DrungoHazewood

I've long since moved on to eviscerating the Orioles' hypothetical GM for his nonsensical evaluation of the 2048 draft pool.

It's one factor among many. But there have probably been cases where it was a key thing. If you're a pitcher looking for a value-rebuilding one-year deal and it's down to a team in a pitcher's park, or old OPACY you're going to the pitcher's park. How many Dan Straily's have come to Baltimore and left with PTSD? After 2019 where he allowed 18 homers in 33 innings at Camden Yards he had to go to Korea to build up enough credit to get back to AAA. Wade Miley allowed almost six runs a game as an Oriole, has been good since leaving. There was at least the impression that you go to Baltimore and you were going to give up a homer every 3-4 innings.

So are you ripping Elias for a hypothetical pick of the (supposedly) consensus best player available, or for a hypothetical pick of someone else that some mock draft article suggests?

That would be a pretty involved search, trying to find OPSes through May 16th or 30+ games into the season. Not sure you can do that with Stathead, I'd have to do a bunch of exporting to Excel. Also, Retrosheet/bb-ref doesn't have box scores and splits going back to the 1800s yet. The 1910 White Sox finished the year with eight players who had an OPS under .550 in at least 200 PAs. The 1886 Orioles had seven, and they only had nine players get 200 PAs. The '99 Spiders ended with just one regular with an OPS under .550.

I think you're off by a year. This is the year they need to be getting in the 65+ win range. Then 2023 should be close to .500. Things will have to go pretty wrong for them to still be shooting for 78 wins in 2024.

Yes, it's somewhat plausible that once they add the kids you mention and they perform very well that this could be as much as a 72-win team. But you seem to be saying they're legitimate playoff contenders, which takes heavy, heavy doses of hallucinogens to pull off. This is more-or-less the same team they had last year that went 52-110. Lower baseline performance than the 1988 Orioles, changed far less than the 1989 Orioles, and play in a tougher division. I'd bet there aren't three teams in history who went from a .320ish winning percentage to true contention in one year. The only one I can think of aside from the '89 Orioles is the 1889-90 Louisville team, and that's only because a new league stole all their competitors' players. The Mets and Braves got miracle labels by going from 60-some wins to contention in one year.

It's quite possible that his career has taken a downward turn that he'll never recover from.

I tend to think most advertising doesn't really work, but people like Don Draper sell organizations on how great it is so they buy spots and signs and stuff that common sense says will have almost no impact whatsoever. Deutsche Bank always has ads at OPACY, they're not even a regular bank in the US they're a German-based company that does investment stuff. Why would they benefit from having a sign at a baseball park? How would they be able to tell that they did? Certainly no one would say "I have my company's loans through Deutsche Bank because I saw a sign at Camden Yards!" I'll accept that I'm wrong, and I just don't understand the psychology of advertising. But I think a statistically significant positive ROI on most of it would be pretty hard to prove.

.708 OPS as a professional. .717 in April in AAA. But 1.026 in his last 25 PA, so yes, he's what's desperately needed to turn this franchise around.

Don't you get it? He's like 9-for-his-last-18 in AAA. That's clear and obvious evidence that he's turned a corner, he's shed the shame and despair of the last 4-5 years, he's now a good MLB player. Why would you leave a good MLB player in the minors?

Impressive, but remember that for most of baseball history 11 Ks was two or three times the average. Today it's just 30% higher than a typical game. Example, in 1940 there were 11 starts in the majors all year with 11+ Ks, five of them by Bob Feller. And that in an era where starters would routinely go 7, 8, 9+ innings. There have been 17 such starts in just over a month of this year, in a context where the average starter barely goes five.

That with Means missing, and they haven't even called up the good players. We'll see. 70 wins would still be a big upset.

It's a contributing factor. Truthfully, I'm a lot less concerned about free agents than I am about developing home-grown pitchers. For most of the OPACY era many young pitchers seemed to constantly be on edge, wondering if every mistake was going to result in a home run. Or maybe that was just the fanbase who assumed that every ball that missed its spot by 4" was going to land in the 12th row. I assume most of the Hayden Penns, Adam Loewens, Garrett Olsons, Jason Berkens, Chris Tillmans, Brian Matuszes, etc, etc changed how they pitched because it was 364' in the LC gap and not much longer to RC. Everyone kept talking about needing more groundball pitchers, throwing more groundballs, switching to two-seam fastballs. Instead of just pitching the way it best works for the individual. Deeper fences give those kind of pitchers breathing room to figure things out without having a 6.50 ERA and getting yo-yo'd back and forth to Harbor Park.

