DrungoHazewood

I, for one, look forward to a MLB game played in a park that's 200 feet to the fences. Wait... what?

Who doesn't want their sports to be a little edgier? Is the batter on the take? Or the pitcher? Will Odor climb up the backstop and drop on a guy with a folding chair on the way to winning the Intercontinental Tag Team Title? Will Vavra bite a chunk out of someone's ear on pay per view?

Will they have a special tunnel or window where the players and coaches can go to bet on the game while it's going on, so as to not raise suspicion? If they just walk up through the crowd to the gambling salon it might bring uncomfortable questions.

The last best-of-nine Series was '21. Duh.

Caleb Joseph framed the hell out of that year.

It's still pushing the limits of credibility. Let's assume optimistically that Rutschman plays at the same rate but in 35 more games, while Chirinos gets docked 2/3rds of his playing time. That puts Rutschman at 4.5 WAR, Chirinos at maybe -0.2 or -0.5 instead of Fangraphs' -1.2. So the O's get 2-3 additional wins, and they're now 10.5 out of first. So they'd be sitting about 7-8 games out with Rutschman in the lineup from opening day. The only way they win the division in this scenario is if the Yanks have a terrible rest of August and September while the O's surge.

See here. #sechzig #TSV1860

Lamela is awesome, a true cult hero. Master of sh$%housery, so naturally loved by his team and loathed by everyone else. At least loved by his team when he's not going in for a late, two-footed tackle and getting a red in a tie game you need to break into the top four. Chelsea has certainly had their share of Diego Costas.

Like you've never had a typo!

How can you not love a dude who still scored 15 goals in a reasonably high level soccer league when he's 35 and looks like he's in shape to be playing in an over-40 Sunday pickup league? He finally got kicked off of 1860 Munich (when he was the captain!) because he had some youth coaching gig on the side and was not showing up to his real, professional team's practices. And yes, Americans tend to name girls Sascha. But in Europe where the name originated it's a guys name.

1) I don't ever give a crap about the Yankees 2) Over the last four years or so I've paid a lot more attention to Sasha Mölders and Erik Lamela than whomever the Orioles were trotting out there to get the #1 overall draft pick.

There are like a million web pages and books and Twitter feeds about the last 100 years of baseball. Gotta concentrate on stuff that hasn't been beaten to death forever. Nobody in their right mind would rather watch 30 seconds of that pompus, overwraught Jeter miniseries than learn more about Lip Pike.

Remember how Manny was the huge key to the 2012 stretch run and the emergence of Chis Davis kept the 2013 Orioles from total collapse, and then Manny missed the whole second half of 2014 and Davis was bad and then got a PED suspension and they won 96 games?

Yea, anything that benefits the Yanks is quite a bit worse than all of humanity being roasted to death alive.

Found online:

Someone has probably mentioned this in the 33 pages of this thread, but until today I didn't know that Mateo was the 2016 Yankees' #1 prospect. Ahead of Aaron Judge. And was Baseball America's #26 overall prospect in MLB.

Isn't the worst case scenario that the sun runs out of hydrogen and begins its transformation into a red supergiant, cooking planet earth but doing it slowly enough that there are years of a hell-like horror across the planet, but quickly enough that we can't develop the technology to leave? And we don't get the pick and lose the extra year.

As a rookie he's walking in 13.3% of PAs. Walk rate peaks in a player's mid-to-late 30s, on average. So if he manages to avoid the catcher pitfall of being constantly injured and that derailing everything, it's plausible that he's walking a lot later in his career. I don't know if he'll regularly get 600 plate appearances, but his rate will be high enough to get to 100 if he does.

Watching Rutschman's plate discipline I immediately think of a guy who, had he played 75 or 100 years ago, would have 100 walks and 40 strikeouts in a full season. As a green rookie he's striking out in less than 18% of PAs in a league that's at 22.2%, while walking at more than 1.5 times the leave average. In the 1930s or something when the overall K rate was 8% he'd have a slash line like .300/.400/.500. He'd be Mel Ott.

Hey, it's only been 27 years since the Orioles had a rotation that included Mussina, Kevin Brown, Jamie Moyer, Scott Erickson, and Sid Fernandez! Of course Moyer and Fernandez weren't any good, and Brown left after one year, to be replaced by David Wells.

2022 OPACY park factor (HR): 0.792 Camden Yards made Jordan Lyles look like a competent starter.

I was trying to come up with some kind of weird circumstances that could have happened in 1916 that allows this, but I can't think of anything. Most likely it's a mistake. Hopefully one day they can get to the play-by-play from newspaper accounts or official scoresheets and can correct it.

It looks like BJ Ryan actually did this. Orioles-Tigers, 2003. He was brought in with two out in the 7th with Omar Infante on first. Before throwing a single pitch he picked off Infante. Orioles score three times in the top of the 8th, Buddy Groom comes on in the bottom of the 8th. Ryan gets the win without throwing a pitch. While last night Kyle Bradish gets 14 outs and leaves with the lead and gets a no-decision. The bb-ref/retrosheet data has 33 instances of a pitcher getting a win after throwing just a third of an inning that included a caught stealing. Probably a better way of capturing this is the 26 pitchers who got a win without an official batter faced. (Note: the last game on this list is a 1916 contest between the Tigers and Senators where Hooks Dauss is credited with allowing an earned run and getting the win in a game where he had zero batters faced. I think this has to be in error. I don't know how you could allow a run without having a batter faced. Unfortunately there is no available play-by-play for that game. Also of note in that game is the losing pitcher is Hall of Fame OF Sam Rice.)

26 man roster now. A limit of 13 pitchers on the roster. So 13 non-pitchers. Nine starters. One is the backup catcher. One is a utility infielder. Usually one is a 4th outfielder. One discretionary spot left. Could be a platoon offense-first guy. Could be another infielder. 5th outfielder who compliments the other four's skills wouldn't be weird. Right now the O's have both McKenna and Phillips even though Santander is really the only defensively-challenged starting OF.

Two opposing points: - I generally believe that the platoon effect is real, is almost universal, and anyone who has a reverse split (i.e. a lefty who hits lefties better) is just seeing an anomaly and will probably revert to a typical ~.100 points better against opposite-handed pitching. - Kyle Stowers has absolutely crushed lefties over the past two seasons So... I don't know. I'd probably not target him as a platoon player, or try to sit against tough lefties. Especially if the platoon partner is someone like Nevin, who is currently sporting a Lenn Sakata-like career OPS+ of 76.