DrungoHazewood

I would urge patience. Maybe you don't go into '23 with him as the only choice at first, especially if he has a poor September. But I'll be surprised if he doesn't have much better seasons. Jones vs Mountcastle through age 25: rOBA: .338 vs .332 Rbat+: 101 vs 109 HR%: 3.1% vs 4.7% SO%: 19.7% vs 26% (League K rate then vs. now is about 6.5 per nine vs 8.5) BB%: 3.1% vs 6.8% LD%: 17.4% vs 25.4% Jones made better contact, but almost all of that is due to league rates being lower when he came up. Mountcastle walks more, hits more line drives, and has been as good an overall hitter. I understand he's frustrating to watch right now, but I'll bet they'll regret selling low on him. If the Orioles were looking for a first baseman and he was on another team the board would say "look, here's a guy whose team is frustrated with but with a xwOBA 40 points higher than his wOBA, let's get him for a steal."

It's funny, Vavra is listed at 6' 1", 200, and that's considered small. Eddie is listed as 6' 2", 190, although no doubt he got heavier as he aged. Palmeiro was 6', 180. Players have gotten bigger, Mountcastle doesn't look gigantic, but is 6' 4", 230. In the old days you were thought of as massive if you were 6' and 200 pounds, like Anson, Thompson, and Brouthers. Gehrig was 6', 200. I think Vavra could handle first defensively, but I don't know that he'll hit enough. His minor league OBP is a combination of .300 average and a good walk rate. In today's majors very few players hit .300 and with limited power his walk rate will probably drop by a fair amount. And he's already 25. I think he'll be lucky to OPS .800, and if I had to guess I'd think he'll settle in more like .750.

@Can_of_corn literally just mailed you a valentine.

40 years ago Bill James coined a phrase called the plexigalss principle, which was that teams tend towards .500. If a team drops by 15 games one year the tendency is for them to rebound the next. If a team leaps forward, odds are fairly strong that they'll fall back in previous years. He even had a checklist to help determine the trajectory of a team. Some of it is probably dated (I remember a bullet about AAA team's record, which could probably be replaced with how many top prospects a team has). But might be interesting to pull out.

That's more accurate. I'm currently reading Thomas Gilbert's How Baseball Happened, which focuses on the evolution and development of the modern form of baseball mostly in and around New York from roughly 1830-1870. The first organized convention of established teams playing the New York Game, which we now call baseball, happened in 1858. Yes, I know you were kidding and mocking. And I'm responding with nerdy and technical reasons why you're wrong on a mostly subjective matter.

Not that the Orioles aren't worthy of praise, they certainly are. But this statement was framed in a way to make them seem a little more unique than might be true. From the late 1890s through about 1960 teams usually played 154 games. To lose 110 out of 154 was quite an achievement, the equivalent of 116 losses out of 162. Even the 2018 Orioles didn't quite get there. Also, tanking wasn't a thing until the last decade or so. The teams that lost 110 games prior to that were either expansion teams like the Mets or really down-and-out resource-starved teams like the old Phillies and A's. Out of the 2500 or so team-seasons since 154 games became more-or-less the standard only 24 have managed to lose 110 or more games. Of those 24, four were expansion teams soon after coming into the league, four were 19th century teams in unusual circumstances, five were recent teams tanking, and about five were those pre-WWII sad sack franchises (Red Sox, A's., Phillies, Browns) who simply didn't have resources to compete at the major league level. So only a handful were just teams having really bad years.

Don't you think it's unusual to take a 36-year-old outfielder who hasn't played an inning at first since he was in AA 14 years ago and sign him to be the regular 1B on a contender? I suppose that could be creative, but also risky. I think I'd rather keep Mountcastle.

For the same "reason" Bob Melvin won it over Buck in 2012? Spite and petty vengeance. And I don't want to hear any nonsense about how the A's lept forward and Melvin was awesome and all. The Orioles were dead and buried and a laughingstock for years and got to the playoffs. Buck should have won that award.

In some of my earlier research into great leaps forward I omitted the '99 St. Louis team. That was an oversight. But... they have a massive syndicate baseball asterisk. The Perfectos were the other side of the infamous 1899 Cleveland Spiders coin. The Spiders and Perfectos were owned by the same people, the Robison brothers. The '98 Spiders were a very good team, over .500. They collapsed to 29-134 because the Robisons decided St. Louis was a better market and they could make more money with a good team there and transferred almost all of their good players, giving Cleveland table scraps. In 1899 St. Louis added Patsy Tebeau (minor star and major agitator and ruffian in 19th century baseball), Cupid Childs (near HOF level 2B), Bobby Wallace (HOF SS), Jesse Burkett (HOF OF), Cy Young (Cy Young), Jack Powell (a good starter), and a few others. In return they sent Cleveland a gift certificate for a free beer at the Robison Bros. saloon. I've mentioned that the 1889-90 Louisville team improved by 60 wins or something because of the chaos of the 1890 Players' League, so their improvement wasn't real in a modern sense. Neither is the Perfectos, who essentially stole three Hall of Famers and a number of other minor stars from Cleveland, helping to precipitate the demise of the Louisville, Baltimore, Cleveland and Washington NL teams the next offseason. After those four teams were contracted the league banned anyone from holding an ownership stake in more than one team, which is still the rule today.

