DrungoHazewood

I want to see some spray charts that indicate significant differences in individual batted ball tendencies based on park.

The solution to hitting in the new OPACY is to get good hitters and not really pay that much attention to tailoring everything to the park. The Red Sox were always concerned about finding RHH and RHP because of the Monster and the deeper RF. But their best players were power hitters Williams (LH), Yaz (LH), Ortiz (LH) who'd usually pull the ball. Some of their better recent pitchers have been lefties Lester, Price, Rodriguez, Sale. DiMaggio played his whole career in a park that was over 450' to LC/CF. Just get good players. The other team has to play in the same park.

Because that's not really a thing? I'd like to see some examples of players who are heavy pull/power hitters in parks that are short to their pull side, but line drive/spray hitters in larger parks. I don't think those players exist. It's everything most players can do to come up with one approach that gets them just productive enough to play in the majors, and then they have to constantly tweak to stay there. People would sometimes say Ichiro or Boggs could flip a switch and become a power hitter or a pull hitter or whatever, but I never even saw evidence of that from a couple of first-ballot HOFers.

If you can get Abreu on a one- or two-year deal (because he's already 35) I'd think about it. That's a lot more appealing to me than Rizzo on a longer contract. There's really no such thing as a crippling one-year contract.

The deliverable is to help prepare a roster full of guys with a variety of strengths and weaknesses to face a bunch of talented Major League pitchers. It's a mistake to think the deliverable is a great hitting MLB team. Remember Leo Mazzone and the 2006-07 Orioles? The coaches help prepare the players and offer them advice. They don't play the game. It would be different if this was year two or three of consistent failure, and highly-rated prospects flaming out, and players trying to do things that are very different than what's made them successful in the past. But this is a slump of a few months from a team of kids and castoffs who were expected to win 60 games. This isn't a Royals and Cal Eldred situation.

He went to war! He got the Congressional Medal of Honor! He saved the lives of every man on that transport. Oh, wait. That was Harry Bailey.

Yes, it's time to fire Terry Crowley.

Gross is not how I'd phrase it, but I'm very, very wary of signing 33-year-old 1B/DH types to multi-year free agent deals. Especially when he's coming off a season as good as anything he's done since his mid 20s. And he's missed 20-30 games. He'll be looking for something like a 4/75 deal, I'd guess. In 3-4 seasons do you really want a 36-year-old first baseman who's likely to be playing 100 games and hitting .215 while collecting nearly $20M a year? Rizzo is having a good year and has been worth 2.6 wins so far. Mountcastle is having an off year and is worth 1.2. Mountcastle is essentially free, and his batted ball metrics point towards him having better seasons. Rizzo will probably decline from here on out and cost nearly $20M a year. My opinion is that you're writing a check for $80M or so to maybe get a theoretical win or two over what's already here, with a decent chance Rizzo isn't any better than Mountcastle over the next 2, 3, 4 years.

Baseball is like cricket, in that there's long been a vocal contingent shouting "it's not cricket!" every time someone suggests some tweak to make the game more engaging to someone other than die hard fans. In cricket's case soccer passed it as the most popular sport in the UK roughly 130-140 years ago and has never looked back. Cricket became a bit of a niche sport because it took day(s) for a match that includes multiple tea breaks, and strategies that basically involve bunting ball after ball into the ground to spoil pitches and play defense. It's only been recently that other variations of the sport like 20-20 have become very popular because they finally adopted rules that greatly increased action and decreased the time to complete a game. In baseball really the only major on-field rules change from 1905 until very recently was the DH. Sure, they'd occasionally clarify the boundaries of the strike zone, or remember they were supposed to enforce mound heights, secretly change the ball, or change how many teams made the playoffs. But 99% of the rules were the same in 1908 when the White Sox hit three homers all year as they were in Barry Bonds' prime. But the game was wildly, completely different. That's because the traditionalists who ruled refused to make any changes and, paradoxically, everything changed. By sticking to the idea that God handed Alexander Cartwright the rules on stone tablets that will never be modified they opened the door to every manager and GM and player to innovate within the gray areas and ambiguities in those rules. And there are many. Gentleman's agreements about how the game is to be played get pushed aside when wins and losses are on the line. People often moan about how there are no longer any complete games, that every team has 11 anonymous relievers, that everyone is just trying to strike out every batter and every batter is trying to hit the ball 800 feet, and defense has never been less important, and base stealing doesn't make sense so nobody really does it. All those things are true because nobody did anything about any of it for 100 years. If you loved baseball as it was when you were 12 AND you're going to never change the rulebook you'd better be pretty sure the rules very strictly defined the game as it was when you were 12. Or you'll wake up one day when you're 40 or 60 or 80 and see that everything is different, you don't like a lot of it, and baseball is the 2nd or 3rd or 5th most popular sport in the country. And that's exactly what happened.

