DrungoHazewood

So far in 2022 he's in the 87th percentile in average exit velocity, he's 85th percentile in max exit velocity, he's 85th percentile in HardHit%, 86th in xwOBA, 96th in xBA, 91st in xSLG and 87th in Barrel%. Looks like someone who's squaring up the ball about as well as anyone in baseball, the results haven't lined up yet but very likely will. If he wasn't terribly disappointing you and was instead on another team I'd guess he's the kind of player you'd be complaining that Elias hadn't acquired for the Orioles.

If he really swings at everything then why do major league pitchers ever throw him a pitch that's hittable? I think he doesn't swing at everything, just more than some other MLB hitters. Do players with poor plate discipline really have more hot/cold streaks than others? It's repeated all the time, but I've never seen any data showing that. Adam Jones was like Mountcastle. He didn't walk. Today I could throw him a slider 6" off the plate and he'd swing at it. But he had a 10-year period where he basically hit .265-.285 with 25 homers every single year. Did he do that while being super streaky?

Depending on how you define terms you could make some arguments for Keeler, Kelley, Jennings, McGraw, Grove, McGinnity, Ruth, Matt Kilroy, Jack Bentley, Jack Ogden and maybe a few others. But I don't think any of them played for the Orioles when numbers were worn on their uniform. Would probably be unprecedented to retire <blank>.

Baseball's unwritten rule #912: Only give the number of a former player who left prior to cementing HOF status to a scrub so that fans know that it's still really the former guy's number and the scrub is just renting it for a bit. If you give it to another star you're disrespecting the former guy. I mean, who doesn't know that? It right there in the section of the unwritten rulebook right after the part about when you can and can't do a delayed double steal with a 7+ run lead.

1. It's May 24th. 2. The last time a full MLB season saw an OPS as low as .689 was 1981. Probably won't stay this low, but we haven't seen offenses like this since today's 50-year-olds were in elementary school. Just look at the list of very good MLB hitters with OPSes in the sub-.750 range. Christian Yelich, Corey Seager, Anthony Rendon, Nick Castellanos, Jorge Solar, Fransicso Lindor, DJ LeMahieu, Wander Franco, Cody Bellinger, (start dipping below .700 here) Jose Abreu, Charlie Blackmon, Bobby Witt, Bo Bichette, Yuli Gurriel, Justin Turner, Salvador Perez. Jonathan Schoop is slashing .169/.217/.287. Nelson Cruz is OPSing .584. It's early, and it's a pitchers year like we haven't seen in more than a generation. Plus, did anyone really think Cedric Mullins was going to be a .900+ OPS hitter for the next 5-10 years? I'll be happy if he settles in at 110-120 OPS+ with good defense in center and good baserunning. Two years ago he was completely written off.

Not that I think the Orioles should follow the Yankees lead on anything, but they have at least half a dozen retired numbers of players who aren't in the Hall. They retired Billy Martin's number. As a player he was half as good as Rich Dauer, and as a manager he won a Series but was fired like five times because he was an unstable drunk. They retired Reggie's number and he only played five years in NY and then left as a free agent to go to the Angels.

By probably you mean 99.99% chance he would have signed elsewhere instead of re-upping with a team on the cusp of a long total rebuild that had failed previously to extend him when they were actually good.

Hey! Geronimo Gil once had 12 home runs in an actual major league season! Actually, I think you're conflating the 2000 and 2001 sell offs, but nevertheless were all pretty terrible. The return on all that was Trinidad Hubbad, Luis Rivera, Fernando Lunar, Miguel Felix, Juan Figueroa, Jason Lakman, Brook Fordyce, Leslie Brea, Mike Kinkade, Melvin Mora, Jose Leon, Mark Nussbeck, Chris Richard. Really only Mora and arguably Fordyce were worth anything. And nobody including Syd Thrift had any inkling that then-29-year-old utility guy Mora would have 3-4 years of near-MVP level performance in him.

Didn't get married until I was almost 33. Played in the marching band in high school/college. That's a lot of time other people devote to women that I spent repelling women and reading the Baseball Encyclopedia and the Historical Baseball Abstract. I wouldn't recommend that course of action. Stick with wooing women.

I think so, too. This so-called rule about Orioles only getting numbers retired if they have a bird on their plaque is only true because it currently happens to be. It will be forgotten the moment it needs to be.

But he was a wierdo. And when you're a 1950s guy like ol' Pete you can't abide by weirdos. Might be a commie for all we know. Baseball announcing is for straight-laced, clean-shaven Americans.

And like all unwritten rules, it's ironclad until they have some reason to ignore it. If the 2028 Orioles sign... I don't know... Juan Soto and he's the key to a couple great World Series teams, but he goes into the Hall as a Nat they'd have a hard time not retiring his number.

Completely by chance I saw Mussina's 1st and 100th MLB wins in person. And I only get to a handful of games a year. Lots of great memories of his time in Baltimore.

Which we know is kind of random. Frank had nearly twice the games and plate appearances with the Reds than the O's, won an MVP with the Reds, but gets an O's hat on his plaque in Cooperstown. If the HOF had left his hat blank like the often do today does Frank not get a retired number or a statue?

