DrungoHazewood

Segui was someone I'd put in the same category as Nelson Cruz, as kind of a litmus test for a GM. When the Orioles acquired him in 2001 he was 33 and coming off a year where he hit .334/.388/.510. All three of those were career highs. If I were interviewing a GM one of my canned questions would be how they'd deal with a situation like that. How would they value a soon-to-be 34-year-old coming off a career year, or nearly a career year. My hope would be they'd say something like "well, while I accept that there are occasional players with late career surges, a typical player rapidly declines in their mid-30s and I'd expect this guy to lose 50-75% or even all of their value over the next few years. I would only sign him to a short or team-friendly deal." Syd Thrift looked at Segui and said, "young man, how'd you like a 4-year contract at $7M a year?" Remember, in 2001 73-homer Barry Bonds was making $10M a year.

That's not going to happen, but compromises must be made. Either ridiculous travel, unwatchable game times, unbalanced schedules that are unfair to many teams, or you just don't get to see Giants-Orioles games in person.

I'd be okay with a situation like that, two 16-team divisions sorted by market size. But the big market division gets six of the eight playoff teams.

There's some validity to that, I get sick of Red Sox, Yanks, Blue Jays, rinse repeat. But it really doesn't matter much if they play the A's or Angels on the west coast, since I'm not staying up to 2 am.

That was much more of a concern when the only way to watch the Giants from Baltimore was three times a year on the Saturday Game of the Week. Today? I can legally watch every single Giants game with an MLB subscription, and every day's highlights on Quick Pitch. If you're not exposed to the players on the other coast its because you don't want to be.

Baseball reference breaks that out for you on his player page.

Why be so conservative? I think you need to start mulling over releasing someone when they've gotten behind in the count 0-2 after consecutive PAs with homers. You can't let slumps get out of hand and negatively impact the drive for 70 wins.

So far this year 24.8% of his batted balls have gone to LF.

My wish is that one day we eventually get to 3-4 geographically aligned, eight or 10-team leagues with limited or no interleague play. You essentially never have a regular season game more than one time zone away. For a team like the Orioles most of their road trips would be an hour, hour-and-a-half flight. It's funny, MLS will get soccer players from Europe used to entire countries (UK, Germany, Italy) roughly the size of New England. They come here and are like "What the holy hell, you're telling me I have to fly five hours to a game nine times this year? Maybe I'll just stay and play second or third division soccer back home where most of the games are within a few hour drive." We just accept that insane travel and 10:30pm game starts are the norm. Doesn't have to be that way.

I think the key to the Orioles' future success is to fire Terry Crowley. Wait... what?

Actually he was okay. 105 OPS+, average-ish defense in left. But he was archetypal of the 2002 Orioles, really that whole 1998-2011 era. 32-year-old free agent signed to fill a hole on a 67-win team with an average age of 29 and an unproductive farm team run by a GM whose best days were 25 years in the past. He was signed post-firesale, so after selling off a bunch of old guys they went right back and signed a declining Grade C free agent to a 3-year deal. Cordova wasn't a bad player, he just symbolized a franchise completely adrift.

Much of the Mullins hand-wringing is a combination of not quite digesting that offense is way down, the park is contributing to that, and unrealistic expectations that Mullins had permanently transformed himself into Mike Trout-lite. On the other hand, I hope he's not a 93 OPS+ going forward.

Like the team is being run by fans on social media instead of the front office?

What actions from either this year or the last four-odd years have convinced you that right now is the moment that Elias and his team are ready to make decisions not on 2023-beyond, but instead on the team's 2022 record?

So it's increasingly likely that the Angeloses will drag out the lawsuit until MASN is no longer a viable business? Looks like our best bet is for both the Nats and O's to be sold and the incoming groups want nothing to do with winning ol' Pete's grudge match.

Then what changed with the Yankee organization? Since he was there from 2013-18, then again in 2019, then again in 2021-today. The Yankees thought so little of him that they left him unprotected in the Rule 5 draft, and then traded him to Seattle for future considerations.

I don't think I really think in those terms. I kind of like higher scoring games, just not in the recent fashion of sitting around waiting for a home run. I'd rather have it doled out in lots of little bits. It's like Christmas. I'd rather have 14 little presents than one or two big ones. You enjoy it longer. Of course I've never experienced this, but I always thought I'd enjoy one of those eras where the big stars were constantly chasing .400. Which is kind of the opposite of today, where nobody has hit .350 in a full season in a decade.

