DrungoHazewood

Looks like they were 14 back in mid-July. Just before they traded for someone who still had a soul available to sell to the devil.

This is like epic level jinxing of the franchise here. You've almost guaranteed that Henderson will celebrate his first callup by drinking 11 beers then going to a speed pitching range with Adley where they both blow out their UCLs. Stowers will become best buds with Billy Rowell. And Kjerstad signs up with some kind of mentoring program with Sidney Ponson and Matt Hobgood.

No he's not, he's a player-coach for the Long Island Ducks.

I wonder what the largest deficit any team has ever overcome in a season? The 1914 Miracle Braves were 15.0 games behind the Giants after being swept in a July 4th doubleheader. They were in 8th (last) place, five games out of 7th. They went 68-19 the rest of the way to finish 10 (!) games up. That might be the record, but I'm not sure. The '51 Giants were 13 games back on August 11th and won it on Bobby Thompson's homer.

I'm guessing that if you asked Palmer about the relatively high percentage of success allocated to his defense, he'd just tell you that if he didn't have Brooks, Belanger and Blair behind him he'd have just chosen to strike out more batters.

Not often that you can raise your batting average 16 points in one day in July.

Schoop has always been a very strange second baseman. Listed as 6' 1", 247 and with a very strong arm. Historically someone with that description is almost always a 3B/RF. He's like a Nap Lajoie, who was 6' 1" and a listed 195 which was huge for 100 years ago. Lajoie played before the shift in the defensive spectrum in the 1920s where second and third switched places after bunts became a lot less common and third became the hitter's position. Anyway, I can see Schoop being put in a lot of interesting places with shifts, and his arm allows him to make plays other second basemen couldn't. But if he keeps OPSing .561 nobody is really going to care.

I've looked into Great Leap Forward teams a number of times, and 30+ win improvements are very rare. You could count them on your fingers, perhaps of one hand. Even some teams with the miracle label didn't do that. The 1914 Braves, the '91 Braves, the '12 Orioles and the '69 Mets all fell short. Teams I know of with 30+ win jumps in a season include the '36 Braves/Bees, the '89 Orioles, the 1890 Louisville Colonels (who went from 27-111 to 88-44 in one year with the help of the Player's League coming into existence and stealing half the good players in the established AA and NL).

I know the baseball world is a different place than when I was forming opinions of what a batting line should look like, but even in 2016-2022 a 7:1 K:BB ratio should set off claxons. You have to be pretty unbelievably good to be an above-average MLB hitter with 25 walks and 150 Ks.

He has a cool beard, and he seems to swing really hard. Plus he gave me a reason to send the GIF of him punching Bautista to my brother-in-law.

Why, because I'm not particularly fond of games with 19 strikeouts and five hits, three of which are homers? No, I would rather see baseball where there are maybe 6-7 strikeouts per nine, not as many homers as today, but batting averages more like .280 and historically normal walk rates. I have little desire to go back to Steve Trachsels trying to throw complete games and shortstops who OPS .575.

When the Orioles do things like this they'll often be a thread here about it, and the opening post will usually include something like "Major League teams simply don't make those kind of mistakes!!!!!!" Sure they do, just not quite as often as minor league teams. I'm guessing that several of the 2001 Mariners' 46 losses were due to them making a series of mistakes, and otherwise they would have broken the '06 Cubs record for wins. Here, for no good reason besides curiosity I'll go look. On August 31st, 2001 the eventually 116-win Mariners lost to the then 55-79 Orioles 3-0. Mike Cameron and Al Martin made errors, leading to an unearned run. They let Chris Richard and Jeff Conine execute a double steal (second/home) after the error that let Richard take third. The Mariners went 0-for-5 with RISP. And I'm not entirely sure why, but the game was called with two out in the top of the ninth. They lost 2-0 to Pedro and the Red Sox on May 1st after Al Martin was doubled off first on a liner to RF, and the Sox' run in the 8th was after an E6. They lost to the Angels 2-1 on June 23rd. Jamie Moyer had a wild pitch on a strike three to Garrett Anderson, who eventually came around to score. Moyer also hit two batters, and allowed one of David Eckstein's four homers that year. On August 9th they lost to the Blue Jays after allowing a run in the 8th on an E5, two singles, and a Norm Charlton wild pitch. One of their earlier runs had been unearned, too. On August 5th they lost the the Indians 15-14 in a game they had been leading 12-0 after three. Even the best teams screw up sometimes.

