DrungoHazewood
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Everything posted by DrungoHazewood
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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.
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A few of you may remember Rob Cordemans from the Dutch team that beat the DR and had a little run in a previous World Baseball Classic. For some reason I was goofing around on bb-ref and stumbled upon his page. He's pitched for years in the Dutch Major League. Which if I had to guess was the rough equivalent of a 2nd-tier indy league in the US. Nobody on a current roster has ever appeared in the US Majors. Anyway, the point of this is that Cordemans is in his 6th consecutive season with an ERA under 1.00. Read that a few times and digest it. I don't care how crappy a league you play in, it's pretty darned amazing to have six straight years with an ERA under 1.00. His career ERA in 536 innings is 0.96. He's 49-10. The last three years he's allowed 10 earned runs in 33 starts, going 26-3. I'm almost willing to push the I Believe button and say Rob Cordemans probably could have had some kind of US Major League career. Maybe only in the journeyman mold, maybe as a reliever. Maybe the kind of guy the 2008 Orioles would have called up in desperation. But on some level his performance in Holland is amazing.
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Each time through the order the OPS against a pitcher goes up by 20 points or so. By the 4th time through an average MLB starter is allowing an OPS in the .780s. If you don't have a reliever who can do better than that you've got problems.
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Nice win, but whoever said the team had no heart? If anything the criticism was/is that the team had an overabundance of heart and too little talent.
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Ford hadn't been in the majors since 2007. He has a MLB OPS of .744. He's hit in the minors and then briefly struggled upon promotion once, at least in recent history.
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Huh? That only makes sense if you equate "always" and "that one time last year".
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Just about everything in this post is flawed. Even spectacularly great teams have journeymen filling backup roles. Were the 114-win 1998 Yankees not a "very good team" because they gave 150 PAs to Luis Sojo? Lew Ford isn't starting for Houston because talent isn't evenly distributed in baseball and the system isn't set up to naturally flow talent exactly where it's needed. When a guy is stuck in one organization he can't just go to the GM and say "hey, the Astros really need a right fielder, will you just tear up my contract and ignore your organizational needs so can I go play for them?"
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Lew Ford is an awesome story, and he had to think he was living the dream starting some MLB playoff games at 35 years old after hitting .183 and years wandering in the indy league wilderness. In a lot of ways he epitomized the 2012 Orioles. But Thome was unquestionably more productive last year for the Orioles.
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On Fangraphs you can easily get there. Just go to team stats, then league stats at the top of the page, then batting, then pick the year and position, and it shows totals for that position/league/year. For 2012 catchers it's .312. 1983 catchers it's .309. For 1933 it's .323. For 1880 it's .238.
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In a piece like that they are going to have to take a conservative approach, using established track records for projections. Nolan Reimold has never played at the level he played in April before. At least not for anything more than a few weeks. His expected performance has to be something like his career averages. And Roberts has played as a replacement-level player over the past three seasons combined, so it would be quite a stretch to assume he'd have done better than that given that when he actually played this year he was flatly terrible. You can argue that the O's might have suffered more since those players were capable of doing better than those projections. But I'm sure the other teams in the division could make similar arguments.
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I don't know of any such group. I don't think there's anyone here (outside of a small handful of cranks) who would be upset if the O's acquired a superstar who made $20M a year tomorrow. But there is a significant group of people who like debating the merits of various hypothetical acquisitions within the real world constraints the O's operate under. And by "debate" I mean more than a cursory "Angelos hates us and will never sign any expensive players". Just because someone says Josh Hamilton is too risky given his history and likely price point doesn't mean their position is anything like "don't ever, ever, ever want the Orioles to spend money on superstar FAs".
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Probably here. Even assuming nobody blows up and gets a crazy extension, AND the O's fill out the rest of the roster with minimally-salaried players they're at or around $100M through 2015.
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No way anyone will pay that. Mauer is the only catcher who's ever gotten a contract like that, and that deal looks pretty insane two years in. And Mauer was coming off some of the best years any catcher ever had. It seems absurd (save for some massive overall revenue increases in the sport) that Wieters would ask for a Pujols deal and settle on a Mauer.
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There are plenty of people who think spending wisely is akin to giving up.
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There have been posts on Tango's blog that indicate there's a significant advantage in resigning your own players. In other words, teams who resign their own get better performance out of those players than an average free agent, indicating teams closest to the players know more than an outside team would and are in a better position to evaluate and value those players. So if the question is would you rather spend $100M resigning selected Orioles or $100M on outside free agents it would be easy to pick the in-house solution.
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If our starters can't handle 114 low stress pitches I guess you can add that to the list of serious problems with the organization. I have never seen evidence that 114 high stress pitches is particularly damaging, not unless like 60 of them came in one innings.
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Is Yankee/Red Sox Hegemony coming to an end?
DrungoHazewood replied to Frobby's topic in Orioles Talk
Just for reference, the 2007-08 Rays improved 273 runs on the prevention side of the house. That was absolutely mammoth, enough propel a 60-something win team to the playoffs. The O's are currently on pace to improve by 299. That's actually closer to plausible than I thought. I'd be pretty happy with 150.
