DrungoHazewood

List of 2022 Orioles sorted by fWAR (rWAR in parentheses): Rutschman, 4.9 (5.0) Mullins, 3.2 (3.7) Mateo, 2.7 (3.5) Urias, 2.6 (3.6) Santander, 2.6 (2.3) Hays, 1.7 (2.2) Kremer, 1.6 (2.9) Lyles, 1.5 (1.0) Bautista 1.4 (2.6) Mountcastle, 1.4 (1.2) Mancini, 1.3 (1.9) Voth, 1.1 (1.8) McKenna, 1.0 (0.6) Baker, 1.0 (1.0) Wells, 0.9 (1.2) Watkins, 0.9 (0.0) Henderson, 0.8 (0.9) Bradish, 0.7 (0.2) Perez 0.6 (2.8)

Lyles did a fine job eating 179 innings and not getting blown out on a regular basis. He did what he was hired to do. But I find it hard to even give honorable mention in the O's MVP voting to a guy with a 90 ERA+, a 4.42 ERA and something like the 220th-best season by an O's starter since they moved from St. Louis 68 years ago. A typical Orioles season sees three starters who were more valuable than Lyles was this year, and "typical" includes all those years from 1954-60 and 1986-present where the season was over sometime in early June. Outside of the newly friendly confines of OPACY he had a 5.25 ERA and allowed 20 homers in 96 innings.

Other relatively poor offensive seasons by MVPs (note, they didn't have an MVP every year prior to 1931 and not at all prior to 1911): Dick Groat , '60, won the batting title but had two homers and 39 walks, 110 OPS+. Nellie Fox, 114 OPS+, two homers, five steals in '59. Marty Marion, 90 OPS+, six homers, one steal, 43 walks, in '44. The aforementioned Roger Peckinpaugh season with a 91 OPS+ in 126 games in '25. Bob O'Farrell, 112 OPS+ in '26. Got the catcher bonus. Johnny Evers, 113 OPS+, one homer, .338 SLG in '14. Also there was the Verlander MVP season where he went 0-for-4 with three strikeouts.

I guess I missed the unwritten rule where if a guy is trying to move into sole possession of 7th place on the all-time single-season homer list you have to stop trying to win the game and throw him meatballs. Somebody needs to write these things down, I'm always forgetting.

Right. Mateo is basically having a Mark Belanger year. Would anyone say "the '77 Orioles might have been playing in October if they just replaced Belanger with someone who could hit!"? Urias is similar if less extreme.

Doesn't that require you to build in at least two extra days in the schedule to account for a game 163 and travel, meaning the entire four-round playoffs need to be bumped 2-3 days to the right? And you have to be prepared for a three-way (or more) tie that moves everything to the right at least another couple days on short notice. Even as it is I don't know how anybody goes to more than a handful of playoff games unless you live near the stadium. I've been to four Orioles playoff games in my life and three involved not going to work the next day. Going to any playoff game is lots of money and scrambling around for the logistics, I can't imagine the work the assistant to the traveling secretary has to do to plan for the team. Game 163s makes all of that even crazier.

The counter to that is hot is backward-looking. For example, we always used to talk about Mark Reynolds going on these insane hot streaks. So you target him on one of these streaks to walk, right? Well in 2012 he had a 9-game run in September where he hit nine homers and had a 1.600 OPS. The problem is that in the 12 games prior he OPS'd .650 and in the 11 games after .577. So it's about 3-4 games into the streak where you think about really pitching around him all the time, and it's probably 3-4 games after it's over where you're like "huh, I guess we should start pitching to him again". Half the hot streak you're still pitching to him, and well into the cold streak you're walking him. So this isn't really actionable in any meaningful way.

Maybe if he'd been a catcher, or even better a player-manager-catcher. Some of the early MVP votes had some head scratchers, where they clearly were giving huge credit for field leadership of a player-manager and/or catcher. Johnny Bassler finished 6th, 7th, and 5th in the AL MVP voting from '22-24 despite never playing more than 135 games, combining for one homer in the three years, and in '22 had just 14 doubles and no triples. But he was a catcher... He and fellow catcher Ray Schalk (.750 OPS, four homers) got way more votes than Harry Heilmann, who hit .356/.432/.598.

I know what you mean, and you may be right. Although Odor may be going too far. If you look at the real 1922 AL MVP voting nobody who hit anything like Odor finished in the top 20. George Cutshaw got a vote or two and finished 26th for being a 2B with a .639 OPS. But to digress... in 1922 the Orioles were the Orioles. They won the International League pennant going 115-52, finishing 10 games ahead of Rochester for their 4th straight title. And they beat the AA champions St. Paul in the Little World Series. The IL didn't give out an MVP award until 10 years later, but if they had in '22 it probably would have gone to Jack Bentley. He hit .351, led the league in homers with 22, and went 13-2 with a 1.73 ERA in 16 games on the mound. After the season owner Jack Dunn finally relented and sold Bentley to the Giants for $72,500, or the equivalent of about $1.2M today. Interestingly, the Giants used him primarily as a pitcher. The Orioles were obviously the best team in the league and Bentley was pretty clearly the best player on team, although SS Joe Boley hit .343 and slugged .509. Lefty Grove went 18-8 but was 6th on the team in innings, it would take him a few more years to become the player Dunn would sell to Connie Mack for $100k. It's pretty likely that you could have dropped the '19-25 Orioles into the American League and they'd have been an average team.

