DrungoHazewood

If I were the Rays in their dome I'd totally replace normal air with some other mixture that includes inert(ish) gases like argon or helium or sulfur hexaflouride that have different acoustic properties to make the sound off the bat really wild.

I'm going to go ahead and assume that the contact times are so close on same exit velocities as to be irrelevant.

Is that really likely, jettisoning all the low OBP players? This year's Astros have won 102 games and are as analytically-inclined as anyone and have five players with 200+ PAs and an OBP less than .305.

Hit .214 with a triple, but 16 PO, 16 A, 2 errors, good for a .941 Fielding %. So... okay. In '69 he played 59 games at short and did reasonably well, but got the GG for playing center field. And only played a handful of games there the rest of his career.

Davis' 2018 season was the 121st-worst hitting season of the 2000-present era (min 200 PAs). Third-worst in that timeframe among players who qualified for the batting title. Even if you limit things to batting title qualifiers that '18 season is 32nd-worst since 1900, and not even the worst Orioles season of all time (1988 Billy Ripken, 48 OPS+). The only thing that unusual about Davis' season was that he kept playing. Lots and lots of players have hit worse than him, but most didn't have anything like his track record or contract so when they hit .150 for a month they got benched, sent to the minors, or released.

I've never seen any evidence that debuting later moves your peak later. Most of the time a later debut just means you weren't good enough to play in the majors at an earlier age. Reaction times, speed, quickness will all decline with age no matter when you hit the Majors. Those things all probably peak in one's early 20s, and experience is keeping you from declining much earlier.

Mateo is 27. It's likely that this is as good as he gets. Some players peak later, a small handful pull a Melvin Mora. But most decline after 27.

Martinez just turned 35, didn't play even an inning in the field this year, and is coming off his worst full season hitting in a decade. And he's a RHH who'd be coming to the new OPACY. Isn't he an older version of Trey Mancini?

Four years ago Elias was one of a bunch of potential GMs. Now he has a track record and would be more in demand. But the truth is MLB teams don't pay GMs anything like they pay top players unless they're really hiding things from the public very well. If you don't like my naïve explanation you lay out why a typical MLB GM makes half as much as Jordan Lyles.

In 2018 Bob Nightengale tweeted that Elias was the highest-paid first-year GM in MLB history. No amount was stated, but I doubt that it's $1M.

Salary isn't based on importance, it's based on the "market" as it exists with all of its influences and restrictions. Sanity is setting expectations for salaries based on those real conditions, not a hypothetical situation where everyone is paid proportionally to the revenues or successes they bring the organization. The player salary structure is set by collectively bargained agreements. Front office salaries are not. The reality is that there are only 30 MLB teams and 30 GM positions. Yale and Harvard educated kids with advanced degrees line up around the block for unpaid internships working 80+ hours a week so that they can conceivably get on a track to one day potentially become a GM. Elias is doing a great job, but there are a lot of people in the potential GM pool and just a handful of jobs come open every year. It's a little like the market for good field, no hit shortstops - there are 1000 of them willing to ride the bus from Walla Walla to Kalamazoo for $1500 a month on the off chance a couple of them get to spend a year or two in the majors.

Yes, it was one of the lowest offensive years in the live-ball era. But Oyler still had a 20 OPS+, which adjusts for that offensive context. For reference, Mark Belanger's lowest OPS+ in 200 or more PA was 32. Oyler's is the worst batting performance in 100 or more games since WWII, and he got a ring.

Contract clause that gives him every cent saved through service time manipulation.

Well, top five or 10 since 1900. We'll see how the last week or so goes. They need 88 wins to pass the 98-99 D'backs. Yea, but he has all those Tammany Hall connections. No, no one will get this reference.

That has to be among the worst 450 trades in Orioles history. They regretted it for dozens of minutes. Teeth were gnashed.

During that four-game series with the O's he went 5-for-14 with a single, a double, a triple, and two homers, four RBI, OPS'd 1.357, and had 0.999 WPA. The entire rest of the season he had 41 hits in 213 AB (.192), five doubles, one triple, one homer, 10 RBI, OPS'd under .500, and had a WPA of about -1.5. In his career he had 31 extra base hits in 292 games. So that series was 1.3% of his career, and he had 13% of his extra base hits, or ten times what you would have expected. And did you know that Matchick was an Oriole for three gmaes in late 1972? Played three games at third base including a doubleheader on the last day of the season, and went 2-for-9 with a CS. He was part of that infamous deal with the Brewers where they got Michael Herson and Mike Ferrero, we got him and Bruce Look. Look never played for the Orioles, and Ferrero spent '72 as arguably the worst third baseman in MLB.

I kind of love these threads that ask "do we need X to contend" or "the Orioles will never win a World Series without Y". Because you almost never have to have any one particular thing to win. Or even to win the World Series. So I take these kind of things as a challenge to find a team without that who did win. TOR is pretty easy, lots of teams have won well over 90 games and even had postseason success with a best pitcher who looks like someone's #3. You'll sometimes hear fans say you have to be very strong up the middle to win, you have to have a top shortstop to win. The 1968 Tigers won the World Series. The player who played the most innings at short for them was Ray Oyler, who hit .135/.213/.186, good for a .399 OPS. Their backup was Tommy Matchick, who had a .534 OPS. Their 3rd SS was Dick Tracewski, who hit .156. It was so ugly that they took their starting center fielder, Mickey Stanley, and put him at short the last week of the season and through the World Series. Stanley had never played a single inning at short in his professional career up to that point, not even in them minors. No innings at 3B or 2B, either. It would be like the Orioles moving Austin Hays to short today, and they go on to win the Series. So whenever someone asks if the Orioles absolutely have to do some thing or they can't win the answer is almost certainly no.

There are more choices than that. They could acquire someone else to play third.

I'm completely agnostic on Bezos, Orioles owner, I don't care either way. It might be great, it might be a disaster. Who knows? But I think the other 29 would not let him in the club.

Yea, that's what I said before. Cuban said he was interested in buying the Cubs and in very short order someone from MLB let him know that they weren't going to let that happen before it even got serious.

There's no question Mateo is a very fine defensive shortstop. The question is whether the O's would be better off with him playing there and OPSing .650, or Henderson's (likely) less impressive glove there with an OPS potentially 200 points or more higher.

Gunnar's value won't be higher at short if he isn't very good at short, but he's excellent at third. Remember the year Manny was a shortstop? That's the one with the -10 rField on bb-ref. Now, I think Henderson is going to be a more than passable shortstop, but we haven't seen a lot of him there yet, and he's very young. Nobody drafts a high-round shortstop like Holliday to play somewhere else. But it happens all the time. Just don't know how an 18-year-old is going to mature and fill out. Mountcastle played 226 games at short in the minors.

I don't know if that last sentence was sarcasm, I'm guessing so. Because you know that the owners would shut down Bezos' bid before he submitted it. They don't care if the guy will invest $billions in MLB. They care if he'll be a good member of the country club.

The 29 other owners say no. They have to approve the deal and they're not going to approve some kind of celebrity billionaire unless he's given them strong assurances that he's going to be part of the club and not a wildcard that uses his personal wealth to supplement the team's revenues and blow by the luxury thresholds. When Mark Cuban was interested in the Cubs it never even got to the official vetting, the owners just let it be known that he didn't stand a chance. I'd say there's zero chance they'll risk someone like Bezos not only going all Barcelona/Man City on the league, but also the circus sideshow his presence could/would bring with it.

It's all game theory. If everyone including the batter knows a high fastball is the right call and assumes it's coming, do you really throw the high fastball every time?