It's funny that the old folks talk about the microscopic attention spans of the video game kids, but then expect everyone to sit through baseball games that average over an hour longer than they were when my grandfather was young. I guess those whippersnappers from 1927 didn't know what they were missing when the pitcher just got the ball and pitched, and the batter actually stayed in the box and hit.

You're like the frog in the pot of water slowly brought to a boil and never noticed until it's too late. If you've been watching baseball for 50 years you started on a game that took about 2:30 to finish and now they've stretched that to nearly 3:15 by adding dead time. There's exactly the same amount of baseball now as in 1972, but it just takes 30% longer. In 1920 a typical game was 2:00. Same thing, no more baseball today, just 1:15 of standing around. Don't let anybody tell you it's better for it.

To make the game more interesting. To reduce the amount of time where you have seven fielders drifting off to sleep because the ball's never in play. To take it back to the way it was meant to be and as it was played for more than a century, as a sport that typically takes two hours or so. To allow my children, aged 15 and 14 to finally, for the first time in their lives, to have fighting chance to see a 9th inning of a weekday game before going to bed. Any reasonable organization regularly looks at its weaknesses and proposes improvements. For a long time baseball has looked at its weaknesses and proclaimed that they were really strengths and that the fans who were leaving didn't really understand baseball. I'm not a fan of banning the shift, but I'm very happy that they've finally gotten out of their 100 year rut of proclaiming every bug to be a feature and hoping nobody notices they're full of it.

Hopefully they move the pitching distance back, which will accomplish the same thing much more effectively.

90% of that is the strikeouts. When the league strikes out once per team per inning it's almost impossible to hit .265. Banning the shift will probably raise batting averages a few points. But until they get strikeouts back to 5-6 per nine the league isn't going to hit like it's 1990. To lower the strikeouts the pitching distance needs to be about 63' or 65'.

You do realize that they're banning the shift because three true outcomes hitters like Joey Gallo and Chris Davis pull everything into it and hit .180, so the league wants them to hit .225? There's an easy way to beat the shift, just hit the ball the other way. Draft and develop hitters who hit all over the place. MLB said, no, that's too hard, we'll just make things easier for big, left-handed pull hitters. Also, the new rules are silent on placement of outfielders, so it's very likely that many teams will place an outfielder where the rover now is, and place the shortstop or second baseman about 6" to one side of the bag to field everything hit up the middle. And banning the shift does absolutely nothing about the number of strikeouts or the length of games. Thankfully the pitch clock should help with the latter. Oh, the nerds you disdain will continue their work without pause. They're just going to determine the most efficient ways to shift and hit within the new rules.

Yes, I'd assume the analytics department has a lot of inputs on when it's smart to go and when it's not.

