DrungoHazewood
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Would you have matched SEA offer to keep Cruz an Oriole?
DrungoHazewood replied to isestrex's topic in Orioles Talk
I think 20% is a good estimate of the percentage of people who don't care what a player costs, Peter Angelos is a billionaire and should just pay whatever to keep/acquire good players. -
Would you have matched SEA offer to keep Cruz an Oriole?
DrungoHazewood replied to isestrex's topic in Orioles Talk
Cruz is being paid for almost 10 wins at $6M per win. Or more than he's been worth over the previous four seasons. Seattle is either betting that he ages in reverse, or that baseball inflation is going to be fairly extreme. My figurin' says Cruz is worth about 4/30 based on a weighted average of his last four years and a half a win decline per year. The Mariners essentially doubled that. As I said earlier in the offseason the Orioles should have thanked him for 2014 and the draft pick, given him a nice basket of Orioles-logoed baseballs and some Old Bay, and wished him good luck in whatever place thinks they've found the fountain of youth. -
Perhaps it was "give a spectator an at bat" night?
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<IFRAME style="DISPLAY: none" id=rufous-sandbox frameBorder=0 allowTransparency scrolling=no allowtransparency="true"></IFRAME>I think I'd assumed that Rich Hill was about 42 and had retired five years ago. Wasn't he an 88-mph junkballer with a shoulder made out of bailing twine and duct tape when he was with the O's in 2009? True fact: since his one big year in 2007 he has pitched 147 MLB innings and walked 105. 5.55 ERA.
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Good for him. The O's certainly gave him more chances than Earl's first wife. It wasn't happening with this team/league/division.
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Good for Lew. In the same league, for the SoMd Blue Crabs, Brian Burres is 3-2, 1.64 in 49 innings. Rommie Lewis has 15 saves and also a 1.64 for the York Revolution.<iframe id="rufous-sandbox" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" style="display: none;"></iframe>
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In 2006 the O's were 70-92 and had a team ERA of 5.35. This was a team that gave 18 starts to pitchers with ERAs of 6.90 or higher. Loewen had a 2.77 ERA in AA, then blew away AAA hitters in three starts. What organization would have kept him in the minors all year given all that? Screech's callup was completely inexplicable, and I don't even remember the circumstances around Mato.
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I think it's more likely he likes to play baseball, and isn't even aware of his career earnings.
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Just in the last couple days BP has had fairly in-depth reports on each of these guys and they say Hader could be a back-end starter if things go right, while Harvey is one of the best pitching prospects in the game.
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It's dicey. I do understand some of these leagues, at least at the beginning, are trying to keep one rich guy from dominating and keeping the others from establishing a base, torpedoing the viability of the whole thing.
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Yes. The players play hard because it's their life. But the fact that nobody cares about winning kind of invalidates the whole concept of a league.
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I absolutely agree with that. I hate that the minors sold out and the majors enabled this travesty. Most North American pro baseball leagues simply don't care about wins and losses. If you don't live near one of the 30 real teams your local team is kind of a sham.
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A big pet peeve of mine is calling the 3rd-best baseball league in the world sub-par. That's saying 99.999 percent of ballplayers in the world should just give up. Talent in baseball is a pyramid. MLB is the single capstone on top. It couldn't exist without the thousands of bricks below.
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Oh yea? What did you see in him? At the time the O's let him go he was 30 years old and had a professional (minors and majors) ERA of about 5.00 with peripherals that didn't stand out at all. He was a big guy who threw hard but got no results.
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That's a good question, and it would depend on which independent league you're talking about. The Atlantic League is probably somewhere between AA and high A in average player quality, but with some AAA players and some rookie ball talent on the same teams. The Pecos League is probably more like rookie ball, with some guys who would otherwise never be paid to play ball. I'd imagine Korea is something like the Atlantic League with some players of at least marginal MLB talent. And probably a legitimate MLB regular or three.