Thinking about this a little bit, that means a typical, average MLB team goes about 13-1 each month when leading after seven. If the Orioles numbers hold up they'll only lose 3-4 games all year when leading after seven. Even a .500 team just getting through the fifth with a lead means you'll only lose two of those a month.

Whenever you compare someone to a player with a wildly unusual aging pattern that's probably not what's going to happen. Most players who have Nelson Cruz' career through age 27 don't end up with 450 homers. They end up more like Matt Meiske, who is Cruz' top age-27 comp on bb-ref. Or Josh Willingham. Or Ryan Ludwick. Meiske is probably underselling Santander, but he would have to be very happy if his career ended up like Willingham. Nelson Cruz is the Jamie Moyer of DHs. Anytime someone picks out a junkballing lefty with a 4.88 ERA through age 30 and says "see, that's Jamie Moyer, he's going to be Jamie Moyer" you can assume said player is going to be out of professional baseball inside of three years.

I think they messed with the ball. The NL was significantly lower-scoring than the AL for most of the 1930s. If I recall that correctly.

I'll have to do the math, but in an eight-team league I think one team making a jump that large was probably 30% or 50% of the total change.

Trey Mancini, 2018. .242/.299/.416, .715 OPS, 95 OPS+, 24 homers, 44 BB, 153 Ks in 636 PAs. Age 26. Ryan Mountcastle, 2022. .244/.291/.421, .712 OPS, 100 OPS+. 18 homers, 29 walks 122 Ks in 475 PAs. Age 25. I'd certainly rather see if Mountcastle can bounce back rather than, say, try to resign Mancini to a three or four year deal starting at 31. A trade of Mountcastle at this point is probably selling low. His '22 xwOBA is .347 and other batted ball metrics are positive, good chance he hits better going forward.

The MLBPA has sent out cards to minor league players to vote for an election that would allow them to join. This would be very interesting, since the history of the player's association has been very focused on just MLB players, with little attention and no membership for minor leaguers or prospective amateur draftees/signees. At any time there are 5000+ affiliated minor leaguers along with hundreds of indy league minor leaguers (who I don't believe are included in this). But just 780 MLB players at any one time. I wonder if they're at all concerned about the major leaguers being heavily out-voted on any issue that might involve the very different treatment of the two groups?

MLB in 2022: .243/.312/.395. And the Orioles play in a slight pitcher's park. Their offense is average.

The 2022 Orioles are not going to break the all time record for biggest runs allowed improvement of all time. I'm not sure what that record is, but the first team I pulled up was the 1930-31 Phillies, because the '30 Phillies allowed 1199 runs. The 1931 Phils allowed just 828, an improvement of 371 runs. For the Orioles to break that mark they'd have to allow just 584 runs this year. Which means 60 more runs the whole year in 35 games, or 1.71 per game. I'm fairly confident that the O's staff is not going to pitch to about a 1.50 ERA the rest of the way. The 1930 Phillies were so terrible that the next year they improved by 371 runs allowed and still finished 66-88-1. The 1930 Phils gave 100 starts (out of 154) to pitchers who'd end up with an ERA of at least 6.70.

Hold onto your hat! Cleveland has the same record as the O's (one less loss), and each of their probable starters has a significantly better ERA than their O's counterpart. But I get a feeling that anything short of a Baltimore sweep is going to bring out torches and pitchforks.

