DrungoHazewood

I'm sure you know better than I do. I had to go Google what was going on. I'm only vaguely aware of the existence of the NBA.

I guess so. But Harden just wants a trade, right? Rusie held out because his owner was a mentally unstable narcissist who got mad Rusie lost a game (how dare him), accused him of throwing the game with no evidence whatsoever, and on that basis fined him like half his season's salary. So it would be kind of like if Harden was holding out because his owner fined him $16M for basically no reason, and the other owners were like, sucks to be you but it's not our thing to worry about.

Looking at the list it appears that the 1800s forfeits included many, many disputes with umpires, crowds running onto the field, running out of balls, teams not showing up or not showing up on time, fights... More than anything it looks like massive arguments with the (one) umpire. There was a doubleheader at Washington in 1886 where Kansas City got the schedule mixed up and just didn't show up for the morning game. In 1884 Cap Anson disagreed with a call on a baserunning play and just refused to keep going, so the ump had to forfeit. There was a Providence-Philly game in 1883 where Providence just left in the 7th inning to go catch a train.

One more... if you look at the link in the last post, from the start of professional baseball in the 1870s until the old AL Orioles disbanded in 1902 the Orioles were involved in 14 forfeits. Not all of them were their fault. Here's the last (not sure all the details are right, but it's close): 07/17/1902 - St. Louis at Baltimore - AL - Andrew Freedman, the owner of the National League New York Giants, with the help of the Baltimore manager, John McGraw, obtained controlling interest in the American League Baltimore club. They reassigned most of the Baltimore players to the Giants and others to the NL Cincinnati team. Only three players refused to go. Baltimore therefore could not field a team for the scheduled game with St. Louis and had to forfeit it. Ban Johnson, the AL President, then removed the Baltimore franchise from the league. He established a new team in the city to finish the season. Several AL teams supplied some of their surplus players to fill the roster. - Washington Post, 07/17/1902, p 9 (baseball ) - Chicago Daily Tribune, 07/18/1902, p 6 Also, Freedman was a real psycho with Tammany Hall NY political connections he wasn't at all shy about using. He's the guy who owned the Giants, got mad at HOF pitcher Amos Rusie one year and refused to pay him his salary which led to Rusie holding out for an entire year. Imagine if John Means got so mad at John Angelos he just refused to play for a whole season.

You know the Orioles had the last intentional forfeit in MLB history on 9/15/77. Earl pulled the team off the field in Toronto (with the O's down 4-0 in the 5th) after some kind of dispute over a tarp in the bullpen, claiming it was a injury risk to the left fielder, Andres Mora. The ump told Earl he was being stupid, and Earl refused to put the team back on the field and they forfeited the game to the Jays. I've read somewhere that the league basically told Earl that if he pulled a stunt like that again he'd be done as a manager. Not sure how much truth there is to that... If you're interested, here's a list of all the forfeits in MLB history. There have been two since 1977. Disco Demolition Night in Chicago, and free baseball night in 1995 at Dodger Stadium that ended up with souvenir balls all over the field.

They could just Mike Oquist somebody. I don't know why I remember this game, but it's pretty obvious that Art Howe went to former Oriole Oquist before the game and told him the pen was pretty burnt out and he was going to get them five innings no matter what happened. The 14 runs he allowed are tied with two others for the most runs any pitcher has allowed in a game in my lifetime (since 1971). No one has allowed more than 14 runs in a game since 1944. Prior to that it happened 78 times in the retrosheet era (1901ish), and a lot of times before that. Most runs by one pitcher since 1901 are the 24 allowed by Allan Travers of the Tigers in the infamous Cobb strike game.

I wanted to see whatever happened to Leo Gomez. And I discovered (or maybe re-discovered) a few things. - He was very up-and-down from year to year. In 1992 he had what looked like a little bit of a breakout with a 118 OPS+. And that actually continued into 1993, on May 31st he was OPS'ing .802. But from June 1 through the rest of the year he was pretty clearly hurt and went 10-for-95 (.105), and missed a lot of time. I don't recall what happened, but he probably would have been better off being DL'd a month earlier. - After his time in Baltimore he had a decent year with the Cubs, but then went on to play six years with the Chunichi Dragons in Japan. He had more PAs and games in the NPB than the majors. With Chunichi he had four years of 20+ homers including a '97 where he hit .315/408/.559 with 31 homers, and a '99 season of .298/36/109. I'm betting a lot of Dragons fans remember him fondly. That '99 team won the Central League pennant, and he was teammates with future MLBer Kosuke Fukudome. Fukudome deserves his own thread, he debuted in '99 and played nine years with Chunichi before coming to the Majors, then in '13 went back to Japan where he played for Hanshin through '20 and back to Chunichi through '22. All in all a 23-year-career with over 10000 plate appearances.

Buford had an interesting career path. He got stuck behind Nellie Fox on the White Sox. Went to college so he didn't play in the minors until he was 23, and despite a minor league OBP of .398 and getting a little AAA ball his first year in the minors, he didn't get more than a cup of coffee in the majors until 27. Fox won the '59 MVP, one of the weaker MVPs (.306 with two homers, but 71 walks and 13 Ks, good D), and the Sox basically let him have the job until he was very clearly done. In '63, with Buford hitting .336 with a .406 OBP and 42 steals in AAA, Fox played 137 games with a .605 OPS mostly batting 2nd. Somehow they won 94 games with a zero batting second every day. After Buford had a bad year for the O's in '72 he went to Japan where he played four years, three of them pretty good. He was teammates over there with Matty Alou, and at least for one game Frank Howard (According to wikipedia Howard hurt his back in his first Japanese PA and never played again. I guess he could have hurt his back in that first PA, but he did get three.).