I have to admit being a little perplexed by the Mike Torrez family of pitchers. How they functioned. The one year he was an Oriole he was 20-9, 3.06 and threw 270 innings. That's sounds awesome, right? Eh... in the context of Memorial Stadium and the O's defense and 1975 it was alright. 115 ERA+. He walked 133 (led the league) and struck out just 119. He allowed very few hits, just 238, and had a BABIP of just .258 (career .282), which points to the O's defense and the pitcher-friendliness of Memorial Stadium. Didn't allow many homers. Maybe the Orioles were pretty smart, not in the acquiring but in the offloading. Maybe they knew the underlying performance didn't really support 20-9, so they packaged him in the Reggie deal. They kind of did the same thing the next year with Wayne Garland after his 20-win season, letting him go in free agency with (as far as I know) barely a counter-offer. But back to the pitchers living in the upside down, there were a number of these guys in the 1970s. Pitchers who'd walk more than they struck out but still were effective. Today that would be nonsense, just doesn't even remotely happen. Today there are pitchers who have 3:1 K:BB ratios with ERAs of 7.00. In '76 Ken Holtzman had a 2.86 ERA but 35 walks and 25 Ks in 97 innings. Dyar Miller had a 2.94 out of the pen with 36 walks and 37 Ks. Doyle Alexander 64 innings, 24 walks, 17 Ks. He'd only pitch another 15 years in the majors. Don Stanhouse was like that for a few seasons. The best way I can explain this working is to look at, say, the 1978 Twins. Random middle of the pack team of that era. They hit 82 homers all year. Their best hitter, by far, was Rod Carew who hit .333 but had 41 extra base hits and only five homers. Bob Randall was their semi-regular 2B, he didn't homer in 375 PAs. They had seven of their listed nine starters with fewer than 10 homers, and nobody on the bench had more than four. Also nobody struck out more than 88 times, and five of their starters struck out less than fifty times. As a team they grounded into 139 DPs, or 57 more than they hit homers. So a lot of teams were made up of guys just trying to make contact and many pitchers of that era were more than happy to oblige so they could save their arms to try to throw a lot of complete games. They didn't particularly care if they walked someone, because the next batter was probably Butch Wynegar and his .308 slugging percentage. I think that if Ken Holtzman and Mike Torrez pitched to 2022 batters the way they pitched to 1978 batters they'd get beaten about the head and shoulders.

Given the information available at the time and the voting pool Flanagan was a reasonable choice for the Cy Young. But I'd have a hard time arguing that he was more valuable than Ken Singleton or Eddie Murray.

