DrungoHazewood

Tony started the Hangout in the late 90s. I'm pretty sure I've been here since '01 or '02 or something. I think Frobby already had thousands of posts at that point. Edit: I know that by '03 I was writing articles for the site. My first one was probably a poorly written one on Deivi Cruz, and I remember driving to Wilmington to see the Keys play and Ryan Hannaman make his organizational debut and write about it. Hannaman was one of the big pieces they got in exchange for Sir Sid. Both those happened in 2003. Hannaman's career barely lasted into '04.

In any case, Mark Reynolds has proven that you can have a 10+ year MLB career whilst being legally blind.

No. Inability to play baseball at a major league level is not a medical condition. Certainly not one that would qualify the team for relief from contract.

That might be a hard query to run. It couldn't have happened very often if it has at all. So... I looked up the teams with the most players with at least one save in a season. The record is a three-way tie at 12, by the '73 Rangers and the '59 and '61 Kansas City A's. It appears none of them ever had four games, four wins, four different pitchers getting saves. Mostly because these were all terrible teams and didn't often win four in a row. The '17 Nats had 11 players with at least one save and won 97 games, but it doesn't appear that they had four saves by four pitchers consecutively.

The Orioles' bullpen is not good. Does anyone actually believe the pen will be better than the Red Sox? I think this shows the limitations of using cumulative WAR for bullpen predictions. They'd probably be better off ranking everyone by some combination of K rate and K:BB ratio.

58 wins. Because plexiglass principle.

Rule 4.17: A game shall be forfeited to the opposing team when a team is unable or refuses to place nine players on the field.

1) Are you a fan of anyone? 2) If you do a search on your posts that include the word Davis you get 471 results.

Because our opinions sometimes evolve over time as new information becomes available, and aren't fixed as absolutely correct predictions from the very moment they pop into our unsurpassed minds?

They'll be 31st. Behind the 29 other MLB teams and Norfolk.

Nunez isn't a terrible prospect, he might actually have a career. In '17 he homered at the same rate as his Nashville teammate and fellow 23-year-old Matt Olson. Olson now has 53 Major League homers in 232 games. On the other hand, the Royals are starting Hunter Dozier, who was worth -1.3 wins in his age 26 season.

I don't think I'd lock Hays up now on the basis of what he's done the last few years. But the concept of taking a player very early on and signing him through arb years is valid. Especially with the unknowns in the future CBA and discussions about the inequity between younger and older players. Now is the time to do it if you're at all confident in the player's projections. Although the agents are probably looking at the same stuff and thinking it better be a great deal to sign now.

I'm well aware of that. Fangraphs is projecting the median third baseman to be worth almost three wins above replacement. By definition the league median in WAR should be about 2.0. So by their projections 3B are going to be much more valuable than an average position. As are catchers and second basemen.

The average player gets $8M per win in free agency. Trout's deal is very team friendly on that basis. Lots more players would be worth much more than $13-15M, if not for the fact that they're pre-free agency and get $550k or whatever they can in arb. Unless you get lucky $15M will buy you an average player in full time play on the free agent market.

I think most of these systems, with the exception of Baseball Prospectus that uses comparables, just does a weighted average of the last X seasons with some aging sprinkled on top. The variables are how many seasons to go back, and if the weighting is 4-3-2-1 or something else. Villar had a very poor 2017 and a very good 2016, so how they do weighting would have a pretty big impact.

The Orioles are ranked 29th and project to 1.8 wins. Two is about an average major leaguer in full time play. For this series of articles to make sense there are going to have to be several positions where the average player (at that position) is well below average overall. That's not catchers, which came out today. The Orioles are again #30, but at 1.2 wins. The median team catching value is 2.4 wins. At second the median player is 2.5 wins. At third it's almost 3.0. At first it's 1.7. There are going to have to be several more like first, or worse. Unless this is Lake Wobegon, where all the kids are above average.

Crap, there went that theory. But I guess when your #30 is 1.5 wins back of #29 it's hard to fudge it that much. With second basemen that gap would have taken them from about #30 to #12.

I think they did it on purpose. Depending on assumptions you could get Pedrioa, who is like 35 and missed last year, as being worse. Or just about anyone in the bottom 10 or 15. But it sounds cooler and gets more O's fans to read the site if they're dead last in everything.

Something doesn't make sense with this. In the Fangraphs writeup they say Villar is an average Major League player. Are they really telling us that 29 major league teams are above-average (compared to all other players at all positions) at second base? That seems unlikely, but that's kind of what their projections say. Their Villar numbers have him regressing on the basis of his poor 2017. In 2018 there were 41 players who played at least 50 games at second base. 19 of them were above average, Brock Holt was average. The other 21 were below average. Villar was 17th of the 41. What this also points out is that there's little or no substantive difference between the bottom 15 or 18 teams on the list at 2B. They're all something like average.