The most underrated class of player just might be someone like Al Pardo or Chance Sisco or Mike Wright, who fans mostly think of as scrubs and bums who didn't even have a real career, but who get to say they were one of the best or the best player who ever came from their high school or college or hometown. (Of course now that I have to go check this, Al Pardo went to the same high school as Fred McGriff and Tino Martinez, so he didn't even get that. But he's still better than 99.99% of everyone who ever picked up a glove.)

Milligan's minor league OBPs were .429, .357, .430, .437, .394, .402, .438, and .373. .408 total. He was by far the best hitter on the 81-59 1987 Tidewater Tides, and the Mets rewarded that with two MLB plate appearances and a trade to the Pirates as partial payment for Mackey Sasser. With the Pirates he had a .379 OBP but just three homers in 103 PAs so they exiled him to Norfolk in June, then traded him to the Orioles for the immortal Pete Blohm. I do wonder how well his skills would translate to today, with below-average power for a first baseman but a walk every six PAs. In any case I'd much rather have him than a Mark Trumbo who's all power and nothing else.

Melvin Mora had a very 1990s-2000s career. Aren't too many players who were minor league utility guys at 27 and legitimate MVP candidates at 32.

I think Brady is sometimes underrated because people look at his career as essentially nothing outside of his 50 homer season, which they chalk up to steroids. I'm not completely convinced that Brady was on anything, or certainly anything more than most of the MLB population of the time. And from 1992-2000 he was about as good a top-of-the-order hitter as you could want. He was no Rickey Henderson, but over that period he had a .378 OBP, stole 246 bases as a decent rate, and scored 100 runs four times. You ask some oldtimers and they'll tell you Luis Aparicio was a great leadoff hitter. Brady lapped him in everything that matters in a leadoff hitter.

He's 9th among modern MLB Orioles, sandwiched between Brady and Frank. If you add in the AA/NL Orioles he moves down two spots behind Jennings and McGraw, and is just ahead of Joe Kelley.

Could be Bobby Grich, because he's mainly remembered today as some guy from 40-50 years ago the stat guys want to go to the Hall of Fame. But he was tremendously valuable, just in ways that didn't typically get recognition in the times when he played. He got on base constantly, but wasn't really a base stealer or a leadoff hitter. And this was that bizarro era where leadoff hitters were guys like Omar Moreno with .305 OBPes, 88 steals, and 78 runs scored. He had good power for the time, but not 30 homer power. His biggest HR year came in a strike year so it gets an asterisk. Memorial Stadium was a pitcher's park. Was an excellent defensive player, at least as an Oriole. Got traded to California, so he disappeared from the radar of East Coasters for much of his career. Had his career delayed by at least a year because the Orioles were stacked. In 1970 he had a 1.074 OPS at Rochester and then spent almost all of '71 back at Rochester. Anyway, he's a good candidate. Another is Jack Bentley. In 1921 he hit .412 with 47 doubles, 16 triples, 24 homers, and went 12-1, 2.34 on the mound. And another is Bob Emslie. Went 32-17 for the 1884 Orioles and not a single one of you has ever heard of him.

Using OBP over 30 days is a little like flipping a coin 10 times, having it come up heads seven, and deciding that the odds of heads going forward is 70%. For all of these players we have much better data to work with.

Hot and cold aren't things. Or at least not actionable things, since they're retrospective and all players tend toward their true talent. Unless he's hurt, every .750 OPS player who's been OPSing .850 over his last nine games is most likely to have a .750 over his next nine.

Good luck with your campaign, but I'm voting for someone else.

I guess, but it just wildly decreases the signal-to-noise ratio here whenever there's a bad outcome.

What I may never get is the way a lot of folks use online forums and social media the way I use yelling at the TV. I'll sometimes say nonsense in the moment when nobody but my family can hear, and even with that they probably think I'm out of my mind. But at least it's just three people and two dogs with that opinion. But a lot of folks will take their time, even hours later, and type out completely nonsensical emotional responses to things that happen in a game so that thousands or even millions will read it and it's archived for all time. Yes, as the Oriole batter is whiffing on a 100 mph fastball I may say some choice words, but I'm not going to wait six hours and then post that he's a talent-less idiot who folds up in the clutch. By then I like to think I've reigned in my autonomous lizard brain and its stupid reactions.

What's wrong with leading off the guy who has, by far, the highest OBP on the team?

The manager's job is to be a steady hand that doesn't do illogical, knee-jerk things that will negatively impact their odds of winning because a tough loss got everyone emotional and upset. Sitting one of your best players because he's in a 6-game microslump would be a big check in the "doesn't know what he's doing" column, in my book.

Certainly the bandwagon football fans aren't ready for a pennant race.

I assume, like jabba72, that the analytics department helps with these decisions. But in the end, the difference between the most and least logical lineups can be measured in a few handfuls of runs over a season. So as long as they come up with something halfway reasonable it's essentially indistinguishable from any other choice. Especially in a world with no DH, where you don't have to worry about an .089 hitter in the lineup.

It's not. He's eight runs below average with the bat, a +1 baserunner, a +1 on avoiding double plays, a -2 fielder by DRS, +4 positional adjustment. Overall about half a win below average, and 0.8 WAR overall. This is bb-ref, but should be similar. When people start quoting wins above replacement on offense or defensive or whatever that's not really a thing. There are only players whose overall contributions are X above or below replacement.

Until he goes down 0-2 in the count in his first at bat, the shine comes off, clearly can't handle MLB pitching, and he needs to be traded for anybody that'll take him.