Bats of the past were often heavier, but I don't think they were any harder. Roger Maris once participated in an experiment where he took batting practice with a number of bats of different weights, and there was hardly any difference in how far he could hit the ball. F=ma. If the mass of the bat is larger it makes the bat harder to accelerate, and it appears that there is little or no advantage (in terms of batted ball distances) to swinging a 40+ ounce bat. Alan Nathan has a trajectory calculator spreadsheet on his site. Playing around with that it's difficult to see how anyone ever hit a ball 550, 600 or more feet. Statcast tells us that the hardest hit ball out of thousands so far in 2022 went 119 mph off the bat. The longest I can get out of a 119 mph ball at sea level is 560 feet, and that's with optimal launch angle, 105 degree temperature, and a 25 mph tailwind. At 80 degrees Fahrenheit with a 5 mph tailwind and 119 mph exit velocity we're under 500' distance. Statcast says the longest HR hit in 2022 is 496'. The only way oldtimers hit 550+ foot homers would be: 1) Some of the balls were much livelier and/or had far less drag. 2) The players were far stronger. 3) The home runs were not measured to the point of impact, or likely point of impact without stands, but to where they stopped rolling. Mantle's famous 565' shot at Griffith Stadium probably was under 500' on the fly then rolled the rest of the way. Put Judge or Stanton in a big open field and they could hit a ball that rolls 600' or more*. I think 1) is possible. That quality control was very poor in the past and some balls were quite lively. 2) is simply not true. 3) Is very likely. Circling back to the original point, I think it's theoretically possible that the occasional ball in 1960 was hit as hard or harder than the hardest balls today. But that the average exit velocity was quite a bit lower. * When I was a teenager we used to play baseball in the street in front of my house. There was a bit of a hill to one side of my house, and on the other side the street sloped gradually down past about 5-6 houses. Another kid, Keith, was a pretty good high school player. One time he hit a moon shot that got to the top of the hill, then rolled all the way down the other side. If each yard was about 150' wide his homer went over 800'. Probably the longest homer I've ever seen.

If you believe some of the (mostly anecdotal) reports of exceptionally long home runs from Ruth, Mantle, Josh Gibson, etc at least some exit velocities had to be FAR higher than today. It's physics, if you believe that Ruth once hit a 690 foot homer it had to have left the bat at 140 mph or something. Which is why I take all those stories with several dump trucks full of salt. My guess is that the average exit velocity 75 or 100+ years ago was much lower than today. Willie Keeler's average exit velocity was probably like 68 mph.

That is true, although I think that MLB has been well-paid and prestigious enough that it's been nearly 100 years since players would even occasionally do something else. As early as the 1880s baseball players were paid, on average, several times an average laborer's wage. And the last time players would sometimes pick other leagues like the IL or the PCL was probably the 1920s. Although the PCL did have that brief period in the 50s where they tried to go independent with an open classification, but even then the vast majority of the best players were in the majors. Football was probably 50 years behind baseball, basketball even further. My grandmother had a set of 1948 World Book Encyclopedias, and the football section focused more on college than the pros.

That's not unreasonable, but just need to keep in mind that the further back in time you go the less the player would dominate today because of the lesser competition they faced.

Someone should introduce them to the 1980 Oakland A's. That was the team where Billy Martin decided that he was going to get fired a week from Thursday anyway, so he was going to damn the torpedoes and have all his starters just pitch all of every possible game. They ended up with 94 complete games. And within a few years all their starters were out of the league with arm problems.

That gets to the crux of the argument. If you're asking how Babe Ruth would have done had he been born in 1975, I think you'd have to say that he'd benefit from all the things everyone else born in 1975 had. So he'd still be really good, he'd have taken industrial tankers worth of steroids, and he still wouldn't have dominated like it was 1925 because the major leagues were vastly better, especially the lower-end talent. Or he would have been a linebacker. But if you took 1890s-born Ruth and in 1920 stuck him in a time machine and brought him to today the odds are he would struggle pretty mightily. Perhaps he could eventually adapt. But there's no guarantee he'd even be a good player when suddenly thrust into a much more competitive league with vastly different training expectations and far more optimized strategies.

The thing I struggle with is the radical change in pitching approach over my lifetime. When I was a kid it was not uncommon for a starter to throw 300+ innings and a reliever 130 or more. To do that and not break the vast majority of pitchers can't be throwing their best, hardest stuff most of the time. Remembering Mike Boddicker, I don't think he ever topped 90 mph, or not by much. I clearly remember Scott McGregor sitting in the mid-80s. So a lot of really good pitchers from 30-40 years ago would struggle to stay in the majors today unless they could quickly adapt to throwing much harder in somewhat shorter stints. And it's not hugely longer outings - John Means averages 5 1/3 innings a start, McGregor averaged 3-4 more outs per start (6.5 innings). For the sake of argument let's say I'm right and MLB improves 0.5% a year. You could argue that 100 runs in 1960 is the equivalent of 73 runs today (ignoring things like league run levels). According to bb-ref Adam Jones created 77 runs per 600 PAs, Mays 114. The midpoint of their careers was separated by about 50 years, so I'd discount Mays by roughly 25%. That would leave Mays ahead of Jones 85 to 77. Hard to say if that's correct, but I don't think it's implausible.

