DrungoHazewood

Of course Cowser's rest-of-the-season ZIPs forecast is for 1.7 WAR, for a total of 2.9. I could be convinced that's under-selling him. But it's almost certainly more realistic than 10.

Replacement level is typically set at a .294 winning percentage, or 47-48 wins. And I certainly wouldn't just mulitiply 6.2 x 9 to get the full season projection.

He'd be in the running for unanimous MVP. Mike Trout in 2012 is the only rookie to ever have gotten to 10 rWAR, and he didn't win the MVP only becuase a bunch of writers got all weak-kneed about Cabrera's triple crown. 2nd in all time rookie WAR is Dick Allen's 8.8 in '64, followed by Judge's 8.0 in '17. Fred Lynn won the MVP and ROY in '75 with a 7.4-win season.

A reasonable opening day projection for the Orioles was probably 92ish wins, or about 44 WAR. Starting 12-6 you could reasonably assume that their EOY projection is something like 93 or 94 wins. Baseball reference says the team WAR is currently 6.2. So that would work out to something in the neighborhood of 40 for the rest of the schedule.

Friendly reminder that even the quickest numbers to show significance like strikeout and FB rates take 60-100 at bats to become more signal than noise. And things like SLG and OBP take the better part of half a season before you can start trusting them. Batting average is well over the number of PAs anyone has ever gotten in a season. Drungo's First Rule (or at least some rule of mine): Never trust anything before Memorial Day. And don't get too comfortable until well after July 4th.

I'll be the pedantic one and point out that it's not really a projection to multiply 1/9th of the season by nine and come up with a full season's performance. Because 1/9th of the season is almost certainly not representative of the talent or expected performance of the players in question. To get a true projection you should take a little less than 8/9ths of your preseason projection, add in what they've done since opening day, and then toss in the little bit of additional knowledge we've gotten from the past 18 games. If you thought Jordan Westburg was a 2.5-win player on opening day, it's probably reasonable to think he's a 2.7 win player today.

I think the issue will always be that throwing 89 with an okay slider means Rich Dauer hits .256 with 8 homers, and throwing 100 with a wipeout sweeper means Rich Dauer hits .221 with 4 homers. Pitchers will almost always take .221 with 4 homers because hurt means you're rehabbing, bad means you're selling insurance.

I think no matter what solutions are attempted, it's going to be vexingly hard to fix because most pitchers will continue to throw as hard and with as much break as possible to get more outs. Even if the ball is dead, throwing hard and with max spin will mean your ERA is 2.00 instead of 3.00. Half joking, but blame all this on the decision in 1884 to legalize overhand pitching. I suppose this is anecdotal, but underhand pitchers don't seem to get hurt at nearly the rate of overhand. Today's women's college softball pitchers' numbers look like Walter Johnson or Kid Nichols.

The genie is out of the bottle, you're not putting it back in. Re-legalize sticky stuff and pitchers will concentrate on throwing sweepers that break eight feet. There is no incentive to not go for 100% effective 100% of the time. Listen to pitchers themselves talk - it's I'm going to do everything I possibly can to succeed in the majors, if I break that's just the risk I'm willing to take. Somehow they have to incentivize throwing most pitches at 80% effort. The only thing I can think of is limit teams to eight pitchers on the active roster, and very few minor league transactions a year. Then an average starter has to throw 200+ innings, and that can't happen with today's approaches.

I think a good start would be to ban anyone from pitching until they turn 24. It's coach pitch until you get out of college... Obviously that's not going to happen. But I think some forward-thinking organization might take some halfway decent pitching prospects drafted at 18 or 22 but with clean bills of health and have them just not pitch for three years, maybe mess around as outfielders or whatever, and see what happens when they go back to pitching when their UCLs are mature at 25-26.

I think that's probably right, and also utterly and completely ineffective and missing the point. It couldn't be more clear that essentially the entire root cause is pitchers throwing every pitch like it's their last. Until they can incentivize pitchers and teams to not do that there will be no solution to the problem.

There have actually been fairly long periods in the game's history where teams more-or-less ignored the requirement that a leadoff hitter be able to get on base. So much of the period before and during my youth (born '71) involved guys like Omar Moreno making almost 600 outs a season but he batted leadoff because he stole 70 bases. But that was okay because they'd have a little second baseman bat 2nd, and each of the handful of times Moreno reached base he could bunt him over to third after he stole second. The Orioles' prime example was Luis Aparicio, who led the AL in steals for nine straight years but never scored 100 runs in a season because he hit .262, had no power and walked 35 times a year. Nothing against little Louie, he was a great fielder and overall a valuable player. But today he'd hit 8th or 9th. His career OPS is within 20 points of Jorge Mateo's.

I don't see why being skeptical about the future value of Bradfield has anything to do with my evaluation of or trust in Elias. He took the player he thought was most valuable when the O's pick came up. That doesn't mean that the guy is automatically going to have a 30-win career. Bradfield was a #17 overall pick. If you look at all #17 picks the median value for their entire career is something like 2 rWAR. The draft has been going on since 1964 and just 10 #17 picks have had a 10-WAR career. While 17 of them who were drafted in 2016 or earlier never played in the majors. Jerry Don Gleaton and Eduardo Perez are typical #17s. Roy Halladay and Cole Hamels were drafted #17, but so were Josh Sale, Rick Asadoorian, Ricky Barlow, and Ken Plesha. The Orioles' only #17 pick prior to Bradfield was the immortal Don Hood. If Bradfield has a 5 or 10-win career Elias and his development team have done better than expected.

