DrungoHazewood

C'mon, Moose! We've met, and you know Jonah Hill has jowls that weigh more than I do!

How many Gold Gloves have gone to someone who didn't start 100 games at the position in a non-strike year (non-pitcher, non-utility player category)? We don't know what Urias' future holds, but it's not inconceivable that he ends up at second base next year. Which could lead to him playing second the rest of his career. So it's not crazy to think he'll have a Gold Glove at third base in the only year he ever regularly played there, and he only started 84 games at the position. That would be some kind of wild SABR 2040 convention trivia question.

But value is in runs, or wins. Doesn't matter if those runs come from fielding, baserunning, hitting, pitching, framing. Lenn Sakata was a better hitter than Mark Belanger, but Belanger was a far superior player. Mateo had a little better year than Urias this year, but Urias has a little bit more of a track record.

Isn't the likely case over the medium term that teams will shift priorities somewhat towards better fielders in general to cover the extra area, thereby depressing the relative value of those who are already in the game? In other words, Mateo is a 10 in a world where the average player is a five. With no shifts teams may prioritize fielding skill over hitting to some degree, so Mateo would be a 10 in a world where the average is now 5.5.

I may be missing some nuance here, but insurance is set up to cover expenses that are a) relatively rare, and b) expensive enough that you can't pay out of pocket. Like health insurance, which helps pay for massive costs by spreading the premiums out among thousands of people, most of whom are healthy. Baseball injuries are pretty common, and the team has already set up their budgets to afford the contract in question. I have to think that the number of contracts really worth insuring are pretty small. Which means you have a smaller base to spread the costs out for the company, driving premiums higher. Unless I'm missing something. I'm certainly not an insurance guru.

Right, so if you paid $8m for each contract like that let's say you're the Yanks and you have 10 large, insured contracts. You pay $80M in insurance on them. Is that better or worse than just paying the money owed to injured players? From the insurance company perspective, I'd say it's not worth it for the team. The premiums are set up so the insurance company makes money in a large percentage of the cases, which means the teams lose money.

I'm sure you're missing a "not" before issue, but that's a very good point. The net payout to teams from player insurance is going to be negative. On average a team will pay more in insurance payments than they receive in benefits, otherwise why would anyone run a baseball player insurance company? If the company's actuarial tables think deGrom has a 1-in-2 chance of being hurt enough to pay out, they'll price the policy such that they make money in most situations, meaning that the insurance would be quite expensive. Perhaps expensive enough to not be worthwhile, except perhaps in a situation where they're only taking out catastrophic insurance to cover something like a career-ending injury. Which should be much cheaper than one that covers lesser injuries and missed time.

Good points. I think I've read something about what happened to Paige, but I've forgotten if it was injuries or something else.

The joys of an infinitely auto-renewing contract. Observations like this are why I'm sure players would be called up much earlier if not for service time rules. If everyone became a free agent at 28 or 29 many high draft picks would be in the majors at 18 or 19.

In 1970 Larry Bowa got more votes for OPSing .580 than Wayne Simpson got for going 14-3. Hector Cruz got a few votes in '76 for OPSing .625 and being almost two wins below replacement. Obviously love Eddie, but how does he win in '77 over Mitchell Page who had an OPS 125 points higher, had a .405 OBP, and stole 42 bases to Eddie's zero? 1980, Ron Oester finished 4th (with a first place vote) for hitting .277 with two homers and six steals. In 1981 Shooty Babitt got some votes for hitting .256 with a .615 OPS in 54 games, and George Bell for hitting .233/.256/.350 in 60 games. In 1990 Scott Radinsky pitched 52 innings of relief to a 4.82 ERA and got a vote. Rich Delucia finished 5th in a deep AL class in 1991 for going 12-13, 5.09 and leading the league in homers allowed. That same year Brian Hunter was worth -0.2 WAR and was 4th in the NL. In '92 Eric Karros was 7th among NL vote getters in WAR (0.4) and won the award. .730 OPS as a mediocre-fielding 1B. Jeff Conine finished 3rd in '93 in the NL with a 0.7 WAR season. Pedro went 10-5, 2.61 and finished six spots lower. Chris Gomez was 4th in '94 for being half a win below replacement in 84 games. Ray Durham was below replacement in '95, finished 6th. Deivi Cruz, half a win below replacement, .577 OPS, 4th in the AL in '97. Same year Tony Womack was -0.9 WAR got a few votes. And Jose Guillen was -3.3(!!) WAR and finished one spot behind Vlad, who OPS'd .833. Ponson got a vote in '98 for going 8-9, 5.27. That wasn't quite as fun as I'd imagined, so I'm going to stop here.

ROY votes are highly dependent on the candidates that year. There are years where you have six or eight really strong rookies, and there are years where John Castino gets a trophy for hitting .285 with five homers. Now you're going to make me go look up the worst players to get a ROY vote...

