DrungoHazewood

Are you sure he was trying to do that? I think he'd have been more than happy to be Ichiro!, if only he had those skills.

If you're only going to carry 8-9 pitchers like it was 1980, that makes a 25-man roster the equivalent of a nearly 30-man roster today. I'm sure many of you know this, but teams had so much space the A's carried an Olympic sprinter (Herb Washington) who couldn't even play baseball for two years just to pinch run. In today's terms those teams were in September roster expansion and then some the whole year.

The high school/college gap in draftees has considerably narrowed over time. If you decide to rarely or never pick high school pitchers you'd have missed out on any number of stars like Maddux, Clemens, Schilling, Verlander, Glavine, Kershaw, Smoltz, Halladay, Sabathia, Pettitte, Saberhagen. Just scanning the list of WAR leaders since 1980 it looks like a majority of the top 20 never went to college.

Eh, that's mainly an artifact of the reserve clause era. Anyway, one day they'll come up with a plaque that rearranges its molecular properties so that when you look at it the player is in the uniform of your choosing.

Manny has about 75-80% of a solid HOF career. He passed Harold Baines in career value two years ago. He'd almost have to Chris Davis things to not go to Cooperstown at this point.

That would be awesome, but Machado has the 33rd-best rWAR through age 29 of anyone ever. And that's with him missing time for injury one year, and most of a year from COVID. You could reasonably argue that Manny is a top 25 player (non-pitchers) of all time through his age. Accounting for COVID Manny is nearly even with Cal through his age. Cal... and Yaz, Duke Snider, Yount, Brett and Reggie. If Henderson is even close to that we'll be talking about him in the same breath with Brooks, Cal, and Palmer. Would be magnificent, but let's not get too far ahead of ourselves.

If some team with a really solid offense but a hole in CF had just stuck Lough there for 500 PAs he'd have been a good 2-win player, maybe better. I'd love to have OAA numbers for him because he was a +13 fielder by DRS per 162 games, and that was playing sporadically and splitting time at all the OF positions. He might have been a Kiermaier-level defender if someone had just gotten over his mediocre hitting.

That's strike one. Strike two is he smokes, so Elaine had to dump him. Strike three is his involvement with the magic loogy situation, even if Roger McDowell was the real heavy.

Hernandez is a worthy HOFer, although like @Frobby said his 60 WAR is below most recently BBWAA inductees, but also above most of the Vet's Committee selections. He's an interesting case for WAR debates because his defensive contributions are as high or higher than some shortstops like Jeter. Which is kind of how it should work - an epic defensive first baseman should be about as valuable as a not-so-good defensive shortstop. That validates the positional adjustment in my mind. If Hernandez had been right handed he almost certainly would have been a pretty good 3B/SS/2B.

Not so much criticizing, just a cautionary note. Sean Foreman had his reasons, but oWAR/dWAR is not something that should be presented on page one. If it's anywhere it should be buried in some sub-menu.

The Mets also had Dave Magadan, who was part of that now-extinct species of good-glove, 4-homer first baseman who could sometimes hit .300. The world of 1987 obviously thought more of him than Milligan.

1) Hernandez was 34 and almost done by 1988. 2) Might have been nice to have someone on the team who wasn't into nose candy.

Because everyone knows that minor league performances don't mean anything and the scouts didn't like a stocky first baseman with 15 homer power who won't even expand the strike zone when he needs a GWRBI.

Don't use oWAR, it's just confusing. If you want to highlight offensive contributions use batting runs. The addition of position adjustment to both oWAR and dWAR is a structural mistake by bb-ref, makes those two metrics non-summable, and does more to obscure than enlighten. For example, the table above makes Mullins', Mateo's and Rutschman's offense look better because it's padded with position offsets. And the other direction for 1B/DH/COF.

Something that almost certainly would be different today is Milligan's promotion schedule and evaluation. In 1984, at the age of 22, Milligan had an .877 OPS in AA. In 1984 the Mets sent him back to AA, where he hit .310 with an .870 OPS. In 1985 the Mets sent him back to AA, where he had a .900 OPS and, finally, by the end of the year he was promoted to AAA. In 1987, at the age of 25, he spent the whole year in AAA and OPS'd 1.033. He was rewarded with 2 PAs in the majors, and being traded to the Pirates as part of the Mackey Sasser deal. The Mets simply didn't think he was a major league prospect or major league player.

I wouldn't be so sure Schilling didn't, too. But who knows.

Harvey might be the new Rudy Seanez. Almost 20 years in the majors, but 566 innings, or about 33 a season. Although I don't know if Harvey ever manages to stay healthy for an entire season; Seanez did a few times in his 30s.

I hate to break it to you, but Milligan was a free agent at 31, at the end of the 1992 season. Elias would have traded him for some prospects in the 1991-92 offseason, because it makes little sense to sign a first baseman with that combination of age and production to an extension, even if he walks 100 times a year. Agreed that the Davis deal seems very un-Elias. Although would even he have anticipated Steve Finley going from an .070 ISO at 25 to 304 career homers? I guess if our time machine includes the knowledge that they'd juice the ball and the players and build like 19 homer-friendly parks from 1990-2005.

Imagine typing that post in 1988. The first question would be "what the heck is an analytics department?" Wonder how many players could have been solid MLBers but nobody had the data or the tools to figure out what they needed? Or on the other hand, how many stars wouldn't been much if analytics had been there and figured out a strategy to attack their weaknesses that they had no way to counter? If you could take Elias' guys and data to 1989 the O's would win 120.

Nah, you're right. You've always been right. The evil seeps through this organization like the black oil in the X Files. It will never be cleansed, no matter what. That's the final straw, I'm a Rockies fan now. See ya!

That was the year the heart of the lineup hit 29, 26, 25, 33, and 24 homers. Oh wait, that's how many homers the top five starters allowed. That's was Chris Tillman's 2011 Brian Matusz impersonation, giving up 86 runs and 24 homers in 93 innings.

So what you're saying is that if the Orioles trade Santander and have four other key guys fail there's a chance they don't get to about 90 wins? Okay, yea, maybe.

Is Nimmo hurt a lot? He seems like a good hitter but has only played 100 games twice and he's 29. Benintendi is okay, fine even. But I don't see any reason to sign him as a free agent if you already have Hays, Santander, Stowers, Mullins, and McKenna at pre-free agency prices, and any number of other young outfielders who could be ready in the next year or so.

So, more-or-less, adding Rutschman over Chirinos/Bemboom was like taking a replacement-level outfielder and plugging in Mike Trout.

Lemme guess... more than enough for you to shake your fist at Elias and scream "service time manipulation!!!!"?