DrungoHazewood

I would consider a position move for a corner OF or 3B before I'd go into a season with Nevin as a primary choice at first. Of course Mountcastle is written into the 2023 lineup card there with permanent ink.

Exactly what I was going to post. If for some reason Nevin is first on the depth chart at 1B in mid-March of next year the reality is (waiver wire pickup) is really first on the depth chart. It's trivial to find a better first baseman for free. The last time Nevin hit for more than a hundred at bats was at high-altitude Lancaster in A ball.

Teams rarely change in nice, smooth incremental ways. They don't go 65 wins, 70, 75, 80, 85, 90, 95. They're at least as likely to go 65, 82, 77, 95. The 2011 Orioles were last in the AL in ERA, runs allowed, hits allowed, homers allowed. They made some seemingly minor changes (including getting rid of Koji, by far 11's best reliever) and finished 6th or 8th in all those things in '12, and allowed 155 fewer runs. The 1997 Orioles had a 3.91 ERA and allowed the fewest runs in the AL. With many of the same pitchers the 1998 Orioles allowed 104 more runs, dropping to 7th of 14. The '88 Orioles allowed 789 runs, last in the AL. In 1989 they started Dave Schmidt opening day and still allowed 103 fewer runs, and moved from 14th to 7th in the league.

Is that based on one- or three-year park factors? Okay, I'll go look it up... and it appears to be single-season.

I think the simplest explanation is that he just doesn't want to be in DC for the next 15 years. Maybe they should have offered the deal at a time of year when it's not 95 degrees with 82% humidity.

How much does chartering a plane cost? What would this be, like a Lear Jet? The Google says something like $5-10k per billable flight hour. Let's say you have to fly Soto to LA and back from DC. That's about a five hour flight plus time on either end, so let's call it 12 hours... maybe as much as $120k. Not counting the time the plane is sitting and waiting for Soto. Does even a $500M organization spend $100k on a flight for one guy just to be nice? My organization is a $100M piece of a $1B larger organization and everyone flies coach everywhere they go.

I don't think I'd ever classify $50M a year plus giving up prospects as a steal. Not when you can build a semi-competitive roster for less than one player's salary. We've had debates here in the past about whether it was ever smart to give one player 20-30% of the payroll. Here we'd be talking, at least in the short term, about giving one player 70% of the payroll. There are all kinds of implications from that. Clubhouse dynamics where Ohtani makes more in three months than the rest of the players combine for in a year. Risk, if he goes down for six months that's six or eight wins. I guess you could probably find examples where this worked but it would be like when David Beckham signed with LA Galaxy when he was still pretty much in his prime. It would be like Giancarlo Stanton signing with the Long Island Ducks. Or like if Bryce Harper had gone to high school in some small Iowa town that's never had a minor leaguer. I'm not saying it couldn't work, it's just unusual and might present issues we don't expect.

I don't know how anyone ever hits a breaking ball. The mean reaction time for a human to visual stimuli is 180-200 ms. A 90 mph fastball released 58 feet from the plate takes 440 ms to get there. The batter has roughly two tenths of a second to see the ball, identify the pitch, and swing where he thinks it's going to be. I say that's impossible. The whole game of baseball is some elaborate trick with mirrors and Play Dough.

I'm sure the teams have that information, but I don't know of publicly available sources. Not that I've looked. I think that the average fan of any team that spends money on tickets, merchandise and similar is going to be better-off than average. If you're making $60k a year you're probably not spending $3000 each on four season tickets. But the demographics would skew differently on a general survey that just asked if you're a fan.

I'm going to be in Norfolk week after next and really want to see as many prospects as possible. Is that not valid?

Hold on. I thought after Bud made home field advantage in the Series for the winner everyone went back to being all 1970 Pete Rose and would spike an opponent from shoulder to ankle if it gave them an advantage. Is that not true? Also, the mics emphasized (possibly not in a good way) that you can carry on a conversation with 2/3rds of the outfield for five minutes and it's probably not going to have any impact on the game whatsoever.

I think it's plausible they talked a bit. But it didn't happen. They can talk all day long, but the Orioles haven't signed an external free agent to a big contract in over 15 years. And these would be the biggest contracts ever, or close.

I suppose in a though-experiment way you could consider what might be the implications of a .500ish team with a bare-bones payroll like the Orioles adding $80M for two superstars. The reality is few superstars would consider Baltimore as a long-term destination any more than they'd consider Cleveland or Kansas City or Pittsburgh. And the Orioles would be very unlikely to offer the industry-leading contracts necessary to make it happen.

There's a wide gap between saying that every team can afford far larger payrolls and actually making that happen. There was a lot of talk about competitive balance and tanking and minimum payrolls and the like. The practical result of all of that seems to be just about zero.

I just don't think anyone is going to peg him as a player with an established value of 10 wins a year. Maybe I'm wrong, but even discounting 25% for risk and decline you're looking at $60M or more a year. Is someone really going to sign him to a 8/500 deal? Would anyone besides the Dodgers and Yanks even toy with that amount? Maybe I'm underestimating the tolerance for risk among GMs who are nearly certain that they'll be in some other job before the contract is over, and owners who see the team as a vanity project.

