that "solid return" for Mateo isn't a lot, you're not getting a starter either in the field or on the mound, you're not getting an organizational top 10 prospect unless you get a great deal. I always try to look at this from the other team's perspective. If the Orioles were trading for a fast, plus-glove shortstop who hits like Kiko Garcia and is 29, what would you give up? Not a whole lot.

I was at two of the 1997 playoff games: the ALDS clincher in Baltimore where Mussina out-dueled Randy Johnson and Davey famously played Jeff Reboulet instead of Robby Alomar and Jerome Walton over Raffy due to Johnson being essentially impossible for lefties to hit. That was great, we got scalped tickets way up in the top row of the upper deck behind the LF foul pole. Then a week later we went to the Virginia Tech-Boston College game (a 17-7 win in Blacksburg), got up Sunday morning and drove six hours to Cleveland. Also got scalped tickets. It appeared we were four of maybe a dozen people wearing O's stuff in the whole stadium. Because of that we got interviewed by Kit Hoover (now of Access Hollywood semi-fame), and of course fled the stadium in the aftermath of Sandy Alomar's winning hit off Benitez, driving home through the night. At least we had Monday off for Columbus Day.

Free agency wasn't a thing until the very end of Brooks' career. The reserve clause was in effect, so players didn't have any choice as to where they played and very little leverage with regards to pay (besides holding out, which was always portrayed in the media as being selfish and greedy). But he wasn't exactly eating cold beans every night. In 1971 he made $100k in a country where the median household income was about $10k. That's the rough equivalent of $750k today. As a younger player he didn't make that much, but even at 24 he was making the 2023 equivalent of $200k a year. Willie Mays topped out at an un-inflation-adjusted salary of $160k, the year Steve Carlton went 27-10 for a last place team the Phils rewarded him with a $165k salary. Nobody made $200k a year until free agency. I think it was Nolan Ryan in '79 who got the first $1M contract. And Brooks transitioned directly from playing to the broadcast booth, so while he wasn't fantastically wealthy like many of today's players, he did okay.

I'm of a mind that being left-handed doesn't necessarily translate to batting the way we call left-handed. I think you're just about as well off either way and it's more tradition than anything which side we call which. But in any case, to be a MLB hitter you have to be in the ~99.999th percentile in hit ability, and not so simple to just start doing it from the other side. And as we see from Mullins' experience, not easy to make it worth the 50 or 70 points of OPS you lose by just batting the natural way against same-sided pitchers.

I was just a kid, eight years old in '79 and in college when he stopped. And he was just on the 30-40ish broadcast games a year on channel 2 or 13 I think, not cable (I didn't have cable until '89). But my hazy recollections are that he was much like Ben McDonald today. Folksy. He said "Boy howdy!" a lot. Would sometimes try to predict home runs. Chuck was more of the polished professional radio guy, Brooks the of good ol' boy color guy. But with Brooks and Chuck on TV, Jon Miller, Joe Angel and others on the radio we had some good ones.

I've taken a million pictures of my kids, but this is among my favorites. ALCS Game 1 in 2012. Sam is now 15.

I'm just a little too young to have seen him play for the Orioles, but I did get to watch him making a diving grab in one of the Cracker Jack old timers games at RFK. Growing up he and Chuck Thompson were the TV commentators for the O's, so I certainly felt like I got to know him through that. Boy Howdy. This is a tough one.

Obviously it's not 1966 any more, but there is a consideration here: Teams use fewer pitchers in the postseason. Last year's Astros had two guys on the World Series roster who didn't pitch at all (Hunter Brown, Will Smith). The Phils had three guys who only pitched a total of four innings of mopup in games where they were down 5+ runs. In the ALCS the Astros only used 10 pitchers, Stanek and Brown only in low-leverage for less than two innings total. The Yanks 12, when they'd normally carry 13, and they lost every game so no starter went more than five innings. The Orioles could probably have Bautista on the roster and even if he's not used it's not a huge deal.

Hey, Jody Davis caught 150 and 146 games in consecutive seasons for the Cubs in the 80s and he was a somewhat effective player well into his mid-to-late 20s.

It was huge. I wasn't old enough to read it until about the 1980 version, but I'd check it out from the library every few weeks and probably read it cover to cover multiple times. It was there that I found things like Willie Keeler's .432 average in 1897, for the National League Baltimore Orioles, of all things. I think many people don't realize that before the McMillan Encyclopedia there was no single comprehensive source for this information. In many cases no source at all. You mention the Whos Whos in Baseball publications, but they only had active players. And I'm not sure how accurate they were, or how comprehensive. If you wanted to see who won the American League in 1907... I don't know. Or who won the 1922 batting title if you didn't have a stack of old Sporting News or Spalding Guides. There were some earlier books, like one called Daguerreotypes, but they were not well known or widely available or probably very accurate. I think it's true that when Ty Cobb retired he probably didn't know how many hits he actually had. When Babe Ruth started hitting homers some writer had to go dig around old guides and total stuff up to see if he was getting near some career record. The main reason a lot of HOF selections from before the 1970s were a little wacky was that the voters mostly were relying on 20 or 50 year old memories because they didn't have a reference. "Oh yea, I remember Bobby Wallace, the greatest shortstop... or was it third baseman... in the 1890s or something." That and the fantastically screwed up voting systems. The Encyclopedia was the beginning of the end of people who'd tell these long-winded stories of great feats of baseball from decades ago that were mostly not true. End of the Cliff Clavin era.