Well obviously this is just like when the owner gives the manager a vote of confidence and fires him three days later. I heard a rumor that someone saw Mayflower trucks out on 695 a few minutes ago.

Bo Bichette has a .329 OBP. 67% of the time he makes an out. I don't really think turning that into a 1.000 OBP is a positive.

While I will say that we're pretty thin on hard data about what steroids and other PEDs do to performance, I have to say that they are very clearly beneficial. It would be strange, to say the least, if being stronger had no impact on hitting. Or pitching, for that matter.

One thing I haven't really thought through or looked into is why homers seem more spread out among players now. How is it that MLB had 2019 where the most homers per PA of all time happened, but one guy in the NL and nobody in the AL hit 50 homers? You can speculate about steroids, but throughout history people have hit 50+ homers in seasons where there weren't half as many homers as today. Jimmie Foxx, Hank Greenberg, Ruth, Foster, Mays, Hack Wilson, Mantle, Maris... but in the years where we saw the most homers ever by quite a ways Stanton, Judge, and Alonso were the only ones to clear 50 and Stanton is the only one to approach 60.

I thought the rule was to strike out all the Yankees.

I'm not talking about walking guys as a strategy, but not throwing balls over the plate as a strategy. Pitchers try to do everything they can to not put any kind of remotely hittable pitch over the plate. The purpose of walks and ball and strikes was specifically so that they'd put balls over plate so hitters could put the ball in play. Hitters know what pitchers are doing, so (most of them) wait until a ball is grooved, knowing if one isn't they can fall back on a walk. Pitchers pitch around batters knowing the fallback is just a walk. Both sides are pretty okay with nobody putting the ball in play. Then one day you look up and you have a four-hour nine inning game where like 10 balls have been put in play.

Gunnar Henderson's OPS+ at age 21 is better than Robin Yount, Alan Trammell, Ernie Banks or Honus Wagner or Barry Larkin (weren't even in the majors yet!), Derek Jeter, Lou Boudreau, Bad Bill Dahlen, and ARod. Although ARod was better at 20. So, inner circle, or just normal Hall of Famer?

Sorry to quibble, this wasn't even your main point. But I don't know that I'd call the 59th-best season in modern Orioles history by OPS+ a monster year. It was a very good year. 26 modern Orioles have had a 150 or higher.

Mancini's value took something of a hit, perhaps a few wins, by being played out of position by a team locked into unwise contracts with Trumbo and Davis.

I think you need a tool like WAR to do the analysis between these choices. I don't think you can eyeball a pretty good hitting/below-average fielding RFer, a DH/1B DHing, and a good fielder/below-average hitter in RF and make a sure choice. With the analysis you probably aren't 100% sure. Without running that analysis I think it's close enough that I'd go with Santander/McKenna because then you have more money left over to improve pitching or other positions.

I, for one, refuse to acknowledge any sports records in the era of flawed humans (1,000,000 BC to the present).

This situation brings us back to the purpose of walks, and how they're not doing what they're supposed to do and maybe we should consider a change. All of you who think the rules were handed to Abner Doubleday on stone tablets can go read another thread now... Walks (and balls and strikes) were invented in the 1860s to make pitchers put the ball over the plate, and to make the batter swing and put the ball in play. It was common for a pitcher to throw 50 or more pitches to a single batter, none of which were anywhere close to what we now call the strike zone. So... balls, and strikes. Clearly that's not working so well. Not when walks afford the defense an opportunity to avoid pitching to the other team's best player at all. The penalty is not steep enough if the defense chooses to accept it pretty regularly. So while I want Judge to hit zero homers against the Orioles this week, I'd like to see what happens if teams could decline a walk. Or maybe a walk puts the last guy who made an out on first, and the batter gets to keep batting with a 0-0 count. And maybe a four-pitch walk becomes two bases. It's a flaw in baseball that you can just decline to pitch to the other team's best player, just take him out of the game. Baseball is a worse game when the stars are just walking to first instead of putting the ball in play.

Santander is about -12 from defense+position, playing all but 30 games in the field. If he were to DH all the time and hit the same (somewhat unlikely as most hit a little worse when DHing) he'd be a +0 defender, but -17.5 runs of positional adjustment, so he'd be five runs worse off. Probably more like 3-4 since he's already being docked a few runs on positional adjustment for the 30 games he'd DH'd this year. The breakeven point is a -10 RFer would be no worse off as a full-time DH. A -12 or -15 RFer (which is, like, Mark Trumbo or Delmon Young terrible) would be more valuable DHing. At least in that set of assumptions he would be almost half a win worse as a full-time DH compared to what he's playing this year.

Well, he's a lot closer to Ramirez than he is to Al Pardo or Nate Snell.

Was it a bad idea to sign Mateo to an 8/260 deal in early August?

As long as the nitrogen is replaced by an inert gas and you have the same ratios of other components like oxygen you should be able to breath it just fine. Like deep sea divers who breath mostly helium.