I have no doubt whatsoever that there are 200 pitchers in the majors today who could throw 670 innings under the conditions of the early 1880s. Throwing from a box with a front line 50' from the plate. Competition was maybe comparable to today's mid-tier college level. Average player was maybe 5' 9", 160 pounds. Home runs were rare. Substitutions were only with the consent of the other team, if at all. And the way they figured out 670 innings was unsustainable was to have a bunch of guys throw 670 innings and then watch as their arms break down and their careers are over after a few years. Old Hoss Radbourne is a legendary Hall of Famer from that era. His MLB debut was at age 26. The last time he led the league in anything positive was at 29. It's almost like throwing three complete games a week is detrimental to your arm.

You'd have no concerns with a franchise that has rarely had a $100M total payroll signing two players who'd almost certainly cost at least $80M a year between them? It wasn't that long ago that the biggest contract (in total value, not per year) the O's ever signed was Miguel Tejada's 6 year, $72M deal. Now you want to eclipse that for two players, every year for a decade? It would be unique to have a team payroll of $100M with 80% of that going to two players.

I watched 2-3 innings. But we went to bed around 10 and it was, what, the 4th inning? I don't usually stay up to the end of Orioles games I care about, there's no way I giving up 2+ hours of sleep for an exhibition with a bunch of mic'd up Yankees and Red Sox.

Fun fact: His .950 OPS at Texas this year was eight points below the team average. An average Longhorns game saw 12.3 runs.

August 30th, 2006. The 60-72 Orioles are playing the 68-66 Rangers at Ameriquest Field. The teams battle back and forth, with the O's squandering a 4-0 early advantage as Anna Benson's husband tired after seven and Todd Williams and Chris Ray combine to cough up the lead in the 8th. But the Orioles rally in the 10th after new waiver-wire acquisition Danny Ardoin comes in to replace Ramon Hernandez for defense in the 9th. With two out in the only frame of extras, Ardoin singles on a ground ball to left off former Oriole Rick Bauer, scoring Chris Gomez with an important insurance run. It would be his only hit and biggest highlight in his five-game Oriole career. It is not known if then five-year-old Silas Ardoin was watching.

SEC average pitcher in 2022 had a 4.56 ERA/5.13 RA with 4.0 BB/9, 10 K/9, 1.1 HR/9. He was 5.13/5.69, 4.2 BB/9, 10.5 K/9, 0.9 HR/9. So... eh. Perusing the 2017 SEC pitching rosters... Zach Logue is on the A's right now, he had a 4.97 for Kentucky before being drafted. Collin Snider is being beaten about the head and shoulders for the Royals (my God, how did that organization win the Series), but he's in the majors and in '17 for Vanderbilt allowed 7.29 R/9. Graham Ashcraft has made 10 starts for the Reds this year and in his short college career gave up 69 runs in 80 innings. Sometimes the project pitcher works out.

I think you have to treat him as a 6+ win player, just with some unique risk because of his skills. Somewhat mitigated by the fact that even if he is injured in a way that precludes him from pitching he can still hit. He's in that category that you can't expect to get huge value back in a trade and he probably won't get paid $50-60M a year. Both history and logic tell us that no big star gets a long-term deal that's just $9M x WAR x years because of risk. Age and injuries mean you have to discount the value. The shorter the deal the less that comes into play. Look at Manny. He was very young for a free agent and he's only being paid for about three wins a year despite averaging almost twice that so far in his career (per 162 games). Anyway, I think Ohtani's weird contractual situation is that he's arb eligible for next season, so this year is $5M, next will probably be close to $20M, then he's a free agent at 29. So there's some surplus value there, but it's probably like 5 wins for 1.4 years. What would you trade for five wins? Then in 2024 he probably signs a 8/240 deal or something like that. With the Dodgers or Yanks.

From 1886 throuth 1890 Dave Foutz had a 123 OPS+ as a batter, and was 83-36 on the mound with a 131 ERA. In 1887 he and teammate Parisian Bob Caruthers switched between the outfield and the mound, each hitting .357 in over 400 PAs, and combining to go 54-21 as pitchers. Ohtani is really doing things we haven't seen since before cars and airplanes were invented.

Ruth only had two years as a two-way player, 1918 and 1919. And by '19 he was not an All Star pitcher. 133 innings, 15 starts, 58 walks, 30 strikeouts. Even in '18 he was 13-7 in 19 starts with more walks than Ks. The last pitcher to really play like Ohtani in the majors was probably Blonde Guy Hecker. In 1886 he made 48 starts on the mound (136 game schedule), went 26-23 with a 2.87 ERA, played 39 games between the OF and 1B, and won the batting title hitting .341. But this was almost 140 years ago in a league that was probably the equivalent of a mid-tier college league today.

23 appearances as a reliever. 25.1 innings, 20 hits, 13 walks 39 Ks. Five saves. .992 OPS as a hitter on a team that had an .893. 37 walks and 107 Ks in 290 PAs. Which works out to a 37% K rate. I think that means he hit about .430 on balls in play. So... Rougned Odor, but he also pitches the 8th inning?