100% guarantee that the data would be indistinguishable from random noise with a touch of true talent thrown in. Things don't magically even out any more than a quarter that's come up heads four times in a row is more likely to be tails the next four.

If Gibson were to allow 18 earned runs and zero unearned runs over the rest of the season he would eclipse the all time record for runs allowed with zero unearned runs, which is currently 118, held by Joel Pineiro in 2005.

There have been 49 catchers who've caught 50+ games this year. While catching Rutschman is: 12th in OPS 2nd in PA 6th in Runs 5th in Hits 6th(t) in Doubles 21st in Homers 13th in RBI 1st in Walks 17th in Strikeouts 8th in Average 3rd in OBP (virtual tie for 2nd with William Contreras) 24th in Slugging 11th in Total Bases But there are also 56 players who've DH'd in at least 25 games and while DHing Rutschman is: 11th in OPS 12th in OBP 11th in SLG So not only is he a top 10 catcher, he's also better than 80% of the players teams have DH'd on a semi-regular basis.

As we've shown previously there's a positive correlation between strikeouts and quality of the pitcher. And, actually, that's been the case since essentially the dawn of time. There's no such thing as a pitcher who can reliably get most of his outs on popups, much less one-pitch at bats with popouts. The line of pitchers who can strike people out stretches halfway to Terre Haute. Also, strikeouts are almost as pitch-efficient as not striking batters out. Look at some examples. Spencer Strider leads the majors with 13.8 K/9 as a starter. He's averaging 97 pitches and 5.9 innings per start, so 16.4 pitches per inning. Kevin Gausman is leading the AL in K/9 and averages 16.8 pitches per inning. On the other side is Adam Wainwright, who strikes out just 4.9 per nine, and throws 17.7 pitches per inning. Wade Miley is probably the lowest-K starter who's actually good and he averages 15.6 pitches per inning. Kyle Hendricks is another out of the Miley mold, and he averages 15.2 pitches/inning. So if you can find a unicorn, a good pitcher who doesn't strike out many batters, he might save you as much as 1-2 pitches an inning. Strikeouts are sexy because good pitchers strike batters out at high rates. So, that's just another way of saying winning is sexy.

I think they usually did, yes. While I do fondly remember reading the paper and the Sporting News and the Baseball Weekly, if you told the 12-year-old version of myself that in 2023 I'd have access to every single MLB box score from 1901 to today, along with a much more comprehensive version of the Baseball Encyclopedia, on my computer, to be pulled up in an instant whenever I wanted I'd have thought that was some kind of miracle from the Gods.

Right. If Means were to have a 3.1 K/9 going forward that would be unfortunate because that would also mean his ERA would be well north of 5.00. In the last 10 years there have been two pitchers with 100+ innings and a K/9 under 4.0. Both in 2013, Jake Westbrook and Scott Diamond. Westbrook had an ERA of 4.63 in his last Major League season. Diamond a 5.43 and would pitch just one MLB inning after that season. Means going forward is going to have to approximate his career strikeout rate or he's going to have a hard time. The further from league average the harder.

This year there are 181 pitchers with 50+ IP and at least 8.8 K/9. The league average is 8.7. Their median ERA+ is 118, well above average. There have been 153 with 50+ innings and 8.6 K/9 or fewer. Their median is 98, or slightly below average. The reason the total of these groups has a median of something like 108 is that the bad pitchers don't meet the 50 innings threshold.

And also when a lot of teams had a throwaway spot in the lineup or three. Pitchers "batted" in the AL up through 1972, and in 1973 there were 28 regulars or semi-regulars with an OPS+ of 70 or lower. For reference, in 1973 a 70 OPS+ was about .610. There were almost 50 regulars in '73 with an OPS+ under .650. And 26 who hit one or zero homers in 300+ PAs. Why try to strike everyone out when 2, 3, 4 spots in the lineup were almost never going to hit a ball 325'?

I think it's unlikely they do that. I believe that teams will devise strategies to counter late-season fatigue. They are probably still determining the impacts and implementation strategies of a world with the three-batter rule and managing to more-or-less twice through the order for starters. There's a competitive advantage to employing strategies for 162 games in six months where you might not play 100% to win today, but your team is still whole and functioning on October 1st. Someone will figure this out. Baseball is mostly an outside game, and it's already uncomfortable to play in a lot of places in April and October/November. In the US soccer plays in February/March and there are a lot of parka games for the spectators. That's not baseball weather.

Greg Maddux career batting average on balls in play: .286. Chris Tillman: .287 Randy Johnson: .295 Wei Yin Chen: .296 Max Scherzer: .289 Dylan Bundy: .291 Justin Verlander: .280 Storm Davis: .280 Jeremy Guthrie: .272 Roy Halladay: .294 CC Sabathia: .296 Mike Boddicker: .277 Andy Pettitte: .312 Erik Bedard: .310 Yes, Palmer and McNally and Cuellar were in the .250s and .260s, but I have a sneaking suspicion that had a lot to do with Messers Robinson, Grich, Belanger, Johnson, Blair, et al. Also, almost nobody suggests that batting average on balls in play is completely random, it's just mostly random. Otherwise it's kind of hard to explain why Maddux had BABIPs of .331, .311, .311, .248, .256, etc in different seasons.