DrungoHazewood

I don't know why the plan can't be Adley catches 75% of the time, DHs most of the rest. Basallo catches 25% of the time, DHs most of the rest. Orioles get the best catching production in the Majors, and a pretty darned good DH, too.

There's one player in AA who's younger than Basallo, and he's years younger than any number of other prospects at that level. Playing well in AA at 19 is a huge positive indicator.

You know how this works. He'll "only" OPS .940 the 2nd half and the Twitterverse and all the stupid ESPN talking heads will blame it on the derby because they don't have the slightest idea about anything.

A #2 or #3 starter with a couple years of control for Basallo? You may well be trading someone like Carlos Delgado for two years of a pretty good starter. It would take more than that for me.

By far the most important thing about a prospect is age compared to level. Basallo is OPSing .800 in AA at 19. He is the only 19 year old in the Eastern League. There's only one other 20 year old in the EL. There are only eight 21 year olds there, and just two of them are out-hitting Basallo. When Gunnar was 19 he had 121 PAs of rookie league ball under his belt, and just got a little taste of AA at the tail end of his age 20 season. Cal Ripken played similarly to Basallo in AA at 19. When Adley was 19 he was OPSing .629 in college as a freshman. Nick Markakis was in low A ball at 19. Ryan Mountcastle was in the Sally League, low A, a 19. Basallo isn't "a little young for AA" but the youngest player currently in the EL and only the Angels' Nelson Rada in the Southern League is younger than him in all of AA. And he's playing well there. I would be exceptionally careful in entertaining trade offers for him.

This list is a mix of over- and under-rating Gunnar. For example, Cabrera played in a more offense-heavy environment, so his .919 OPS is actually worse than Gunnar's .871. But, Cabrera came up earlier, when he was just 20, while Gunnar didn't debut until lat in his age 21 season. Griffey is somewhat similar, not with the pre-PED era timeline, but he was in the majors at the age where Gunnar was taking the year off for COVID but otherwise would have been in A ball. When ARod made his debut just shy of his 19th birthday, Gunnar was in the Gulf Coast League. But, ARod came up in a season where the AL scored 5.32 runs/game, or a full run more than today so a run in 1994 was worth just about 0.8 runs today. Mike Trout played 652 games through his age 23 season, while Gunnar will probably end up about half that.

Oh, I don't know. If it weren't for the evil Yanks winning basically every year we'd probably still have the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers.

The AAA experience is that walks went off the charts. Literally the IL has a higher walk rate than any season in MLB history by a lot.

You could. But I think that's harder because every player has their own bat they like. Bats aren't, and haven't ever been, subject to the same kind of requirements balls are. The ball is a very specific size and weight and COR, etc. The rules about the bats are basically that they can't be longer than X (something crazy like 48", which nobody has used in a century+), or heavier than Y (again, tailored to deadball or Ruth era batters). I think the pushback from fans and players if they went away from wood would be very substantial. I think much more substantial than the pushback for the pitch clock or other recent changes. Just guessing, but I think it would be easier to convince the world that moving the mound back is a better option. Just moving away from the sound of ball hitting wood bat might spark a revolution. There are no shortage of people who say college baseball isn't real baseball because of aluminum bats (even if they've moved to composite? I don't watch enough college ball to know.) Also, if you're not careful you could get into a college baseball situation where before they got the bats under control teams were scoring like 10 runs a game or more. And I have no idea of the underlying reasons, but in 2023 the median runs/game across all college baseball leagues was nearly seven, which is a level that hasn't been approached in MLB since the 1800s. The ACC averaged 7.5, which makes pre-humidor Coors look like a Camden Yards where every batter is a right-handed pull hitter.

I'm guessing that without a major technological breakthrough we're getting the 2024 version. Which, in the absence of other information, is his career averages with a bit of age-related decline thrown in. I'm assuming the year-to-year variation we see in his record is mostly random noise overlaid on his basic talent level.

I'd argue that they became the evil empire circa 1920, when they were drawing 40% more attendance than anyone else in the league, game-day related revenues were almost all revenues at the time, and so they started to have resources and payroll substantially higher than any other team. In 1920 the Yanks drew 1.3M fans, the A's 0.3M. The A's didn't have a chance until Connie Mack pulled a Mike Elias and assembled arguably the greatest collection of relatively cheap, young talent the game had ever seen.

If you wanted to you could probably write us a white paper on how any number of borderline HOF candidates have not been inducted because the writers are sick of all the Yankees. Like Munson, Nettles, Randolph, Guidry, Bernie Williams, Posada, Mattingly, Pettitte, Schang. Every few years a Baines, Oliva, Hodges, Rice, Cepeda gets in, but not those guys. I'm not going to do that, but feel free...

