DrungoHazewood

Nobody is going to cry if those things are added. But not adding them doesn't guarantee failure. Last year's D'backs won just 84 games, had a bunch of pretty big holes in their lineup, their bench wasn't that deep, three of their top six starters had an ERA over 5.00, their closer had just 13 saves, their bullpen innings leader had a 4.73 ERA, and they ended up just three wins away from the World Series title.

I have to think that most of that difference is that Baseball Reference thinks the O's are going to win the Division, while Fangraphs thinks the Yanks will. By basic probability having to play another series, in rough terms, halves your odds of winning the whole thing. If each series were a coin flip (which isn't that far from reality) the odds of winning four straight series is (.5)^4 = 6%, while getting through three is (.5)^3 = 12.5%. That's why the Yanks were able to win so many Series in the pre-Division era and can't today. Because they made the postseason most of the time, and had roughly a 50% shot on day one of the playoffs prior to 1969, but today it's (about) 6-12%. Edit: as I'm typing this @Hallas says mostly the same thing.

Yes, they're asking pitchers to throw at 110% all the time, just like everyone else in the world from 11U on up.

That probably makes the most sense. It's not often you see a guy post a 6.10 AAA ERA over 36 starts and still spend almost all of his time in the rotation. His numbers over the last year and a half are abysmal. Like six walks and two homers per nine. That would be completely unacceptable in pre-humidor Coors. Remember when Ken Dixon was hurt in '87 and gave up a mind-bending 31 homers in 105 innings? That's basically what Stoudt was doing in the PCL this year.

Remember Eddie Rogers? I was at a BaySox game in 2000, looking at the roster, and was like "Man, this kid is 18 years old and holding his own in AA. He's going to be a star!" But then two things happened: he never really developed, and come to find out he was three years older than his fake Dominincan Republic docs said he was. But he can always say that he had a Major League season with a 5.000 OPS. Let's see somebody top that.

It's 27, but like I said, roughly 26-31 is fairly flat if you average across all MLB players. Some studies come up with some other age (usually older), but they're often addressing survivor bias incorrectly. They'll just look at productivity by age of MLB players, and not account for playing time. For example, you might find that 33-year-olds hit about as well as 27-year-olds, but that there are three times as many 27-year-olds in the league because 2/3rds of the 33-year-olds have been weeded out of the majors and are providing zero value. And the ones left are the best of the lot. So when doing an aging study you need to add a bunch of ballast to account for that effect in those age groups.

The peak has always been around 27, but the curve is pretty flat between 26 and 31. Give or take. Of course individuals may peak at pretty much any age. Nick Markakis' best season was 24, Al Kaline was just a fraction of a win off his high at 20, and Hoyt Wilhelm's most valuable year was at 36. Although most pitchers don't have an aging curve with a peak, so much as a scatter plot. Then you have David Ortiz and Barry Bonds who had very late peaks because of clean livin' and hard work...

Yes, that's about right. I think there's a bit of... we'll call it interpretation in that opinion. You'd need thousands of PAs in very specific conditions to definitively prove that's right. But if you ran a simulation where every player had a fixed platoon advantage (say, everyone has an OPS 15% better against opposite-handed pitchers) the observed results of a 100 years of play would be indistinguishable from what we see in reality. In other words, you'd get a distribution of results centered at 15% better, with some players 30% better, and a few with observed reverse splits. But the underlying reality would be everyone has the same true talent splits. Which is not the same as saying there's zero variation on platoon split ability, just that it's small and dwarfed by differences in overall hitting ability. So small that you'd be better off assuming everyone has the same split. One other thing, I think it's plausible that players who never get to face same-sided pitchers may see that ability atrophy. At least temporarily. So if you take a John Lowenstein and suddenly have him get a bunch of PAs against lefties he might do worse than what's typical because Earl and Joe Altobelli wouldn't let him face a lefty for years. But even with that I'm not confident that would be more than a short-term blip.

Yes, I think the story goes that they wouldn't let him name it Budweiser Stadium so he named it Busch Stadium and about 20 minutes later launched Busch Beer. And I don't really buy the cheap and financially struggling argument when teams like Real Madrid and Man U that are worth $billions have ads on their kits, and have for decades.

Almost all soccer teams have their crest and colors on the jersey, but it's sometimes less obvious than the corporate logos. Sometimes lower division teams have multiple corporate sponsors with ads on not only the jersey but also shorts and socks. But I don't mind, because that may be the difference between them staying afloat financially and not.

