DrungoHazewood

.424 is the all time Oriole record, set by Willie Keeler in 1897. I wouldn't really mind Adam tying it... The whole time I was growing up the record was .432, but somewhere along the way those retrosheet guys discovered an error, probably a double-counting of some hits, and Willie lost eight points of BA. It is kind of funny, if you go to Retrosheet right now and list all time qualified single-season BA leaders Jones and Keeler are tied for 9th place, since you only need about 46 PAs to qualify this year.

Like almost anything else BABIP is subject to random fluctuations caused by any number of things. And it usually trends back towards recently-weighted career averages. Maybe Nick is dialed in, maybe he's got good luck, maybe he's feeling better after surgery, or more likely a combination of things. I wish him well, but he ain't hitting .373 this year.

That mark would have been the highest in the majors (among qualifiers) last year by 0.059. And about 130 points above the level he's established the last 3-4 years. That mark would also set a post-1900 record, as the last person to BABIP greater than .432 was Hugh Duffy in 1894. I hope Nick does well when he's not playing the Orioles, but BABIPing .432 is just a wee bit unsustainable.

Ha! Simon is probably just a huge fan of Star Wars, couldn't figure out how to drive a Millennium Falcon, so he settled on an Earth version of the Naboo Royal Starship. But that gets him some demerits for the reference to a prequel. <iframe id="rufous-sandbox" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="display: none;" allowtransparency="true"></iframe>

This may not warrant its own thread, but is one of the more funny/awesome/ridiculous things I've seen in a while: Alfredo Simon really does drive a totally chrome Mercedes Benz that looks like a real life Hot Wheels car. It must be pretty great to have enough money that you can do stuff just because the 12-year-old version of yourself would think its super totally cool.

Outscoring the opposition wins. And Miller pitched 62 innings this past year, leaving about 1396 innings for other pitchers to pick up.

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.

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.

You can make a very strong case for 27 for everyone.

He will get every chance he earns. All we're saying is that when you're planning you don't count on guys who're 24 years old and just got to AA.

And that's a reflection of where he was as a ballplayer at those times. I wouldn't say he necessarily chose college, or chose to stay for his senior year. The choosing was done for him by the scouts who graded him as a very marginal prospect. Now, sometimes a player will have a breakout after spending years stalled at a lower level. Hopefully we're seeing that here.

Sure it is. If you're 18 when you're drafted and and you fly though the minors like Manny or Trout or Harper you're a productive major leaguer long before a college graduate. If everything goes right Yastrzemski will be in the majors at 24, more likely 25. He only has a couple years before a typical player starts to decline. It's probably not much of an over-generalization to say that a position player who plays 3-4 years in college is just not as much of a prospect as someone who's in the minors at 18 or 19. To this day, there are only a very small handful of HOFers who weren't established big league regulars by 25. Sam Rice may be the only one, at least if you exclude guys who weren't eligible for MLB service at 25 (Negro Leaguers, very early 18th century guys). It's just hard to have a long, successful career when you're not even starting until what's mid-career for most players.

And age is BY FAR the most important thing. In another thread someone was comparing Dariel Alvarez' performance at Bowie (at 25) to Manny Machado's at Bowie (at 19). My guess then, and I stand by it, is that six years of age in AA is roughly the equivalent of 300 points of OPS. At least. Yaz is two years older than Manny, and a year older than Schoop. Anyone want to guess what Manny or Jonathan might have hit in Bowie this year? Or in a year or two?

The issue here is what "that much tougher" means. And there's no way you can rationally look at the facts and conclude that the Orioles', or any other team's, odds shifted more than a few percentage points. You can argue how much those few percent are worth in money and risk and future wins, but there's no changing them. Even under the most outlandish assumptions you couldn't conclude that the Tigers were now a prohibitive favorite to win it all, or that the Orioles odds collapsed.

I don't even know what you're arguing now. The Price/Lough bit is nonsensical, and who thinks odds dictate what happens? Huh?

And what I'm saying is that the numbers are real. If the O's had acquired Kershaw, Trout, and Cabrera they'd still be facing 3:1 or worse odds of winning the World Series.

