DrungoHazewood

It's like fans expect the world to be a Hallmark Channel Christmas movie. Girl works at a small town flower shop, guy moves in next door. He's cute, works at the local garage fixing cars. Sure, he drinks too much and has this weird obsession with Dungeons and Dragons, but deep down he's a good guy. So when FTD Flowers offers the girl a $300k a year job at their headquarters in New York she thinks about it, but in the end she stays in Bedford Falls making $40k a year with her quirky-but-cute guy. Roll credits. Yea, no, that's not the way the world works.

Smaller stadiums are not about looking fuller, it's about creating artificial scarcity and driving people to purchase season tickets, and higher-priced single game tickets. While I understand the business motivations, I think it's short-sighted. It's a very common North American sports phenomenon, and I think it's a bad choice. It necessarily drives attendance at sporting events up-market and really limits the ability of people who aren't swimming in disposable cash to go to games. A recent (or ongoing) real-life example of this is the Messi situation with MLS. DC United and Washington built a beautiful 20,000 seat stadium five years ago or so. Upon moving from RFK ticket prices shot up, because of artificial scarcity from a small stadium. So great, right? Lots of new revenues for the team. But, now Messi is in the league and every Miami game could sell 50,000+ tickets, but won't because a) they're super expensive, and b) there's on 20k available! Also, DC was out of hte running for hosting World Cup games because the stadium was way too small. So... keep OPACY at 45k or more, nobody except the O's accountants want it smaller, and almost 50,000 fans at a playoff game is far better than 30k fans who each traded their first born for a ticket.

Since many fans have this leftover expectation that players are forever loyal to whatever team happens to draft them, but those same teams can release or trade or demote said players at any moment... well, perhaps there needs to be some kind of player-equivalent honor to retiring numbers, where they can honor the teams they felt most connected to. I know that's probably unworkable and silly, but this whole retiring numbers thing is completely one-sided. Example: BJ Surhoff desperately wanted to stay in Baltimore, he literally cried at the press conference about the trade. But nope, it's a business, he had no choice, so off to Atlanta he went. But players need to be loyal to the team, right.

I've long since made peace with the idea that only a crazy person would sign a below-market hometown discount long-term deal with the 2000 Orioles, given that Angelos basically said no pitcher was worth what the market was going to pay Mussina, and he clearly had no idea how to build a winning organization in the modern world. So most of the blame for Mussina leaving is squarely on ol' Pete. But, no, you don't retire Mussina's number.

I was a child when they traded Doug DeCinces for Disco Dan Ford and I still wake up sweating in the night, crying out "oh dear God no!"

I'd have to dig around for some narratives and examples. There's a Bill James article or articles I could try to find that lays out in some detail the sudden and dramatic acceptance of regular workloads for pitchers in the late 50s and early 60s. It was really like a lightbulb went off and, like a lot of innovations in the sport, within a few years routine and scheduling for pitchers became a best practice that you rarely deviated from. Going back to the Whitey Ford example, in 1954 he was healthy and pitching well all year and pitched at various times on 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7 days rest, including six relief appearances. In 1963 he only had four appearances out of 37 that weren't on three or four days rest, not counting his first start of the year. You could look at the gamelogs of a selection of regular starting pitchers and see that after the first few games of the season it's essentially random who matches up with who. Almost every team for years and years has tried to keep their starters on a five-game rotation. The further back in time you go there were more teams using five-day rotation and using off days to sometimes skip weaker starters. But that's pretty infrequently done today, as most (all?) teams think the extra rest for everyone is more important than an extra few starts shifted from your #5 to #1 over a year.

Oof, he may be a worse actor than MLB pitcher. And that's saying something.

The Orioles runs scored and allowed suggest that their true talent in a sequencing and leverage-neutral context would be maybe seven games worse, and that it's unlikely that they'll continue to exceeded their Pythag indefinitely. But that doesn't mean they are predestined to regress at any moment.