I bet you could come up with some truly mind-bending MVP votes the farther back in time you go. Roger Peckinpaugh won the award in '25 as a 34-year-old shortstop who only played 126 games and OPS'd .746 with four homers. Bobby Richardson had an 8-win career where he received MVP votes in six different seasons. In '57 the Phils' Granny Hamner (who I think pinch hit a bunch) got three votes in a year where he was -1.3 WAR. In '55 the Senators' Jose Valdveiso got a vote in a season where he OPS'd .594 in 94 games. In '52 the Dodgers' Billy Cox got eight votes for OPSing .639 in 116 games. The Browns' Ken Wood got two votes in '50 for being 2.1 wins below replacement, and the Senators' Sam Dente got a vote the same year for OPSing .585 with two homers and one steal in 155 games.

From 1989-93 there were 24 different pitchers who had 30+ saves in a season, including Eck (five times) and Smith, Tom Henke, Rick Aguliera, and Jeff Russell (four times each). The College of Southern Maryland's* own Steve Farr had a 30-save season, so they were giving them out with boxes of Cracker Jacks. *That's what bb-ref says, at the time it was still Charles County Community College.

The way he was pitching right before the strike he might not have been the closer by October if the season had gone on. Much less made it to 48 saves. From June 15th-on he only pitched in 15 games and had a 6.28 ERA.

Talk about wacky award voting. That was a different era in a lot of ways. Lee Smith's one year in Baltimore was the strike-shortened 1994, but he pitched 38.1 innings. Yes, he had 33 saves, but allowed 45 baserunners, 16 runs, six homers and had a 3.29 ERA. Aside from the saves that would be like the 5th-best reliever in the 2022 Orioles' pen. Yet he was 5th in the Cy Young voting and got some down-ballot (14th place) MVP votes. To be fair to the Cy Young voters, 5th place was 1% of the vote, so probably one guy threw him on the ballot. To be very harsh to the MVP voters he finished ahead of Mike Mussina who had a lower ERA in five times as many innings. Was in a virtual tie with Wade Boggs (.433 OBP), Will Clark (.932 OPS), and Rafael Palmeiro (.942 OPS). For 38 pretty good innings where he allowed runs in six of his last nine appearances and blew five saves.

Now you have me thinking of all the possible situations where you might be credited with a game played in a bases loaded nobody out situation, but not a plate appearance. - Batter injures himself checking swing on a 2-1 count that's called a ball. Pinch hitter comes in and sees ball four, walk and PA is credited to the original batter but pinch hitter gets a game played with bases loaded/no out. - Bench clearing brawl, ump ejects everyone not in the game. Later a batter is up with loaded/no outs. Runner injures himself on a pickoff play. Team is down to 8 players, cannot continue, game is forfeited to the other team. Aren't there some cases where the stats count even in a forfeit? The '77 game Earl forfeited to the Jays looks like the stats counted. - If a game is called due to weather or darkness in the middle of a PA, what happens with the scorekeeping for the last PA? - Similar to the first one, if you're ejected/injured in the middle of such a PA but prior to three pitches I think the PA gets credited to the pinch hitter who replaces you. - Prior to 1950 courtesy runners were informally allowed and in a handful cases in the 19th century the runner stood beside the plate and ran for the batter. Perhaps when they get around to documenting splits for that era the courtesy runner will get a game played in that situation but not a PA?

He's the new Vince Coleman. Not really, but in 1986 Coleman hit .232 with a .581 OPS and stole 107 bases in 121 attempts. He had 180 singles plus walks plus HBP and attempted 121 steals. And he had 41 hits with men on base, and 22 with a guy on first. Another 11 walks with guys on first or second. So he attempted a steal at least 121/147 times he had an opportunity, or >82% of the time. Unless they really change the pickoff rules that will never be approached again.

I think it has to be PB/WP/SB/CS/Pickoff/Balk while they were up that either ended the inning or the game. If I had a nickel for every time I saw a triple steal with nobody out in the bottom of the 17th...

Whole list here. Gehrig, Murray, Simmons, Kent, Stephens, McGriff, ARod, DiMaggio, Delgado, Ott are the top 10.

Gehrig is the leader in bases loaded, no out PAs with 81, Eddie is next with 73. Gehrig hit .343/.420/.716 in those situations.