Yes, that's spot on. Any way you look at it, no team, not the best in history, is more than 25-30% chance at getting through the playoffs. I think that Beane and other GMs aren't wrong in thinking that way, putting that much emphasis on trying to build a World Series team. But I think even they know that most of what happens in the playoffs is out of their hands. I doubt Billy has done a 180 on this. He's just decided that he's in a situation where he has a strong team and he's trying to make it stronger even if he's not likely to win it all and it'll cost him later. He has a long term contract, and he knows he will never be unemployed, so he's not terribly worried about the state of the 2016 A's.

I'm sure I rambled a bit, and I may have even changed my opinion while typing. But in the end, I think I was getting at Tampa won those deals. They traded established stars for a bunch of kids, and they came out ahead. The teams that went for it, trading the future for those big pitchers didn't get any playoff glory out of it. So I guess I'm saying that's a point in favor of holding onto Bundy and Gausman and Harvey (and to some extent Rodriguez).

Your argument now is that quantitative risk assessments are the same as random guys throwing out opinions? You're looking at a franchise worth $100s of millions, talking about what to do with its key assets, and your analysis is "screw the numbers, forget thinking through this in any detail, let's frickin' go for it!"

1) The Orioles are in first place now with a 70-something percent chance of making the playoffs. 2) Almost nothing they could have done yesterday, up to and including trading all of their top prospects, would have significantly changed their odds of winning the Series. So, they're a good bet to make the playoffs, and nothing they could have done would have made them a lot more likely to win it all. So... why would you trade the future for that?

Of course many of these guys will/should produce a lot of future value, but the Rays have traded Kazmir, Garza and Shields over the last five seasons or so, and have gotten about 20 rWAR out of the 12 players they received. By far the most valuable to this point has been Sean Rodriguez. So far the Rays have won those deals about 20-14 in rWAR, and they'll probably continue to move ahead as the pitchers they traded away decline, remain more expensive, and the Myers and Ordoizzis and Archers produce. And since leaving Tampa those three have pitched two playoff games (both Kazmir), 10.2 innings, 10 runs.

I think everyone would prefer to acquire the best possible players. But there's only so much a rational GM would give up for bumping up his World Series odds from 4% to 6 or 7%.

How did the O's acquire that talent? They got Hardy in a deal for a random minor league arm. They got Davis as a part of a trade for a relief pitcher. They drafted and developed Wieters. They extended Markakis after developing him, and he's slipped from his peak years. Cruz was a $8M flier. Why can't they continue to look for similar opportunities, augmenting a core of Gausman, Machado, Bundy, Jones, Harvey, hopefully Schoop, etc? But you're giving up someone who has a very high chance of being a strong asset for many years at below-market rates for a one-off chance at bumping up your playoff odds a few percent. The Baseball Prospectus team pushed out an article on odds of winning the World Series after yesterday's machinations. The result: The A's and Tigers increased their odds of a Championship by about 1% each, going from 14% to 15% for the A's and 12% to 12.5% for the Tigers. If the O's had traded Bundy for Price their odds of winning the Series would have gone from 4.5% to 6%. That is what you're giving away six years of a top-10 prospect for? Of course it's not now or never. In 2012 it was never or never, and they made the playoffs. They have a core of Gausman, Bundy, Harvey, Jones, Machado, Showalter and Duquette and others to build on/with. Hopefully they'll have a little more cash in the drawer after this postseason. There is no reason they can't resign a few off your list, retool, find some bargains, and keep winning.

It is a fairly high price. But since that piece he's taken a step back while repeating AA, and will almost certainly fall off all of those top-100 prospect lists. Stotle (who is one of the scouting writers at Baseball Prospectus) thinks it's a tossup whether he ends up as a back-end starter or a reliever.

But you can lay out a set of assumptions and a framework for how various trades could work out and make an assessment of the upside and the risk. You have to, at least in part, judge a trade or any transaction based on the information available at the time. For example, if you traded Gausman for Emilio Bonifacio, and Gausman has a fluke career-ending injury next week it's still a terrible trade. It doesn't matter if it technically worked out, you couldn't have reasonably expected it to work out. There is a very high chance that Bundy becomes some kind of productive major league pitcher, and a non-trivial chance he becomes an ace starter. The return on that kind of odds has to be very high, and any trade assessment in the future would have to take that into account.