If you were going to run a comprehensive study you'd have to run a correlation between MVP votes and (value metric of your choice) across all teams, then see if the Yanks were different than the average. But even that might be of limited usefulness, because I'd guess the WAR leader has won the MVP less than half the time, perhaps substantially less. It's only been the last 15-20 years that we've had decent, reasonable, consistent ways of combining and comparing different types of production on a common baseline. So even as recently as 2005 MVP voters were left to their own guessing and biases to figure out if a run saved by a pitcher was more or less valuable than a run created by a hitter, or a baserunner or even how (or if) to include fielding. In other words, even if a Yankee beat a more-qualified player in the voting what does that mean in a world where Juan Gonzalez and his three wins out-polls ARod and his nine? How do you pick out the Yankee bias from the "we just don't have/use an objective way to measure value" bias?

Print the playoff tickets! Sorry, old habits die hard.

What are we talking about here, that heavier baseballs thrown slightly slower will not really be any harder or different for pitchers, because there a lot of QBs who can throw 60? While the energy is comparable, I think there are a lot of variables not accounted for here. Like, the pitching motion is substantially different from a QB's throwing motion. I'm guessing the QB takes a few steps, he's not throwing from a mound, he probably uses slightly different muscle groups. Also, QBs throw at something less than max effort a large percentage of the time, at least outside of combine drills for max velocity. I think it's very much an open question as to whether a heavier baseball would impact injuries or fatigue. Although I'm not quite sure which way. My own datapoint is that trying to throw a very light whiffleball at max effort for very long hurt my shoulder a lot.

I think it would take a very long time to see any increase in the number of Arraez-like players. Basically teams would have to be convinced this is a lasting change, and then switch their drafting and development priorities pretty significantly. It's not like guys raised on the strategies of today are going to see a lightbulb go off and try to turn into Brett Butler. They'll keep doing exactly what they're doing and accept that they're 5% or 10% less productive because, frankly, almost everyone will be.

Right, and that's a good thing. As we talked about earlier, most people like offenses around historical averages, which is basically where we are today. The solution to pitchers becoming more and more overpowering isn't to give them another very powerful weapon.

140 games x 1.5 runs = 210 runs per season. So, if the investigation confirms the hypothesis, a .900-OPSing Basallo catching most of the time would be something like a -8 or -10 WAR player. Yea, I'd assume Elias wouldn't put a -10 WAR player out there every day.

Exit velocity is directly related to BABIP. You make a heavier ball that's equal/less resilient you will see offense go down, or at best hold serve, even if there's more contact. My solution is move mound (5' maybe) and fences (OPACY-like) back while keeping the ball about as resilient.

Never trust catcher ERA! Who were they facing when the various catchers caught? Who was pitching for the BaySox? I'm sure there's some signal in that data, but it's awfully hard to tease out of the noise.

Hernandez was an Oriole from 2006-2008, and Weiters debuted in 2009. In 2014 Caleb Joseph came up when Wieters was hurt early in the season. And he didn't come back until June of '15. They did give him some days off with Joseph catching, but that really wasn't much of an asset with him OPS+ing 88 (but a pretty good catcher). But more-or-less from his debut until he left after the 2016 Wieters was the regular catcher getting 75-80% or more of the playing time when healthy.

Possibly. I don't know how easy it is to make it heavier and bouncier at the same time. And I'm not particularly worried about all zero knuckleballers. Although I suppose this would make it harder for them to stage a comeback.

I'm fine with going back to regular extra innings now that the pitch clock has brought normal games times under control. If there's the occasional 18-inning marathon that only takes 3.5-4 hours that's fine. I probably won't see the end of it, but whatever. But I think the driving factor here is not so much game time, but the fact modern teams need 11 pitchers to get through 18 innings. Even 12 years ago we ended up with Chris Davis and Darnell McDonald pitching in a game that long. Today the specialization has gone farther. And to fix that... well, if the pitch clock is minor surgery, and moving the mound back is a lung transplant, somehow getting teams to go back to using starters for seven innings and 1-3 relievers a game is like taking your brain out and getting it to live in a jar on the mantle.

Current MLB slash line is .242/.311/.393. I think first degree deadening is probably about .228/.290/.360. And while part of me says "yea, that'll incentivize little contact hitters who run all over the place. Enrique Bradfield will love it", another part of me says "nah, they'll just double down on Kyle Schwarbers and try to win every game 3-1 on three solo homers since sequential offense is essentially impossible when nobody is on base."

Because a large majority of fans don't like four-and-a-half hour games that are mostly strikeouts? I've been a baseball fan since the late 70s, and while that kind of game might be a nice change of pace once in a long while, I'd far, far prefer my normal game to be 5-4 in a crisp 2:15. Before the pitch clock I'd regularly go to bed in the 8th inning, no matter the game situation. Now, combining that with 6:35 first pitches, I can often watch something else after the game's over. It's awesome. The pitch clock is the best rule change of my lifetime.