The Gold Glove awards need to be sorted into before 2013 and 2013 to the present. In 2013 they made some significant changes where they fixed some of the more egregious problems of the past, including publishing a list of eligible players (fixes the Palmeiro problem, he wouldn't have been on the list of 1B), included some subject matter experts in the voting in addition to coaches, included some metrics which incorporated things like UZR or DRS. Clearly better than the earlier system, but with the advent of Statcast it's once again fallen behind state-of-the-art. Prior to 2013 it was a mess. I've read that the Rawlings people would go to the various managers/coaches at some point late in the year and more-or-less just ask them to write down who they thought the best fielders were that year in their league. Maybe they'd give them a blank ballot and ask them to send it back, or they'd come pick it up. Many people would delegate the responsibility to some member of the coaching staff. There would be no accompanying material at all. For most of the history of the award there wasn't even Baseball Reference, so if anyone wanted to use metrics... good luck. I guess you could find a copy of the Sporting News with assists, errors, double plays, and putouts, for whatever good that would do. There were no lists of eligible players, so inevitably a Palmeiro would happen. And the system was what's called an "open plurality" vote where the winner is whomever gets the most votes, even if that was 15%. In Palmeiro's case let's say there were 30 voters, he may have gotten seven, a couple other guys got six, a few got five... so he won despite 23 of the 30 voters not voting for him. And we know that the largest determinant of winning this year was whether or not you won last year. In one of his books about 2000 Bill James was very critical of the old system and said that it had some things in common with primary elections, and that if you ran an election like the did the Gold Gloves you'd eventually get a complete nonsense result like Warren Beatty or another famous person we won't name here as President.

This is one of those records that is completely dependent on the way you ask the question and where you draw lines. There were nine National Association teams from the early 1870s who had one pitcher pitch all of their innings. THAT is a record that will never be broken unless they change some very fundamental rules of the game. In the weird world of the Negro Leagues there was a team (1933 Cleveland Giants) who only used two pitchers, but they also only played one game. I understand why they decided to count the Negro Leagues as Majors, but there are some oddities. The last team to use just two pitchers in a full season was the 1883 New York Mets, who had Tim Keefe and Jack Lynch throw 97 complete games in 97 games. The last to use three was the 1885 St. Louis Browns. Four was... well, a couple of very short season Negro League teams and the 1890 Chicago White Stockings. The post-1900 AL/NL record is five by the 1904 Boston Americans (i.e. Red Sox). The last team to use less than 10 was the 1936 NY Giants. Exactly 10 was the '49 Indians. 11 was the 1980 Braves. 12 was the 1983 Red Sox. And 13 was the 1994 Braves, although that was a strike year. Full season and 13 was the '93 Braves.

When I went to college in the fall of '89 there was a bookstore in Blacksburg over by the Kroger that carried Baseball America. I thought it was great. I eventually subscribed, and continued to for quite a while until their prices got ludicrous.

Yea, whatever, some WWE guy who plays in the Bronx. They're all the same.

You have to assume that a 32-year-old with a career FIP of 4.68 is going to give you something like a 4.68 ERA. What would be a reasonable return for half a season of a guy with a 4.68 ERA? A #10 organizational prospect? A #20? Not someone who is likely to be a good major league player. If you bring him back it's because you think he's a positive performer for the team compared to other options.

How is paying $11M for what is objectively a 4th or 5th starter going cheap? If they wanted to go cheap they'd just let one of the much less experienced guys making $700k a year the 4th/5th starter.

I think the question is whether there is value in having a player with a 90 ERA+ who can take the ball every fifth day, if he's at the back end of your rotation. The Blue Jays gave 72 starts to pitchers with ERA/ERA+'s worse than Lyles. They would have been a better team with Lyles than Berrios, Kikuchi and the rest. The Rays really only had four regular starters, but gave between one and nine starts to 13 other pitchers. Some pretty good, some pretty terrible. It's arguable they'd have been better just using Lyles as their 5th starter. The Guardians had two starters with 20+ starts and an ERA+ worse than Lyles. I don't think the decision on Lyles is obvious. They do need better 1-3 starters. But they could do worse than having him as the 4th/5th starter.

Never bet against humanity's ability to find the slightest ambiguity and hammer on it until no fun can be had and no logic can be found in your results. There could be a Best Player in the Major Leagues in 2022 Award and someone would vote for Lourdes Gurriel and back it up with a 3000-word article mocking anyone who thinks it should be Ohtani or Stanton.

It appears that the Fielding Bible is voted on without any hard standards, while the GGs switched somewhere around 2013 or 2014 to a system that includes some metrics. But the metrics don't include any Statcast data, which are more accurate and pretty clearly show Mateo to be the best SS in the AL. I think it's likely that the Fielding Bible voters took OAA into account. I applaud the GGs for finally improving on their broken system, but it took them less than a decade to fall behind the curve again.

All I know is that Curt Blefary was Fielding Bible caliber, but Nick Markakis clearly and obviously wasn't.

If you're in favor of bringing him back I don't ever want to hear any complaints about WAR and replacement level. Lyles is clearly an above-replacement but below-average player who they may end up paying $11M. Obviously replacement level is a valid measure if teams are willing to spend $11M for a 32-year-old pitcher with a career ERA+ of 83, coming off a 91.

Often times a weird poll result is because the voting or voting system was weird. For things like this they rarely put a lot of thought into the system and end up with some nonsense results. Palmeiro almost certainly won that Gold Glove when he only played 30 games in the field because the voting was an open plurality, and there were no eligibility criteria. They just asked a bunch of coaches and managers who they thought was good, didn't give them a list of eligibles, and whoever got the most votes won even if they got 17% (so 83% didn't vote for you). The Hall of Fame voting regularly spits out crazy things because it's poorly conceived and executed. Here's a list of 54 people, vote for zero to 10 of them, and if anyone gets 75% they're in. So in the late 50s there were ballots with 35 eventual HOFers where no one was picked at all. You're probably right with this vote that the AL outfielders had a seven-way tie for 3rd with two or three votes each.

Better than Jeter.

The other guys didn't field well enough to get noticed.