DrungoHazewood

My best guess is that this is a contract signed by a team/GM who know that they're both likely going to be not in those positions by the time it blows up on them. What does a GM care if the team has $150M in dead money on the books when he's been in some other job for five years by the time it happens?

Nobody can pay to guarantee a ring, they just try to build the best team possible and hope the dice comes up (whatever a good dice roll is). The Padres know this. I don't know what their end game is. They pretty clearly are operating in a different world of payroll vs. revenues than anyone else. Whether that means ownership is subsidizing the team out of their own pockets, or just making less profit I don't know. Whichever the case, I doubt the other owners are happy about it. And I don't know if it's sustainable, especially in what may well be a post-RSN world.

Thanks, I'd forgotten they list stolen base opportunities under Advanced,Stats, Baserunning and Misc.

That started in 1973, so for most people it's always been that way and it's not a big deal. It's really nothing, it just is.

Didn't your pappy tell you about going up in the woods to use this metal thing to scrape bark off the trees, and they'd use that to tan the hides? It backbreaking work, you got paid next to nothing, and everyone died at the age of 37. But at least the local nine didn't have ads on their jerseys.

In '86 Coleman had 139 hits, 60 walks, two HBP, and reached on eight errors. Eight triples and no homers. 13 doubles. He also batted over 200 times with men on, and he only drove in 29 runs all year. So he was only on base a little over 200 times, quite a few of those with other runners on, and he still stole 107 bases. That's probably the record for steals as a percentage of possible steals, at least for a full-time player. Compare that to Rickey, and the year he stole 130 he had a .398 OBP, and the other two years he was over 100 his OBP was over .400.

Yea, the game hadn't been around long enough for most folks to be mad that it wasn't the same as when they were in the 4th grade. And they probably didn't look too fondly on the 4th grade, since that was the year half the town died in that typhoid epidemic. Plus, they'd dropped out of school after the 2nd grade to go work in the hide tannery at 75 cents a day.

Decorum is in the eye of the beholder. Or in baseball terms: "Was this a thing when I was in the 4th grade? If not, it sucks, I hate it, and I'm never watching baseball again. Well, at least until the season starts." I 100% guarantee that if the owners of 1885 could have made $300 a year by putting an ad for McQuigley's Miracle Brain Tonic on their jerseys they'd have done it in a second. They certainly put ads on every square inch of the ballparks they could.

Here's a list of all time single-season leaders in steals, OBP .300 or lower, since the 1898 stolen base redefinition. Vince Coleman once had 107 steals in a season with a .301 OBP. Note that Mateo is the only player in that timeframe to have at least 30 steals and an OBP as low as his was last year (.267).

I think Rickey would still be active if he'd just cut back on all that running.

From page 326 of The Book: The disruptive runner has an enormously negative influence on the batter, enough to almost completely offset the disruption caused to the defense.

I always wondered (well, very occasionally) what Henderson or Brock would have stolen under the rules prior to 1898, where things like going first-to-third on a single were counted as a steal. Under those rules Sliding Billy Hamilton stole over 100 bases four times, never in more than 137 games. I also wonder how often players prior to, say, 1990 would have stolen bases had they known that anything less than a 75% success rate in most situations was taking runs off the board. Babe Ruth had 123 steals and 116 caught, including that famous one that ended the 1926 Series. Today someone would tell him to cut it out.

Depends on to whom they sell the team.

Yea, the "practical" reasons for the exemptions were we've designed the stadium this way because we thought it was cool, and how about we say it would be expensive and a pain in the butt to change the drawings now? These are essentially $billion custom-designed stadiums and they're arguing that it's neigh impossible to move a fence back 3'. Yea, okay. Camden Yards is 318' to RF because every stadium for the prior two decades had been a cookie cutter and they wanted to be different.

Ohhh... now there's an idea. Instead of a wall you have a trench. I like it. The question is do you just paint a line at the edge, or have a little triangular thing marking the boundary like on a cricket oval?