Way back in time teams didn't have official nicknames. Sometimes they picked them up, like the National League Chicagos were called the Colts, probably because of a stable of young players signed by Cap Anson. The papers were as likely to call teams the Bostons or the Baltimores as anything else. Or if there was more than one team/league in the area they might be called the Washington Nationals, since they were the NL team in Washington. If you looked into the official legal documentation for the franchise it would just say something like the Cincinnati National League Baseball Club. It was well into the 20th century before teams started making nicknames official, legal things. As late as the 1930s the Braves started calling themselves the Bees for some reason, and then switched back to Braves. So I would kind of like it if people occasionally referred to them as the Baltimores or the Baltimore Nine or the Baltimore Americans just as a throwback reference to long ago eras.

We've had Wrigley Field and Busch Stadium since before almost all of us were born. Look at the stadiums of 100 or even 150 years ago and the outfield walls are completely covered with advertising. 110 years ago the Federal League's Brooklyn Tip Tops were named for the Tip Top Bread that was baked by owner Robert Ward's company. Major League players have been paid spokesmen for all kinds of products, many of questionable taste, since the beginning of time. Probably my first exposure to Joe DiMaggio was as the Mr. Coffee guy. I'm going to bet that if Harry Von Der Horst and Ned Hanlon thought they could make $500 from selling advertising on the NL Orioles' uniforms, and renaming Union Park to Dr. Hornswaggle's Miracle Brain Tonic Stadium they'd have absolutely 100% done that. Perhaps I'm just not indignant enough about things, but I have a hard time getting worked up about a T Rowe Price patch on the O's sleeve.

I like my baseball decided by the players, not by the missed calls of umpires who aren't given the best available tools to do their job better because of some misguided idea that that takes away from the human element of the game. Quite obviously it's a strawman to suggest that if we give umps better tools to call balls and strikes we might as well have R2D2 and C3PO playing Strat-O-Matic instead of real baseball games. How is the game going to be worse if the home plate ump has a little buzzer that verifies if each pitch is a ball or strike in real time? If they implemented that and didn't tell us we'd never know, except that we'd get suspicious that the balls and strikes were essentially always right and we'd never seen that before.

But is there any reason for that, or just one of those things? Like a significant fraction of 1950s CFers being Mantle, Mays, Snider, and Ashburn, and like 40% of 1960-70s SSs hitting .195 with no power or walks. I don't think anyone is choosing poor-hitting CFs to focus on defense or baserunning or whatever.

I'd also guess that he's not 100%. Nagging injury, eyesight, illness, something.

I'd bet there's no small number of players who've fallen off a cliff at whatever age you pick. Not commonplace, but far from rare. Will depend on criteria, like how you define "off a cliff". Famous ones come to mind like George Scott. First two years in the league he hit .273 with a 122 OPS+. Third year (age 24, not quite the same) he hit .171 with a 40 OPS+. Adam Dunn had a 100+ OPS plus every year of his career from 21-30, including 141 from 29-30, then at 31 hit .159 with a 54 OPS+. Mike Devereaux had a 54 OPS+ right in the middle of his career at 31 (was that the year he got beaned?). Mike Davis of the A's was a very solid hitter from 26-28, then kind of randomly hit .196 with a .530 OPS at 29. Scott Brosius had OPS+es of 114, 127, 53, 121 from ages 28-31. Mark DeRosa had a .614 OPS at 29 then was pretty solid the next five years. Paul Blair was regularly an above-average hitter through 30, then at 31 he hit .218 with a 54 OPS+.

This is the part where we talk about how the O's scouting and development is total trash and that all Gibson had to do was go to a halfway decent org and he's a solid contributor. Oh, wait, I fell asleep there for a while. Is it still 2016?

That's some good information. But let's look at that a little bit... The O's OPS facing the starter the first time in the game is .674, as you note, which is 15th in the Majors. So they're exactly average. In 556 PAs. But one thing to remember is that includes all first PAs in a game against the starter, whether that's the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd inning. In the 1st inning the O's have a .703 OPS, good for 12th in MLB. But as I just typed in another thread, unless you have a real good reason to believe otherwise, your going-in assumption for all random splits and small samples of data is that there's nothing there. It's just noise. It'll all even out in the long run. I see no reason to think otherwise with this. The O's place in the league in OPS in each inning: 1st: 12th 2nd: 5th 3rd: 6th 4th: 2nd 5th: 18th 6th: 19th 7th: 1st 8th: 5th 9th: 15th Extras: 6th Overall: 3rd I wouldn't look too deeply at these tea leaves, lest we wrap ourselves up in trying to hire a 5th and 6th inning hitting coach to try to solve this troubling "problem" with scoring in those innings. The O's are 3rd in OPS in a pitcher's park. They're only scored 10 fewer runs than the super-Yank$, and they've played three fewer games. They're good. It'll work itself out.