Remember that they started designing OPACY in the 1980s. When most parks were cookie cutters, 330-375-400-375-330, or about that. In 1989 the average American League team hit 123 home runs. The Orioles wanted to be different, they wanted some parts of the park to be good for hitters. They also wanted RF with the garage door and weird angles to be a triples paradise. In the 30-some years since circumstances have changed, home runs have almost doubled, and some of their calculations were a little off. I'd bet Janet Marie Smith didn't intend on LC in her new park to be a really cheap home run, just a little easier than the multipurpose stadiums of the era.

Yea, before the dimension change the Orioles routinely extended all their home grown stars. Like... umm... I'm sure one will come to me eventually. If a friendly home park is a primary driver of free agents then why don't the Rockies get all the hitters?

The Orioles have mostly had poor teams, they don't much of a budget and they played in a little bandbox of a park. What pitcher wants to sign with a team featuring that trio of cringe? The last one was taken care of. The first one is very much a work in progress. They'll probably never have a budget approaching that of the Yanks or Sox. Yes, if you can routinely offer up 10/300 deals then the pitchers don't care so much if a medium-deep fly lands in the third row.

Choice of two teams: 1. Hits 280 homers, allows 245 homers, hits .245 with 1600 strikeouts (both hitters and pitchers) and 25 steals, nobody really cares how they field because 1600 strikeouts, wins 90 games. 2. Hits 150 homers, allows 110, hits .280 with 900 strikeouts and 150 steals, five gold glovers, wins 90 games. I'll take #2 all day long.

The 1985 Cardinals hit 87 homers all year and drew 2.6M fans, 3rd in the majors and almost a million more than average. But they won 101 games, so everyone loved their speed and defense brand of baseball. In 2019 the Twins set the all time record with 307 homers and were average in attendance, 400k behind the Giants and their 162 homers. The '19 Cards drew 3.48M despite hitting fewer homers than the 1.3M-drawing Orioles. Winning brings more people to the seats, not home runs. Everyone loves to see their team hit a homer, but it's like beer. Having a couple really good ones is great, but if you need six or eight to have fun you have a problem.

I think it was considered unseemly, maybe even unmanly, to complain that your home park wasn't tailored to your specific wants. If the little whiners want closer fences maybe they should go back to digging ditches or joining the Army instead of being paid to play ball.

Sounds like the original dimensions of Braves Field in Boston. It was 402-550-402. There were years where no one hit a ball over the fence. Or Griffith Stadium in DC in the 1920s. In 1927 Goose Goslin hit all 17 of his home runs on the road.

But not many more. I would have to do some research, but I'd guess that 75, 80% or more triples are hit to RC or RF. A few months ago I looked up all the triples hit to LF at OPACY before the wall change and almost all of them involved the fielder making a poor choice, such as diving at an uncatchable ball that flies by, or sprinting to the fence only to have it rebound a long way past him towards the infield. I would love to get back to an environment where triples and even inside-the-park homers could happen with some regularity without a fielder falling down or colliding with something.

As of today runs are at 4.04 per game. That's 25th-lowest of all time. Right around the same level as 1966, 1963, 1971, 2014...

A vote here for love. I'm done with bandboxes. Bring on a 470' sign in center.

It's amazing how 0.6 runs/game and about half a homer makes games feel so much less out of hand on a regular basis. A few years ago when they allowed 300 homers it felt like every game was on the verge of disintegration at any moment. When you're playing four run a game baseball with less than a homer a game you don't have that same constant "I'm in one of those dystopian drug movies where you know the main character is always about to relapse and OD" feeling.

Debatable. Quintana Roo is off to a good start, but at 41 is Olmo Rosario's 1.070 OPS sustainable? Doubtful. Personally I think a 55- or 60-win MLB team would do very well in Mexico, but there's always some substantial error when doing translations.