DrungoHazewood

You keep fighting that good fight, I've got to go find out when the first Unterhaching offseason scrimmage is. I can't imagine a scenario where I'd buy NFL merchandise that doesn't involve Roger Goodell holding my family hostage.

The thread has gone off the rails, because it was originally about the First Unit Equipped Date (FUED), kind of like IOC, with regards to the contract awarded by the Angelos family for team uniforms in '94. I don't know where all this Nashville stuff has come from.

Easy solution is to just never watch the NFL anymore. Peter Angelos has made being an Orioles fan difficult, but because of Dan Snyder's ownership I would literally rather watch cricket, curling, bobsled or fourth division German soccer than the Commanders. No exaggeration whatsoever.

When exactly do the Mayflower trucks show up?

Orioles fans on Facebook typically post things like "I can't believe they haven't released Schoop, he's gone 0-for-his-last-12". It's like you take the Hangout and scrape off the top 75% of posters.

The Castellanos deal is ludicrous, but he's really not much better than Mancini. I just don't get some teams' player evaluations. Castellanos had a 3.5 win career year at 29 after years of being an average+ player, and then you sign him to a 5/100 deal? I guess a lot of teams have a lot of cash lying around and are willing to accept 2, 3, 4 years of $20M bills for below-average players. Hopefully someone irrationally breaks the bank for Mancini, he's a nice guy.

Can you imagine the outcry when Earl moved him to short in midseason? No prep, just all of a sudden he's the shortstop? He's 6' 4" and like 200+ pounds, as a shortstop? Even in the minors he played way more third than short. Clearly the dementia is setting in for Earl, it's all over. Glenn Gulliver is now the third baseman?! Oh well, it was a nice run. Maybe we can rebuild something for '85 or '86...

Also remember Cal Ripken went 5-for-40 with no extra base hits and one walk in his 1981 callup. OPS'd .278 (-19 OPS+). Then started '82 hitting .165/.185/.304 through May 9th. So in his first 47 games and 122 PAs he was OPSing .419, or way worse than 2018 Chris Davis. He figured it out.

Is that really the goal, is that a bar that a small market team can clear? For me it's "have they turned a lot of this into what we'd expect from a functional, competitive MLB team in 2022?"

People like to extrapolate current trends out forever. So India will one day have 75 billion people and Japan will have 12. But things do change. Inner city crime was worse in 1990 than today, then it got better. The Orioles aren't going to win 38 games this year, it'll probably be more like 68. Webbrick was wrong when he said the 2014 Orioles needed a firesale. The pessimists don't get to win all the time.

I won't really comment except to say that we don't know. I just know that no matter the situation there will always be those who assume it will get much worse, and soon. In the middle of the Orioles' 47-win season there were a number of posters were quite sure they'd win 30 or 40 games. The next year many predicted they'd be much worse than the year prior. So... we'll see.

While you have the ol' crystal ball out, can you let us know about the results of the 2024 bowl games?

Nick Markakis was OPSing .597 after 196 PAs. One of the few things the 2006 Orioles did right was letting him work through it. From that point to the end of the year he OPS'd .799.

That's a very good point. MLB won't let Baltimore have a scheduled All Star game, presumably out of Angelos spite. You think they're going to let an Angelos take the team and let OPACY sit vacant?

Forever? Forever is a long time.

Yea, I haven't been to Nashville since the 1998 Music City Bowl. It was... fine. It snowed most of the game, but Tech beat Alabama so all was good.

I suppose that gives us a bit of hope and optimism, since baseball tends to adopt new things 75 years late.

Yikes, a country music version of Vegas? Moving the O's there would be very specifically trolling me as I can't stand either thing.

Not that we need to repeat this over a silly rumor concocted from a lawsuit but: Baltimore and Nashville are basically the same size media market (#s 28 and 29 by Nielsen) Baltimore metro area (not to include DC) has 800k more people than Nashville's (see wiki and other sources) Baltimore has Camden Yards, Nashville has a 10,000 seat AAA stadium. Baltimore has a long history of major league teams going back to the 1870s, with multiple championships, to go along with a dynastic minor league team in the first half of the 1900s. Nashville has a history of AA and AAA teams, subservient to some MLB team since at least 1934. At first glance the only positive I can see from doing this would be the few seasons of sugar high ticket sales the team would get from being the new thing.

Except the A's, since they're now owned by an Angelos. Although wouldn't it be just peak Orioles to have John Angelos buy the A's and turn them into a dynasty?

If you can find a really meaningful difference between Owings and Willie Bloomquist I'd be surprised. Bloomquist spent 14 years in the majors as a utility guy. 78 OPS+. 1.7 WAR. In a world where teams keep 12, 13, 14 pitchers someone has to be able to play like five positions adequately and not whine about sometimes getting 14 at bats a month. Lenn Sakata had a 71 OPS+. Jeff Reboulet a 72.

That's almost certainly not going to happen, not with RF and CF normal dimensions and 81 games on the road. Also, pitching to contact is not really a thing at least in modern baseball. It's basically a euphemism for getting beaten about the head and shoulders. But having all the pitchers less terrified of every mistake being a home run is a good thing when building a staff. This made me wonder a bit about what was the last team/park where the pitching staff basically didn't have to think about home runs? The answer may be the Senators and Griffith Stadium before they started messing with the fences in the 50s, bringing LF in considerably. Prior to that it was 402' down the LF line, not much less than 400' anywhere from LF-RC, and the RF line was just 320ish but with a 30' concrete wall. In 1945 the Senators hit just one homer at home (Joe Kuhel on September 7th), but 26 on the road. Their pitchers allowed six at home (one inside-the-park), 36 on the road. I'm not really suggesting the Orioles make OPACY a place where homers are more-or-less impossible. But I wish some team would.

Yep, these are mostly academic exercises. MLB isn't doing any radical restructuring any time soon. They may chip away at a few things, but it'll stay mostly the same. If you really want a pie-in-the sky discussion, what's great for variety of opponents is to relegate the bottom three teams every year and bring up new ones. In most soccer leagues just about every year your team gets to play someone in a meaningful regular season game that they haven't played in 5, 10, 20 or more years. But for most North American sports that ship sailed 120 years ago. Truly is never going to happen. MLB is lucky that they don't have any real competition. In soccer players have chosen 2nd or 3rd tier European leagues over MLS at least in part because the travel is less crazy over there.

It's already a regional sport. The number of people in Philly watching a Twins-Rangers game is probably in the tens. The only teams with sustained national interest are the Yanks, Sox, and Dodgers. But tens of people is also pretty comparable to the number of people in Maryland watching an O's-A's game with a 10:30 first pitch. Most people have to get up for work. I am at work at 7am. I will almost never stay up to midnight to see a game, and my kids are teenagers and have never seen the 8th inning of a weekday regular season game. West coast games? When they were at their peak years for forming a baseball fan relationship they'd been in bed for 2 hours by the time Chris Tillman would throw a first pitch in Anaheim. From 1902-60 MLB was at the height of its popularity and each team just played the other seven teams in the AL or NL. I bet if you asked the players and owners if they'd prefer far less travel and travel expenses they'd be almost unanimous in support. I understand you like the current setup or even one with expanded games across the country. But your opinion isn't unanimous.

That's why you use market size instead of payroll, at least to start. Then promote/relegate based on success or failure at said level. And reward teams that punch above their weight class.