DrungoHazewood

I think sometimes people underestimate the effort required to execute a signing or a trade. Signing Correa not only takes time and effort and money, but it also necessitates several other transactions to make the roster and the organization's talent balance work out. There are only so many things a front office can do in one offseason. Trading one of the big prospect pieces for pitching is going to be at least weeks of effort unless something magically falls into their laps. Then they still have to do all the other things they need to fill out the roster and improve the team. It's like the conversations about increasing payroll to $125M this year. That's just not really feasible, there's only so much you can do and there are 29 other teams trying to get better than you at the same time.

"Hey, Mr. Platinum Glove Correa, we'd really like you to spend the next 10 years in Baltimore, but we're gonna need you to move to left field." That seems to me to be a non-starter unless they throw him a bunch of money on top of the unwise amounts he's already going to be looking for.

If you look at the Orioles' needs shortstop isn't anywhere on the list, and Correa is only at the top of the fans' minds because he happens to be one of the best available free agents in 2022-23. The Orioles have very solid Plans A, B, and C for shortstop for the next eight years, and acquiring Correa means swapping many of those options for players at other positions. Chances that many of those swaps will not be terribly efficient (i.e. we won't win all the trades). Just go buy some starting pitching and maybe an outfielder. The more moving pieces the less chance of success.

I think it's exceptionally unlikely that he's been told to hold firm on a sub-$50M payroll.

Or if Elias is told he can spend reasonably, but you just don't end up with all the guys you want. It's not Confederate Money if you put a good offer on the table but the guy would rather take the Dodgers, Southern California, and just as much or more cash.

The world sim uses a Gaussian distribution of clutch and non-clutch ability and two aren't correlated, so sometimes the Matrix just works it out that way.

I hear Rougned Odor is available and he's cheap. Plus he's clutch.

It's very hard to sign 3-5 $15, 20, 25M players in one offseason. There are 29 other teams trying to sign the same guys. What's supportable in the budget and what's achievable in four months can be very different things.

If on April 1st you asked 100 baseball experts if the Orioles would be contenders this year 108 of them would have said no. I'm not going to gig Elias for not adequately preparing his 52-110 team for a deep playoff run.

Who knows? I think most of us see the playoffs as the slightly weighted coin flips that they are, but will whatever committee tasked with voting on managers in 10 years? My guess is the managers from this era who go in are going to be the ones with the most rings. I think Bochy goes in despite an overall record below .500. Piniella and Leyland have a World Series each, a season or two more games managed than Buck, and they're not in.

How is he going to win if the O's do reasonably well next year? He will have managed the up-and-coming team of young stars to contention and perhaps the playoffs, as is expected. I guess that's the narrative for Francona and he won, so why not? Buck didn't win for the plucky upstarts who played Lew Ford in a postseason game against the Yanks, he won for having the best record in the AL East. But I'd argue his work in '12 was as impressive or more so than in '14.

1. I don't really care about other teams. 2. The AL Central is a bunch of cupcakes, so if you win 80 last year odds are you might do okay this year.

"Sorry, Brandon, I know you led a team that lost 110 games last year into contention despite the lowest payroll in the sport by far, but seeing as how you didn't quite have the greatest leap forward since before the airplane was invented we'll give it to the guy whose team improved by 12 games in perhaps MLB's weakest division."

Championship Odds in early April had the O's at +30000, Guardians +8000. O's last in the majors, Guardians 21st.

I shouldn't get upset about awards where one of the O's reps is Roch Kubato. I'm sure he's a decent guy, but I'm just not going to be in alignment with opinions of beat writers much of the time.

After Buck didn't win in '12 I take the attitude that the writers just don't use the criteria I would.

You're acting like the two teams were on equal footing. The Guardians were probably projected to win 85 games, the Orioles 65 at best.

Exactly, it's pure crap. Guy manages a team that hasn't approached 60 wins in years to a winning record and they give the award to the guy who took a 80-win team and managed them to 92 wins. Basically the voters are saying that it would have taken divine intervention for Hyde to win it.

If there were no injuries you could probably have 60 MLB teams with no discernable loss in talent level.

Of course Darvish pitched 1268 innings in Japan prior to coming to MLB, going 93-38, 1.99 and throwing a complete game every third start. So he's actually more like a 60+ rWAR player for his career. In 2011 for Nippon Ham he went 18-6, 1.44 with 276 strikeouts and 36 walks in 232 innings. 28 starts, 10 complete games, six shutouts. That was the year Lee/Verlander/Halladay were all over 8.0 rWAR so I don't know if I'd argue he was the best pitcher in baseball, but maybe.

That's... something. (Goes to check... yep, David Wells was a thing, but then again so were the Billys* Hamilton.) Santander is a below-average corner outfielder, Statcast shows that. He's been a few runs below average every year except the COVID year where he was a single run above average. But dropped to -5 last year. He's 28, so it's likely that he's not going to get better in the field as approaches 30. So, he's not a butcher, he's not Mark Trumbo or Delmon Young, but he's also not going to win a Gold Glove unless he changes his name to Vlad. If he keeps hitting he's fine, he's an average-ish RFer. If he hits like 2021 he becomes harder to play with that defense. * This does lead to the question, what is the plural of Billy? Since it's a proper name do you just tack on an s, or change the y to an ies, as in Billies?

With the pitch clock it's possible that we'll see some games end by 9:00. That's miraculous. The 10-year-old me would have loved that. The 51-year-old me does love that.

The 1968 Tigers' average game length was 2:38. The 2022 Orioles only played 11 games that quickly.

They enforce it just fine in the minors. If they don't do it in the Majors it will be a choice, and one I'll be extremely disappointed in.

Hopefully Kwan with more power and less of the Guardians' incessant social media push for Kwan to be inducted into the Hall of Fame tomorrow.