The Phils kept Ryan Howard for five years when he was more than a win below replacement in four of the five, including three in a row. He was a .219 hitting, sub-.300 OBP first baseman with negative baserunning and -10 defense. And they let him do that for 1500 PAs after his last positive WAR season. Not quite Davis, but Davis hasn't done this four years in five.

Recoup? That implies they're keeping him around to get back value. Last year they would have been almost three wins to the better if they'd sent him off to Aruba to hang out with Sidney Ponson all year. If he hits .200 with 17 homers and 200 Ks he'll likely be worth almost nothing while they're paying him $23M. The money is gone, they're not getting any of it back, and unless he has a dramatic turn around they're not getting any production out of it. If he really is cooked, the Orioles gain nothing and lose a win or two from his replacement from having him hang around wishing he could still play Major League baseball.

In the mid-90s Virginia Tech was just coming off a run of 5-6 straight losing or .500 seasons, and had trouble selling out Lane Stadium. They offered alumni season tickets for something like $300 a year plus a token donation of $50 or $100 to the Hokie Club. The representative told my friends and I that whatever seats we picked would be ours forever. Fast forward to 2005. The past decade brought major bowls, Michael Vick, huge TV exposure, a National Championship appearance. They announced a new policy where they were reallocating all the season tickets. By Hokie Club donation amount. Our previous seats were in the first row on the 20 yard line. The seats we were offered under the new scheme (but our prior donation level) were still on the 20, but in row XXXX. Literally four Xs... the 102nd row. We asked what it would take to keep the old seats and they said "hard to tell exactly, but something like $5000 a ticket. Each season." We sat in row XXXX for a few years, then gave up the tickets altogether.

It looks like the Orioles used 10 subs in the Chris Davis game, that went 17 innings and they ran out of pitchers. For a limit to have any substantial impact it would have to be more like 5-6, and if there weren't pitcher/fielder restrictions almost all of the 5-6 would be saved for pitchers until maybe the 9th.

It is expensive. But it's also much cheaper than other professional sports, and almost certainly cheaper than many or most college football/basketball games. All of these things are priced (more-or-less) to maximize revenues. Pro sports are in an interesting situation where their stadiums can only seat so many people, and many teams are actively choosing smaller stadiums to decrease supply and increase demand or willingness to pay to get in. In the end, tickets are priced where they are priced because owners think that's what will get them the most revenues. Which means enough people are willing to pay that. For now. There are a lot of reasons attendance is down. Price is probably part of that, coupled with fairly stagnant wages in real terms for many people over a long period of time. Some of it is declining capacity in newer stadiums. I just watched Major League again, and the movie Indians drew almost 70k to their playoff game. There is no MLB team that could draw 70k any more because all the stadiums max out in the 30k-50k range to encourage season ticket sales. Some of it is more entertainment choices, both other sports and non-sports. Some of it is the proliferation of 65" HD and 4K TVs that look incredible and don't involve hours long trips to the park to spend $hundreds. I have observed a bifurcation of markets in a lot of areas, where there's a concerted effort to move as many people as possible up-market, even if that means fewer customers. Companies with business models that are lower total sales but higher profit per sale. Cars are like this, with the average price now over $30k, a standard pickup truck sometimes into the $50k range, and nobody buying sedans that aren't made by a German or Japanese luxury brand. I'm a bit of an amateur photographer, and a decade ago the focus was on $500-800 APS-C DSLRs. Now almost every manufacturer is pushing $1500-3000 full frame camera bodies, with the bottom end eviscerated by phone cameras. Sports is following that model, seemingly just as happy with 26k fans paying $55 a ticket as they were with 32k paying $45.

Traditionalists hold sway in baseball, so why don't we go back to the original rule on substitutes? Which was you need the opponent's concurrence to make a substitute. That's why most relief appearances in the period before 1891 were swapping the right fielder with the pitcher. And, occasionally, someone would have a collision, break an arm, and have to finish the game. Somewhat more seriously, if you gave a modern manager four subs a game, four of those would be used on pitchers. If you gave him five, five would be used on pitchers. You'd have to give him six or seven before he'd even start thinking about pinch hitting or pinch running prior to the 9th inning of a three-run game. I'd like a rule that says you can only use three pitchers per game, with an allowance for an additional pitcher for each two extra innings. Since my preference is three, I assume MLB will propose a trial run in the Atlantic League in 2022 of limiting the number of pitchers in a game to seven.