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Hopefully McLouth is a realistic evaluator of his abilities, and knows that he can't hit lefties at all, has been wildly up and down lately, and is 32 years old. He has to be doing a little dance every night thinking about his $11M guaranteed plus an option contract. I'm sure all below-average players think that, given enough regular playing time, they'd be above average. It's not true. If you're a .730 OPS left fielder who needs 600 PAs to really show what you can do... well, it kind of sucks to be you. Unless you can wrangle a contract with the Astros. Or maybe the Fukuoka Softbank Hawks. Yea, he's doing about as well as he could have hoped. After April of 2012, if he hadn't played as well as he did with the Orioles he was staring the Atlantic League in the face.
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I don't particularly like it, either, but Bud Norris was a 2 rWAR/2.7 fWAR player last year and that's roughly the equivalent of the average career value of a 1st round sandwich pick.
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He's basically an average MLB starter with a good strikeout rate despite pitching for some absymal Astros teams. Was it the world's greatest trade, of course not. But it wasn't a bad deal, not the near-tragedy webbrick is painting it as. Don't pretend Hader or Hoes were anything but middling prospects in a middling minor league system. I'd much rather have the DD approach where he occasionally takes some risks rather than the prior regime's method of holding onto every 14th-rated org prospect like he's gold because you know you only have about one or two ways of ever acquiring more talent.
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Yes, good teams always keep every halfway decent prospect in low A ball instead of trying to upgrade the MLB team and stay in the pennant race. I love orgs that reflexively place more value on Sally League fans than MLB fans.
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I'm still smarting over missing out on Flagstead. Stupid $## cheapskate Jack Dunn.<iframe id="rufous-sandbox" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" style="display: none;"></iframe>
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<p><p><p>Here's a question you might know the answer to: How did they orient the ballfield when the IL O's played at Municipal Stadium after the fire? Did they have a ridiculously short porch on one side, like the Dodgers at the LA Coliseum?</p></p></p>
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<p><p><p>Thanks for the reply. I have a copy of Baseball in Baltimore, and read a library copy of The Home Team many years ago, so I'm familiar with the picture from the outfield. The insurance map is very cool, as it highlights how the field had to fit into the lot/stands - I'd never noticed before how home plate sits off to the left side of the main grandstand. With that map and the photo I think we could guesstimate fence distances, which I don't know of any source that's tried before.</p></p></p>
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<p><p><p>I know you're a O's history guy, obviously from your user name and avatar. Here's a little obscure question: I've only seen two photographs of Union Park, the one in your avatar and the (relatively) famous one from the 1897 end-of-season game against Boston. Have you ever seen any other photographs of Union Park, or maybe even some of the earlier NA/AA parks in Baltimore? It's amazing that so little has survived from that era, although I guess the '44 fire at Oriole/Terrapin Park probably destroyed a lot.</p></p></p>
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One of my pet harebrained schemes has long been for Angelos to donate maybe $10M of his fortune to John's Hopkins to establish a Baseball Medicine and Biomechanics deptartment, just so long as they could establish some kind of NDA to give them a competitive advantage. Hey, they started converting random failed minor leaguers into knuckleballers this year. So all of my dreams could come true!
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Yes, notably Italy. Also Germany. I think those three countries have pro or semi-pro leagues that could plausibly be described as being on the level of a US indy league. I'm sure there are other countries in Europe with lower level leagues that probably resemble a US adult league of the type Tony has played in more than anything else. The Italian League has maybe a half dozen players who've played in the majors, including Darwin Cubillan. He pitched 10 innings for the Orioles in 2004, and now at the age of 40 he's got a 30:1 K:BB ratio for San Marino in 16 innings. I believe at some time in the past the Orioles were somehow affiliated with the team in Grosseto. I knew a guy from Germany who was working for the Navy on a project here at Pax about ten years ago. He'd previously been an exchange student in the US and got introduced to baseball. He went back to Germany, started a team called the Baldham Boars, and helped grow it to the point that it was eventually promoted to the upper levels of the Baseball Bundesliga.