What is Hayden Penn up to these days?

It's essentially completely random which of your starters faces which of the other team's. In the distant past teams and managers would mix up days rest and match up starters with stronger or weaker opponents. But that threw off the pitcher's routine, and in roughly the 1958-63 period that practice went almost completely extinct. The exclamation point on that was Gene Mauch repeatedly starting Jim Bunning and one or two others on very short rest down the stretch in '64 while the Phils blew a 6.5 game lead in the last two weeks of the season. Casey Stengel was probably the last manager who didn't really use a regular rotation, instead mixing and matching as he saw fit. You can see this in Whitey Ford's records, where under Stengel he never started more than 33 games in a season. But when Ralph Houk took over he immediately saw his workload go up to 36-39 starts a year.

Exactly!

All these secret sauce in the playoffs arguments make sense on some level, but I've still never seen any analysis that says teams that do X, Y, or Z actually perform better in the postseason.

Sounds like something I'd say!

That's where we need the comparisions to stop. Ol' Stump went 12-36 for the Cowboys. Also... think about the 1886 Kansas City team. That was the frontier. This was less than 20 years after George Armstrong Custer was sent to fight and subdue the native population of Kansas. Kansas City has a population in the 1880s of maybe 55,000, many of whom were kind of rough ranchers and farmers. Getting there by train even from the other "western" cities of Chicago or St. Louis or Louisville was probably no small feat. No wonder Kansas City didn't really stick as a MLB team until a century later.

I've done a linear projection of Oriole performance since 2021, and it looks like they'll achieve Platonic perfection and transcend this reality sometime around June of 2025.

What is ideally structured for the playoffs, and how do ideally structured teams do in the playoffs compared to teams that have similar regular season W/L records but that are less than ideally structured?

When it comes down to gut check time, you gotta know who's clutch. You never see clutch in a spreadsheet.

Yes! If you use that, and then on the other side Pitcher's Allowed GWRBI you're pretty much covered for every conceivable case by just two numbers.

Really just pitcher wins and batting average. Oh, and fielding percentage.

There can't be many records where the team record is just over three seasons worth of the single-season record. Jim Johnson's 51 saves in 2012 is the O's record, so Olson's mark is 3.1 seasons of that. That would be like if the team home run record was 54 x 3.1 = 167. Or the team pitcher win record was 78. I'm guessing there's a 80-90% chance of the team save mark falling in the next 20 years, unless there's some radical change in the game and top relievers only get like 15-20 saves a year.

How dare you disrespect Don Aase and Tom Niedenfuer!!! Did you ever notice that you could have slipped those guys into an episode of Dukes of Hazzard as the bad guys and they'd have fit right in?

I still have no idea how Full Pack didn't just burst into flames. In 1979 he had 21 saves and a 2.85 ERA, but walked 51 with just 34 strikeouts in 72 innings. If social media existed in '79 worldwide servers would have melted every time he came in with less than a 5-run lead.

Obviously Myers had a good couple seasons with the Orioles but he never even pitched 60 innings. Bautista will probably pass that in 2-3 weeks. People complain about hyper-specialization today, but 26 years ago Myers averaged less than an inning an appearance. Miller was before my time, but obviously very good. Different era, averaged almost two innings an appearance. ERA+ not at the stratospheric levels of today's relievers at their best, but it's near impossible to put up a 1.00 when you're throwing 70 games, 110 innings.

Olson's curveball was so good that hitters didn't swing at it much. Go find the clip on YouTube or whatever of this game in April of '89 where he fanned Parker, Henderson, and McGwire to notch a save. Each one on a video game curve that had the batters bailing. He had to rely on the umps to not get fooled by that, too, and that was kind of hit-or-miss.

If there's a case it's that Britton relied much more heavily on his defense. I think Bautista is more likely to get you out of a 2-on, no-out situation than Britton. We'll see how the longevity goes. Britton was only Britton for about three seasons.