I forgot that in 2012 Jim Johnson had 51 saves and just 41 strikeouts. One of 17 pitchers in history with at least 15 saves and more saves than strikeouts, and the most saves on that list. Rk Player SO SVV Season Age Team Lg W L W-L% Dec ERA 1 Jim Johnson 41 51 2012 29 BAL AL 2 1 .667 3 2.49 2 Brian Fuentes 46 48 2009 33 LAA AL 1 5 .167 6 3.93 3 Mike Williams 43 46 2002 33 PIT NL 2 6 .250 8 2.93 4 Bob Wickman 41 45 2005 36 CLE AL 0 4 .000 4 2.47 5 Dan Quisenberry 41 44 1984 31 KCR AL 6 3 .667 9 2.64 6 Jose Mesa 37 43 2004 38 PIT NL 5 2 .714 7 3.25 7 Danny Graves 40 41 2004 30 CIN NL 1 6 .143 7 3.95 8 Danny Kolb 21 39 2004 29 MIL NL 0 4 .000 4 2.98 9 Todd Jones 33 38 2007 39 DET AL 1 4 .200 5 4.26 10 Todd Jones 28 37 2006 38 DET AL 2 6 .250 8 3.94 11 Mariano Rivera 36 36 1998 28 NYY AL 3 0 1.000 3 1.91 12 Dustin Hermanson 33 34 2005 32 CHW AL 2 4 .333 6 2.04 13 Troy Percival 33 33 2004 34 ANA AL 2 3 .400 5 2.90 14 Braden Looper 27 28 2005 30 NYM NL 4 7 .364 11 3.94 15 Todd Jones 14 18 2008 40 DET AL 4 1 .800 5 4.97 16 Dave Smith 16 17 1991 36 CHC NL 0 6 .000 6 6.00 17 Russ Christopher 14 17 1948 30 CLE AL 3 2 .600 5 2.90

I'm sure you remember that Johnson was a highly controversial figure. The center of the Buck save rule controversy, May of 2013 he blew three saves in about a week and half the board wanted him released. Never had over 7.5 K/9. Even the 2014 team had Brian Matusz (3.48 ERA as a LOOGY), Ryan Webb (6.8 K/9, 3.83 ERA), Tommy Hunter (45 Ks in 60 innings), TJ McFarland (5.2 K/9). Andrew Miller pitched 20 innings, less than Evan Meek (who?). Brad Brach had 62 innings, six homers, 25 walks, 54 Ks, 3.18 ERA, 3.90 FIP. Dillon Tate has 60 innings, 10 walks 51 Ks, four homers, 2.70 ERA, 3.09 FIP. Britton, O'Day, and that group is pretty comparable to Bautista, Perez and the rest.

With the liberalized transfer rules NCAA sports are moving towards a kind of extreme all-laundry model. You have no idea who is on the team from year-to-year so you're really just rooting for the school. Or the coach? Who roots for the coach? Essentially every player is on a one-year contract all the time, every school is trying to get good players to transfer in, and every good player wants to leave as soon as the pros want them. Bench players are the only ones likely to stay around for four years. I get that it was sometimes unfair to tie a kid to a school if he got into a situation he didn't like. But as a compelling sports league the current setup is clearly inferior to 10 or 20 years ago. Especially with the Big 10 and SEC moving hard to become two hyperconferences aligned to maximize revenues and markets at the expense of more than a century of rivalries and history. Maybe Virginia Tech will do okay in a new ACC that's us, Wake, NC State, UVA, Syracuse... uhh... VCU, Coastal Carolina... whatever. Can't we just go back to the Metro Conference or the Big East or something that was fun?

Just avoid being the Phillies of 10 or 12 years ago, when they started handing out big extensions to everyone who played on their World Series teams. Need to let Nick Markakis walk, but eventually get him back for the Orioles HOF ceremony.

Obviously the 2023 Orioles will be in a position to press hard for current wins. But the mid-range projections for the '22 team was something like 65 wins. If anyone criticizes Elias for not going for it last winter they're badly mistaken.

Of course the Orioles aren't going to get into a position where they're trading everyone all the time. Even the Rays, with their microscopic attendance and a stoic approach to players, still sign players to long-term deals. They signed Longoria to a big deal, bought out arb/free agency and extended Archer and Lowe, signed Kiermaier. Kiermaier has been on the Rays for 10 years. The Orioles are probably not going to be a team that resigns or extends all of their home-grown stars, but they're also unlikely to be some kind of more transactional Tampa Bay. If Gunnar and Adley and others are willing to entertain deals buying out arb and early free agency years I see little reason to think Elias wouldn't pursue that. Cue @Can_of_corn reminding us that the Angeloses don't allow us to enjoy life, and most of what I just wrote is rank speculation informed by a naïve twinkle of optimism.

You may be overstating the case a little. But I'll pull some more data: They're 22nd in bullpen K/9, about 0.5 behind average. But within a few tenths of the Rays and Blue Jays. The pen is 8th in MLB in K:BB ratio. Fourth in the majors in BB/9. Eighth in HR/9. 11th in BABIP, so combining that with the defense it's not like they're riding some ridiculously unsustainable luck on balls in play. Yes, this is with Lopez through July, but he has about 1/10th of the pen's total innings. Pull him out and the difference isn't going to be large. So I think this is a foundation for a pretty good bullpen, especially if Elias and team can continue to add pieces over the winter.