I agree with all of that. 30 year old Drungo had a newspaper clipping of an article calling Mussina a traitor tacked to my fridge. 50 year old Drungo doesn't blame anyone for wanting out of the late 90s/early 2000s Orioles. This is a team that had 80-year-old Syd Thrift as the GM on purpose. The team that led the majors in payroll in 1998, and had the same payroll 10+ years later as everyone else doubled theirs. The team that fired Jon Miller and John Lowenstein. The team that seemed a lot more engaged in fighting the Nationals than doing what it took to field a competitive team. My only real beef with Mussina was signing with the Yanks. If it had been the Dodgers or the Braves or the Cubs... fine, no problem at all. But the Yanks was a little about money, and a lot about giving Angelos the middle finger. Not sure he thought through that he was also giving that finger to the O's fans who'd rooted like heck for him for a decade.

It was 296' to RF at old Yankee, and unlike Fenway's 296 the fence didn't immediately fall off to much deeper measurements. It wasn't much over 300' 50' or 75' towards RC. He had 46 homers at Cleveland's League Park, which was 290' to RF and 340' in the RC gap. Imagine OPACY with the RF/RC walls 30' closer. He had 85 at the Polo Grounds and its 275' sign down the RF line. And another 58 at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis that was 310' to RF and just 354' to RC. That's a total of 448 homers in parks that had at least one dimension in RF or RC that is shorter than any current MLB park except Fenway's Pesky Pole.

When Davis was really in his prime he would often look like he just kind of dropped the bat into the zone without any substantial effort, and the ball would end up 10 rows deep in the stands in left field.

I applaud the Orioles for their forward thinking, and hope the rest of the league follows suit.

German football is a funny thing. They have the 50+1 rule where the supporters have to have 50% plus one of the voting shares of the club so nobody can come in and just buy a team and pump $billions in and remake the whole thing in their own image. Like happens every 20 minutes in the Premier League. The Saudi soverign wealth fund just bought Newcastle; that would never happen in Germany. The Germans love that, it's a big part of their core identity as Fußball fans. But somehow Bayern Munich gets around that, they have some kind of setup where they still make ungodly amounts of money and dominate the Bundesliga in a way the Yanks or Sox are jealous of, and it seems like even fans of other teams will root for Bayern in European competitions. Bayern is mostly loved (I loathe them, and I'm a fan of their traditional rival 1860 Munich, sadly long-since relegated to the 3. Liga). But by God if anyone else tries to get around 50+1 they're immediately pariahs. I'm not sure how Red Bull was able to do what they did, I assume they have 50-1% of the votes on the board but everyone else is okay with their money. But if you ran a poll of Most Hated Team in Germany Leipzig would win going away. The German people see them as exploiting some kind of loophole in 50+1 and cheating their way to the top with outside money. I guess it would be like some super-controversial billionaire like Buffett or Elon Musk or Bill Gates buying the Marlins and immediately boosting them to a $350M payroll.

I mean, they only get $125M or $150M in shared revenues, plus whatever MASN pays, maybe $50M in ticket revenue, plus parking, concessions, merchandise... So on $250M in revenue they might be able to squeeze out $50M or $60M for player payroll. The Angelos boys might have to subsist on Spam and peanut butter for a while, but it's for the good of the Baltimore area.

What would you give up for a 1.5 years of an average-ish DH/1B at his salaries if you were the GM of a contender? Even if I had a black hole at one of those positions it wouldn't be a big return.

I'd like to win. At some point you have to have mid-career, mid-peak players on the roster. If that means payroll is up above $50M a year for a few years, so be it. Not my money.

Yea, Sox fans are now Yanks fans with the added annoyance of claiming they deserve it more and have more street cred because their team didn't win the Series for a long time before they became fans. Sox fan in green 3rd-alternate David Ortiz jersey: "Bro, we were so cursed for like 100 years and it was wicked painful. Then when I was six they finally won it all and it was like this great weight was lifted, but now we're frickin' awesome and win it all the time. Suck it!"

I'm content with the knowledge that if the Orioles ever win it'll be truly satisfying and unexpected and joyful in a way that can never happen for fans of teams for whom 92 wins is disappointment. The Yanks winning the Series is like Jeff Bezos winning the lottery.

But do we really? Who plays in a huge pitcher's park? 75 or 100 years ago there were parks that were 257' down the lines, just over 300' in the gap. Others that were 500' or more to various spots. Yankee Stadium was 460' in the LC gap and about that far to CF, but 296' to RF. When Memorial Stadium opened for the Orioles in the 50s it was about 450' to the CF hedge, and about that far to the LC/RC gap. Griffith Stadium in Washington was 402 down the LF line. In its early days Braves Field in Boston didn't have a dimension under 400' anywhere. Today? Nobody has a fence over 430', nobody is over 350' down the lines, and the Pesky Pole in Fenway is the only place in the majors under 300'. Nobody has a gap measurement over 400', unless I'm missing one. It's only in the context of the last 30-odd years that OPACY's new 396' in deepest LC is considered extreme. Joe DiMaggio played his entire career in a home park where that fence was about 70' further away. Mays' catch in the '54 Series would probably be five or 10 rows deep in every park in the majors today.