DrungoHazewood

Walter Johnson pitched in the majors from 1907-1927. Catchers were using more-or-less modern protective equipment by the time of his debut. The face mask was invented and quickly adopted in the 1870s, chest protector by the 1880s, some catcher-specific gloves also in the 1880s and the big pillow mitt in the 1890s. Roger Bresnahan was using shin guards in the very early 1900s, almost certainly borrowing from similar cricket equipment. Previously in the 1890s catchers had been wrapping their legs with newspaper or leather.

Oh, but internal improvements never satisfy the messageboard and Twitterverse. You know nothing short of three major free agent signings and a handful of epic trades will cut it. We're going to seriously backslide towards irrelevancy unless we can package Hays, Mountcastle and Lakins for a couple TOR starters.

The equivalent of five walks in a month is something like one run, so if this is an intentional strategy to increase framing efficiency the trade offs could very well be worth it. Or it could just be a random thing, or it could be opposing batters have noticed some minor thing and are trying to subtly wack at Adley's mitt.

A ton of what? Let's say he has $20M in surplus value over the two years until he's a free agent. At current market rates that'll get you about 50,000 metric tons (or 55,115 US tons) of soybeans. Would you trade two years of Anthony Santander for 55,000 tons of soybeans?

Hey, the '64 Phils were 6.5 games up in the standings on September 17th and by September 30th were 2.5 games back. We just need John Schneider to channel his inner Gene Mauch have Manoah go eight innings every two or three days the rest of the way.

I think it's pretty likely in the future the O's are going to have a lefty-heavy lineup and they'll probably carry some kind of random Benny Ayala, Delmon Young, Jesus Aguilar types on the roster for when they face a tough lefty. Guys you can sign for $3.75 and hopefully they'll OPS .800 against lefties and otherwise stay out of the way. But in small samples sometimes it doesn't work out. Aguilar isn't going to be that guy after the next couple weeks...

My favorite baseball game I've ever attended. And I've seen a fair number of them, including one where the Why Not? Orioles defeated Nolan Ryan, the playoff game where Mussina beat Randy Johnson, Mussina's 1st and 100th career wins, a Floyd Rayford 13th inning walk-off, many others.... but this one tops them all.

What has been the main impact of the shift on second basemen? I think it's mostly that they play more up the middle, and make many more plays far from first, often deep backhanded plays. Now they might revert to a more traditional position with less of a demand for those long throws and teams may get away from the Schoop, Odor types who profile more like third basemen. Whether that makes them more or less defensively important, I'm not sure.

In most of the rest of the sports world if you are interested in a player/manager/coach and he's under contract to someone else you go talk to that person and their current employer and try to work out a deal. Chelsea recently sacked their manager Thomas Teuchel. They wanted Brighton's manager, Graham Potter, to replace him. Chelsea's owners went to Brighton's and to Potter, and worked out a deal where they'd pay Brighton £21.5m for Potter and five of his coaches. In mid-week between matches this happened. Baseball, and maybe other North American sports are kind of weird where we have this concept of tampering when another club is interested in buying your guy. And I think that only applies to players here.

In all of 2022 there is one reliever (Jaime Barria) who has thrown 3+ innings of relief at least 10 times. There are only 10 pitchers with five relief appearances of 3+ innings. The Sammy Stewart role is basically extinct. Nobody carries a pitcher whose role is to come in and pitch most of the rest of the game when the starter gets knocked out in the 2nd or 3rd.

There are 27 LH/SH MLBers with an OPS+ of 120 or more this year (min 300 PAs). There are 38 righties. Despite there being about twice as many righties. Weird that they're in danger of going extinct when there are a larger percentage of good LHH with shifting legal.

Here are some observations about the rules changes and their pilot projects in the minors. On steals, they say the minors are seeing about as many steals in 2022 as they saw stolen base attempts in 2019, indicating something like a 25% increase in steals. I didn't think about this, but the pitch clock can help runners, too. If you know the pitch has to come at the 20 second mark you can often jump the gun at 19 seconds knowing the pitch has to come right now or it's a ball. You don't even have to wait to see if the pitcher is pitching. So, actually, with runners on it would benefit the pitcher to pitch even faster so the runner can't time him.

I was hoping this would coincide with season three of Ted Lasso, but looks like that's not happening. I'll either follow along on MLB app, or pay $5 to re-up Apple plus just for this. Probably the app...

You have to assume that any time any player has success the other 29 teams have their scouting and analytics guys pouring over video and figuring out how to counter that. It's constant adjustments on both sides.

I doubt that's going to be anything like the impact. First, they'll keep shifting to the greatest extent possible under the new rules, with an outfielder playing rover and the shortstop or second baseman playing almost up the middle. So that probably cuts half or more the effectiveness compared to playing straight up. But also I have a hard time believing a league that strikes out once per half inning is going to hit .273. But I suppose we'll see.

I don't know if this is completely 1:1, but in 2021 they tried the 2 pickoff rule in low A ball and there were 1.23 steals per game. In 2019 in A ball (before the purge and restructuring) there were 0.83 steals per game in A ball. That's nearly a 50% increase. I have no idea if this will be duplicated in the majors. In 2022 so far we're seeing 0.51 steals/game. A 47% increase would be 0.75. The highest mark in any of our lifetimes is the 0.85 in 1987. So it's plausible we could see some totals not approached since the 80s. Although back then there were little or no analytics to tell us that the cost of a CS is very high and the break-even point in most situations is a success rate of nearly 75%. The highest SB mark under the modern definition is 1.48/game in 1900. There were three steals/game in 1887, but back then the definition included things like going from first to third on a single. I think I'm good saying those marks are safe.

Didn't he win the 200 cubit sprint in the Olympics of 46 BC?

Yes, and yes. I don't like your strategy, it negatively impacts me and it's too inconvenient to work around, so please make it illegal.

The diagram a few posts down is going to be commonplace. Look at Joe Gallo's spray diagram on Statcast. He basically only hits flyballs to straightaway right and left/left-center. So you put one outfielder in short right, another in LC, and he may not be helped by this change at all. We'll see the King Kelly oddness for the first time in forever. Kelly was a star in the 1800s, and when Bill James was working on the fielding analysis for Win Shares he noticed that Kelly had crazy high assist totals, and weird PO and fielding percentages for an outfielder. What was happening was he'd be listed in the box score as an outfielder, but would regularly sneak in and play fifth infielder and he ended up with stats more like a second baseman.

You all know that the new standard LHH defense will just involve the LFer playing rover in short RF, right? SS will be an inch to the 3B side of 2B and will still field anything hit up the middle. So next year they'll paint circles where all nine fielders have to stand.

Or... if banning the shift doesn't have the desired outcome maybe the next step is requiring a reverse shift. Any time a lefty comes up, all the fielders have to be on the third base side of second. Then we might get the next Ted Williams.

He was a surprisingly good shortstop for a left fielder.

Basically zero chance of anyone hitting .400 until they drop strikeouts by at least 30%. Last time anyone hit .400 the league hit .266, minorities weren't allowed to play, and there were 3.6 K/9. Maybe we see a run at .400 if they ban the shift, move some fences out, and push the mound back 3'.

Media coverage increases interest in the game and the team, which indirectly leads to more attendance. If you don't have any way to watch the Orioles on TV you're going to be less likely to go to the ballpark. Every year millions drop cable/satellite, and a pretty small fraction replace that with the one legal way to stream the Orioles.

According to Forbes the Orioles (at least pre-COVID but after the tanking started) had revenues in the ballpark of $250M and almost no team spends 50% of revenue on MLB payroll. Nobody is going bankrupt in the modern era.