Are they? 2023 saw the 5th-most home runs per game in history. While steals were up from recent seasons, they're only about as frequent as they were in the 1990s. I guess we'll see, but I didn't notice a spike in Juan Pierre and Willie McGee types in the last year+.

But what about non-analytically speaking? How good a play is it if you're just making stuff up and telling stories?

I don't think you can describe anyone who's still in A ball with 133 career pro PAs at age 22 as having a floor of three wins a season. At this point it's an open question as to whether he tops three wins in any MLB season. If you look for comparable players, say .310-.330 OBP, little power, plus-plus basestealing and CF defense, I think the archetype in recent baseball is Michael Bourn. Who did top out with some really good 5-6 win seasons, but tailed off quickly and only had 5-6 seasons as an above-average regular. Beyond him you're looking at guys like Jarrod Dyson, Dee Strange-Gordon, Ben Revere. But only a handful of years each as average to average-plus MLB regulars. And then lots and lots of players who didn't even reach that kind of level. I think we have a few years before we figure out where on that spectrum Bradfield falls.

I agree that it's easy for fans and announcers to come up with narratives that, after the fact, describe outcomes as being a result of comfort or mental state or belief in a higher deity or any number of things that are probably just random variation. But, on the off chance that all this stuff isn't completely made up post facto rationalizations, Gunnar has a career OPS of 1.249 when batting 8th. So just to be safe Hyde should bat him 8th for the next 3-4 years to see how it plays out.

Actually, the analytics say that the difference (over an entire season) between the most and least logical batting lineups is on the order of one or two dozen runs. So the gains from switching between any halfway reasonable lineups are too small to measure. Literally all of the hand-wringing about lineup construction is much to do about nothing.

Can we please stop making judgments about anything in baseball before Labor Day? And making any kind of tactical or strategic changes based on 12 PAs is pretty much like using a 20-sided dice and some chicken entrails to decide where to invest your life savings. Also, Henderson's career OPS leading off is .823, which is higher than his overall .810 OPS.

Last year I went to a meeting for work in Luxembourg, and flew in/out of Brussels. The last night I had a Chimay and a Lindemans' Kriek with some Flemish carbonnade at dinner, then a Cantillon Gueuze later on. Can't really go wrong with any of that. I love German beer, but the Belgians are doing a lot right.

If I were him I might have done the same thing. The movie netted something like $30M in the theaters, and has probably made some significant fraction of that again in video, DVD, streaming, etc. If he had done a dark and bitter movie staying true to the book I don't know if it breaks even. Not that depressing, quasi-nihilistic movies can't make money, but it's probably more of a challenge.

I don't know if Malamud was brilliant, I thought the main point of the book was no matter what you do it'll all work out poorly in the end. But I did enjoy both the book and the movie in completely different ways. And someone needs to remake the movie staying true to the book and just being relentlessly dark and depressing.

I'm somewhat skeptical that God is up there counting prayers and making the team with the most win. Otherwise the Yanks, who almost certainly have the most fans and by extension the most (insert your favorite religion here) fans, would never lose.

One thing to keep in mind (besides the microscopic sample size) is that Norfolk's run context (the number of runs scored per team per game) is 10.8. Or more than double the rate of runs scored in the 2023 majors, and way higher than the context of pretty much any MLB team since the early 1870s. It's far, far too early to draw any real conclusions from this. But... when you're analyzing a team with a gargantuan run context the result of all of this is that each run is worth far less than a run in a more normal environment. Basically it takes 11 runs to win a Norfolk Tides game, when it takes a little over four to win a normal team's game. So if you create a run in Toledo that's worth something like 2.5 times what a run in Nofolk is worth. In simple terms, if this were to keep up all year (which it won't!) a 1.275 OPS in Tides games might be about as valuable as a .800 elsewhere. It's like 1996 Rockies games where decidedly mediocre MLB players like Dante Bichette and Mike Kingery would hit .350 with power.

The Tides are 6-1 despite having allowed 66 runs in 64 innings. In the last 50 years no MLB team has ever had more than four wins in any seven-game span where they allowed at least 60 runs. 25 teams have gone 4-3 in a span where they gave up at least 60, topped by last year's Rockies who went 4-3 in late June despite allowing 64 runs and scoring just 32. That was enabled by 25-1 and 14-3 losses. Expanding the search to 1901, 10 MLB teams have gone 5-2 after allowing 60+ runs in a 7-game span, but no one has gone 6-1. Only the '29 Phils allowed as many as 65 runs in their 5-2 span (they gave up 67). The Tides are 6-1 after having allowed 66 runs. I don't know if there are minor league teams that have topped this, that search is essentially impossible with today's tools. But if they were a MLB team this 7-game span would be pretty unprecedented.