"Do we have too many streaky hitters to win it all"? The short answer is no. The long answer involves first defining what is meant by streaky and then doing a bit of analysis to see if the Orioles have more or fewer hitters who fit that definition than average. Because right now we haven't even remotely established that the Orioles' hitters are streaky, much less to the extent that we can quantify a negative or positive impact on team performance.

It's pretty safe to assume all variances in small samples of plate appearances are just random noise unless you have really good evidence otherwise. And unless you're talking some very specific metrics like K rate or GB/FB rate 40 games is a small sample. OBP and SLG take 100s of at bats to reach significance, and batting average over a full season's worth of PAs.

Tony, I wasn't trying to counter your points. I was just trying to put this in context. That success is drafting/developing the occasional non-first rounder. No matter the organization they're not at all likely to hit on most of their picks after round one, and even in round one the success rate is lower than commonly believed.

Another way to look at this is picks by franchise/round. The Dodgers' last significantly good 3rd round pick was Phil Nevin, in 1989. In the 21st century they've yet to have a 3rd rounder reach five wins. The Yanks last got five wins from a 2nd round pick when they drafted Al Leiter in 1984. And being the Yanks they traded him at the age of 23 for the last few years of Jesse Barfield's career, so they really got almost nothing out of that. The Red Sox drafted Jonathan Papelbon in the 4th round of 2003, and he was worth 23 wins. Aside from that they haven't gotten any significant value from a 4th rounder since 1990. Since drafting Dan Haren (35 wins) in 2001, the Card's only 5-win 2nd round pick was Jon Jay (12 wins, 2006). They have the reputation of being one of the best orgs in baseball, and their 21 picks in the 2nd round since 2006 have totaled 7 wins in their careers. Or about 0.3 wins/player. Again, you can do this all day long.

Randomly pick a year, any year: 2010, round 3. JT Realmuto is the only 2010 3rd rounder with a career value over six wins. Of the 34 picks in that round, 30 of them have a career value under three wins. 2007, round 2. Freeman, Stanton, Zimmerman and Cozart were good to great. But Josh Fields (1.8 WAR for his entire career) was the 6th-best player taken that round. About half never appeared in the majors at all. 2013, round 4. Bellinger and Kiner Falefa are over 10 wins. But just six players got a single win in their careers. More than half never appeared in the majors at all. Jonah Heim, the O's pick later traded for Steve Pearce, with a .682 career OPS is the 4th-most valuable player taken in that round. 2015, round 2. Brady Singer (7.6 WAR) is the best player taken in that round. Scott Kingery is the only player from the round who's played 300 MLB games. 2005, round 2. Yunel Escobar and Chase Headley had good careers. Nobody else made 10 wins. More than half never appeared in the majors. 1995, round 4. Russ Ortiz and Adam Everett are the only players who had a career over replacement level. 1989, round 3. Pretty great round with Olerud, Salmon, Neagle, Shane Reynolds, and Phil Nevin. But even with that 19 of the 25 players taken were worth 2 wins or less, with the majority never appearing in the majors. You could keep going like this forever... A majority of 2nd rounders have little to no career value in the majors, and that number goes up with each succeeding round. If a team is getting some kind of value out of a 2nd or 3rd rounder every few years they're doing better than most.

Actually, that's exactly what it's meant for, to compare value across different types of players and different types of contributions. It's to put everything, hits, homers, steals, fielding, pitching, on the common baseline of wins. Tom Tango and Rally and the others who developed WAR specifically were doing it (or at least one of the main goals was) to help determine value for contracts. I have had conversations with them on this very topic. See posts #236 and 240 here.

I get that if the situation presented himself Teheran could get a spot start, because someone has to and when he's inevitably DFA'd no one would care. But the implication was that he was a "solution" to some supposed hole in the Orioles' rotation. Solution, to me, means plug him in there every five days for the rest of the year, which is totally preposterous unless Elias and Co think they have some kind of infomercial one easy trick to fix for all that's wrong with him.