I'm trying to visualize why this would be. The 3B/rover was taking some of the balls Mark Trumbo couldn't get to? I still think the impact is going to be pretty marginal. Batting averages for left-handers are going to go from, like, .236 to .242. They're telling everyone they can't play their fielders where it makes the most sense for maybe five points of batting average.

If the shift makes range less valuable, then wouldn't the thing that maximizes the value of range be forcing all the fielders into sub-optimal positions? If you painted a dot for each of the infield and outfield positions to stand on, but put them in unusual places like right near the lines, or almost on the warning track... that would put a huge premium on range. Perhaps we should do that.

It's a science experiment. They want to see if a team can go 81 games without hitting or allowing a triple at home.

That's strange. In a world where Rogers Center is already a very good HR park and people are talking about wanting more action and balls in play, the Blue Jays go the other way and decide they want their own Baker Bowl or League Park. I think it's been a while since a MLB park was a short as 357' in a alley. When OPACY was 364' to LC medium fly balls would carry out. The next step will be to make the RC fence 300', and then you don't need a RFer at all. Just have the second baseman go fetch anything hit that direction. Or, maybe they're going to make the walls 100' tall all around.

I really, really wish we'd see open financial books. I know there are a few teams that have had to reveal a lot, but most of the information we have on the Orioles are guesses. Most teams are like that. I want to see the Padres' ledger. But we also know in other big professional sports teams spend a lot higher percentage of revenues on player payroll and they have no problem whatsoever getting massive team valuations and value increases.

Looking across the media landscape it appears that there's market research suggesting that negative reporting driving anger and disappointment and resentment is more effective at drawing clicks and eyeballs and revenue than positivity and optimism.

Frank Chance, who wasn't as good as McGriff, played (obviously) with Joe Tinker, Joe Tinker played two years with the Federal League's Chicago Whales.

Tony, you know that players who weren't even on Baines level have been going into the Hall since the 1940s. That's really why we don't have a solid argument for the line being much higher. Once you start putting in the Rube Marquards and Tommy McCarthys in the very first decade of inductions it's impossible to close the floodgates. High Pockets Kelly is a first baseman who went in the Hall 49 years ago and he was basically Lee May or Ryan Klesko. McGriff was twice the player he was. Baines is about halfway between Kelly and McGriff.

I have no idea what I said before, but McGriff is solidly in the area between solid BBWAA first-few-years-on-the-ballot selections, and the weird Committee-of-the-Moment picks where 80-90% of comparables aren't in. In other words, far better than Sunny Jim Bottomley, Highpockets Kelly, better than Frank Chance and Gil Hodges, just as good as Tony Perez and maybe even David Ortiz or Harmon Killebrew. But also about on par with John Olerud, Will Clark, Norm Cash, Mark Teixeira, Carlos Delgado, Dolph Camilli and others. No, he's not an average HOF 1B, but neither is Cepeda and I don't remember any rending of garments or self-immolation over his selection.

Every year since 2017 he's pitched significant innings in the minors. The Japanese Western League is a minor league, and in 2017 he threw 61 innings there, 59 in the Central League (Central and Pacific Leagues being the top tier in Japan). In 2018 63 innings in the Western, 71 in the Central. 2019 75 of his 79 innings in the minors. In 2020 22 Western, 76 Central. In 2021 39 and 48. Last year 40 innings in the minors, 66 in the majors. His Central League ERAs have been 4.12, 5.32, 2.08 (in four innings), 4.01, 5.21, and 3.38. Remember, the Japanese Leagues are often pitcher-heavy, with ERAs recently in the 3.50-4.00 range. To me he looks like a average to below-average NPB player. Clearly Hanshin doesn't think he's a solid contributor or he wouldn't be spending much of each season in the minors. Unless the O's see some kind of diamond in the rough they can fix I would not pay a posting fee and then spend several tens of $millions on him.