Ha! Yep, I meant 1983. My guess is if the 1893 Orioles played the 2022 Orioles they'd call it off after three or four innings with the modern guys ahead 22-0. '93 was the first year of the 60' 6" pitching distance and McMahon allowed over 1.5 baserunners an inning and 232 runs in 346 innings. Walked 156 and struck out just 79, against a bunch of opponents who probably averaged 5' 8", 160 pounds and many of whom choked up 5" with a split-handed grip on a 30" bat. The current Orioles' staff probably throws 10-15 mph faster on average than the 1893ers. A question I'll never get answered is what someone like John McGraw would do against a modern pitcher throwing 100 mph with good control. 1893 was not one of McGraw's better seasons, but he hit .321 with 101 walks and 11 strikeouts in 597 PAs. Nine doubles, 10 triples, five homers (three inside the park). My best guess is that if you put him in the Tardis and brought him to 2022 he'd look something like Lance Blankenship or Joey Rickard.

I am 100% on board with the slope of history argument that baseball gets better all the time, and that an average team today would wipe the floor with the 1927 Yankees. But there's a limit, you have to inject some realism. If the slope of history was so steep that a .450 team today would regularly beat the 1998 Yankees then David Ortiz and Nelson Cruz couldn't exist. Nobody would still be a good player in their mid 30s, much less a star. I have argued that the increase in quality in MLB is something like 0.5% a year. That's small enough that over a 20-year career the majors get 10% better, and over a century 50% better. The 1893 Orioles are probably better than the '22 Orioles, although I'm not sure how the '83 team would adjust to wall-to-wall 97 mph max effort pitchers.

My first thought was that they use 3-year park factors, which would assume the O's are playing in a much better hitter's environment than they are with the modified OPACY. But that's backwards, that would overrate pitchers and underrate non-pitchers. I think Frobby is right, most of the difference is that DRS sees the Orioles as the 4th-best defensive team in baseball, while OAA has them as about average. Interestingly, DRS centers at about +9 on a team level, the Majors are +273 right now. So an average team is 9 runs above average.

It can be fun to compare how we approach awards in the metrics era with how they approached them 30 or 40+ years ago, but everyone needs to keep in mind that in 1979 was the very, very, very early stages of the analytics revolution. You can assume that the voters didn't even remotely consider most of the rationale that we use today. I'd guess that there was a very strong correlation between pitcher wins and Cy Young awards. Along with that weird 70s and 80s (mis-) (over-) evaluation of relievers, although relievers of that era did pitch a lot more so perhaps somewhat justifiable when there was no way to meaningfully compare innings and leverage and overall value. Flanagan got the award because he led the league in wins and was on the team that won the division. Interesting to compare Flanagan to Jerry Koosman. On the surface they look very similar, but bb-ref has Flanagan at 3.8 WAR, Koosman 7.2. Mostly that's down to defensive support. They see the O's defense benefiting Flanagan to the tune of almost half a run a game, while Koosman's team was just a hair below average. Fangraphs' valuations have Flanagan ahead by half a win. I don't really know who would win if we knew then what we know today, really in either league. Both are kind of muddled, nobody had a truly dominant season even by WAR. If you average rWAR and fWAR it's almost pulling names out of a hat. Jim Kern might have actually gotten some serious support as a reliever since he threw 142 innings to a 1.57 ERA and had a leverage index of 2.4. In today's terms he basically was someone's closer and their 8th inning guy. Every other day he threw two high leverage innings. Nobody ever does anything like that any more, probably because the next two years combined Kern threw 93 innings to a 91 ERA+ and more walks than Ks. The rest of his career he had a 4.60 ERA/84 ERA+.