Of course you constantly look for process improvements, keep abreast of the latest information, and always be willing to be introspective. But do we have any reason to think the Orioles don't do this? Besides the general "haven't won anything in a long time so they must be doing it wrong" stuff?

I don't know about the very strong minor league resume part. He was a 36th-round draft pick. He was always a kind of swingman in the minors, only once starting more than 15 games in a season. And that year with Scranton where he made 18 starts he saw his K rate drop off and his ERA was nearly 4.00. From 2019 through the 2020-21 winter league season he was basically unpitchable, allowing 93 runs in 136 innings across multiple levels. What suddenly changed in early '21?

I don't know if it's a fallacy so much as an assertion based on hearsay. The OP said the Orioles should re-evaluate all their training because they have injuries. But there's zero data to indicate if a) their injury rate is unusual, or b) the training is related to this hypothetically unusual rate of injury.

In the old days there were abrupt changes in the fences because of immovable obstacles just beyond the fence like streets or houses. In modern parks the abrupt changes are usually because old parks had them and old parks were cool in the minds of people who saw games as 12-year-olds in old parks. When the Marlins played in that football stadium the fence was a zigzag because... uh... Ebbets Field rocked? At least the abrupt changes in the OPACY fence is for a reason: that there's really no other place to put the bullpens. Not because they're pandering to people who remember 1945.

Step one would be to compile a comprehensive database of injuries across the league for multiple years and determine if the Orioles' injury rates and types are significantly unusual. My baseline assumption should be that they don't deviate from the norm in any statistically meaningful way. Whenever a team sees a cluster of injuries a few fans call for the heads of the training staff and processes. But I don't know that I've ever seen any analysis of the situation beyond "some guys got hurt so something must be terribly wrong."

Yes. By doing that it will become clear that wall-to-wall sluggers with 175 strikeouts makes for a losing game. It kind of brings back some of that deadball era common wisdom that swinging for the fences all the time just leads to a lot of fly outs, so you need a different strategy. But you also need to combine longer fences with a 63' pitching distance, since much of the K spike comes from pitchers. Implement both of those and I think we'll see more contact, higher batting averages and more of an emphasis on speed and defense. Which also means more baserunning. Also a pitch clock, so we can have 2:30 games with more balls in play and more people doing athletic things rather than standing around waiting for Aaron Judge to hit a ball 475'. Or more often 370' into the third row. It will not be without controversy, as today's fans are very accustomed to post-1993 baseball where ESPN highlights are typically six home runs and one or two other random things that might include a good defensive play or a close play on the bases. People today mostly know baseball as a slow-paced game of homers, Ks and pitching changes. Fans and the media always push back against changes to the status quo, even if it's bringing the game more in line with how it was played for 100+ years.

If they're going to do a more radical renovation, can we extend the new LF wall across to the turf area, move the bullpens somewhere else, and make the turf area and hitter's background in play?

Yes, but I think RZNJ is mostly right. Velocity is a byproduct of max effort, and throwing at the limit of human physiology is what's causing most injuries. I don't know if throwing just max-effort fastballs would reduce injuries significantly. You'll sometimes hear people say that today's pitchers have more injuries because they don't throw enough. They need to build up their arm strength and then they could handle 300 innings a year and 20 complete games. I think that's a misunderstanding of what's going on. It's not wear-and-tear from pitching too much, it's a sudden failure of a tendon or ligament from strain. It's not so much getting worn out from pitching too much like a marathon runner getting tired, it's more like a power lifter ripping something trying to clean-and-jerk 800 pounds. And it's complicated by the drown-the-witch method they used to use with pitchers. Yes, some pitchers like Nolan Ryan or maybe Bob Gibson would throw 300+ innings with very significant effort and survive. But the vast majority couldn't. Since you can't identify who can handle that workload without letting them try, the world has fallen back on not letting anyone try in attempt to keep most pitchers healthy. There are obvious ways to limit innings, but there aren't any obvious ways to limit effort on each pitch. You can tell a guy he'll reduce his injury risk greatly by backing off 20%, but then he washes out of the game in A ball.