DrungoHazewood

Joe Saunders is available and he's solid on 3200 days rest.

I wonder what JTrea thinks about Icelandic roundabouts where there are two lanes and you have to yield to the cars on the inside lane who want to exit? It was confusing, I got honked at a lot, but you could probably get used to it.

In theory, in an alternate universe, I'd much rather have a open pro/rel setup where if you aren't good you go away to a lower league until you figure out how to be competitive again. And hundreds of teams all have a shot at building something and passing the teams that don't care if they lose. But in this universe and the rules we have in this reality, tanking is a thing, it really sucks for fans, but it's advantageous for owners and GMs.

It's a little disincentive, but it's not huge, since draft position is probably not as important as saving $10s or even $100s of millions in salary in years where you're not competitive. And baseball draftees are far less certain and further away in time than other sports. Ask an owner if they'd take an extra year of rebuild in exchange for saving $400M in salaries over five years and they'll probably take that deal. The NBA has naturally lower parity, mostly due to the structure of the sport. I'm not a basketball expert by any means, but I've definitely read that the nature of the sport and the many many possessions and scoring opportunities per game lead to the better team winning a much higher percentage of games than in baseball. Basketball has true talent .800 teams, and baseball hasn't had a true talent .700 team (i.e. regularly wins 113+ games) in a century-plus. And if you have real .800 teams you'll have real .200 teams, too.

There is a predictable relationship between draft slot and career value over many picks. The #1 overall pick is very clearly the most valuable pick, and each draft position after that steps down in value a little bit. But individual draftees, rounds, and years are very noisy. Pick a random year... 2009. The most valuable first rounders were #25, #1, #6, #17, and #7. But if you total all picks ever, the highest value is (or is very close to) overall picks #1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

I don't see why they need a draft at all if they have bonus pools and slots. If the last place team gets five times as much to spend as the first, then the talent will naturally go to the last place team. My guess is two reasons: 1) Every other sport in North America has a draft and MLB isn't going to be creative/weird. Ooh look, the draft is on ESPN and dozens of people are tuning in! 2) It's easier to "negotiate", if you want to call it that, with your 20-odd draftees than with everyone. It's less work. People will say things like all the good players will end up with the Yanks or Dodgers, but prior to the draft and way before pools and slots the Orioles signed Brooks, Palmer, Boog, and most of the core of the 1966 champs. Players go where they have opportunity.

From 1898. The runner is apparently the author Zane Grey, who wrote a few baseball stories including "The Shortstop", a copy of which is on the bookshelf here in my office.

Huh. Maybe I should reconsider my opinion of him. Roundabouts are great. Of course whatever my opinion of him before was a correct opinion. Because JTrea's most strongly-held opinion was that all opinions are correct and no one should ever be criticized for any opinion even if it's objectively insane.

ScOtt had that one incident where he was raging mad, like over-the-top righteous fury, that Felix Pie hit for the cycle and besmirched the special-ness that only Cal and Brooks had ever done that before.

Stupid movie glorifying a bunch of cheaters.

Right, that's why I said not a significant impact among MLB hitters. It's there, but it's usually swamped by other factors like plain old quality of batter. So most of the time you'd rather have a good overall hitter who's no better in the clutch than an average or poor hitter who steps up his game in the clutch. People talk about clutch hitting like it turns Billy Ripken into Eddie Murray, when it actually turns Billy Ripken (in this example where we're assuming Billy was clutch) into Tim Hulett.

No, that's not hopeful, because performing in high leverage situations isn't a skill. Or not a significant one among major league baseball players. It is possible that one of the differentiators between guys who wash out in A ball and MLB players is that the A ball players can't hit under pressure. All MLB players, given enough plate appearances, will tend towards their overall numbers in all types of leverage. Yes, some players like Eddie Murray end up with career marks of .872/.843/.808 in high/medium/low. But even if everyone had exactly the same clutch skills you'd expect some players to end up with observed performances better or worse than average because of random variation. Just like if you cloned a .300 hitter 100 times, some of those 100 players would hit .260 and some would hit .340.

We're five weeks into most of those deals, so either they were terrible from the minute the ink was dry or we're a year or two short of knowing much of anything meaningful. Correa has had 25-game spans where he OPS'd under .620 in 2016, 2018, 2019, 2021, along with one in 2022 where he OPS'd .633. It's a lot more obvious when it starts the year.

I'm not reading 15 pages of this thread, but I'm not trading Henderson for anything. At least not anything any other team would say yes to.

For context the league has been .755 in high leverage, .720 in medium, and .721 in low. And the O's opponents have done .594 in high leverage, .825 in medium, and .750 in low. So the pitchers have been really clutch. This worries me a bit, because I'd assume all teams trend towards league averages and the Orioles have wildly overperformed in high leverage situations on both sides of the ball.

I didn't get to watch last night, but found this today. Don't know if anyone else has mentioned it. This is pretty heads up trickeration for a kid in his first MLB game.

Depends on the run context and the base/out/score/inning situation, but in most cases the breakeven point in roughly 4, 4.5-run baseball is somewhere around 75%. In general, if you're getting caught 30%+ of the time you're costing your team runs.

Atlanta United (soccer) plays there, too, and they're known for having just about the only reasonably priced food and drink in MLS. They finished 11th in the eastern conference but easily led the league drawing 47k a game.

I believe that the Orioles have run the numbers and they think that they make more money with higher prices on concessions but fewer people buying them, than lower prices with more people buying. To me that's always seemed short-sighted, but most US sports have trended in that direction on pricing everything for decades.

I don't know or care what other teams do, but that AT&T thing isn't an actual, legitimate option. It's forcing you to get most of your programming through AT&T for $100 a month so that you can also get MASN. MASN and the Orioles have essentially told me to get creative to watch the Orioles.

I used to have Virginia Tech season tickets and the least popular person in the stadium was the ref in the red jersey whose job was to stand on the field to hold up the game until the commercial break was over.

I think part of the draw of football is the overt violence. Whether that's good or bad is up for debate... I have long wanted to see a football or basketball game with a continuous clock like soccer. No timeouts, no clock stopping on out of bounds or incompletions or free throws and fouls. Even with halftime and breaks at the quarters it would be over in 1:30. Managers would have to rely on the players to know what to do the vast majority of the time.

Yes! Baseball is highly quantized, a sequence of individual events, and one-on-one matchups. Soccer is much the opposite, a flow, 11 players moving constantly on and off the ball to implement a strategic vision. But both sports are largely things where the managers wind up their players, set them off on the field, and hope they understand what they need to do.

Says a fan of a sport where you can go to the bathroom in the 4th inning of a 0-0 game and by the time you come back you've missed two homers. And when you say nothing is happening, that's like telling a baseball fan that any inning where a run doesn't score you can just skip. There's often plenty going on in both sports.

It comes down to mindset and expectations. Some sports are all about the build up, some are mostly the scoring. They can each be equally exciting. Most of the world is fanatical about soccer matches that typically end 2-1. I bet 99% of US sports fans would call a cricket match that sees 1000 runs scored tedious and boring.