DrungoHazewood

Blue Crabs are 8-1 and are scoring over nine runs a game. We need a DC-Maryland-Virginia Open Cup to decide this once and for all.

Odor is 28 and has a career OPS+ of 88. His current OPS+ is 90. So... if you're patient and lucky you can find a day where a player is almost exactly meeting expectations? Is that less annoying than me pointing out for the 17th straight year that almost all numbers are more noise than signal on May 3rd?

They needed someone who can get through five innings without embarrassing themselves. It's easier when the league scores four runs a game than five. Takes a long time for perceptions to catch up with reality. Even if nothing changes it'll be 2030 before a 5.00 is embarrassing.

But the best time to tweet something for maximum impact is 6-12 months before the slightest hint of statistical significance. If Travis Sawchik had waited for real evidence he'd have lost countless followers on social media. That's far worse than being the 12,334,556th person to present comically premature information as fact.

Not disagreeing, but let's assume for the sake of argument that runs stay right where they are for the rest of the year. A 5.00 ERA this year would be the last year equivalent of about a 5.80. Psychologically it feels okay, but in 2022 in OPACY a 5.00 ERA isn't good. But after five years of the worst pitching in the majors I'm fine with some delusions and placebos from dead balls and park effects.

Sure. And some pitchers threw 300 innings a year starting at 17. But most didn't.

From the beginnings of organized baseball until pretty far along in the 20th century the teams and papers would announce the starting battery, not just the pitcher. Catching with primitive equipment was so difficult that every team had a backup catcher (or two) even in the eras where teams only carried 12, 13, 15 players. Usually teams would give even a great catcher a lot of rest, either not playing or playing another position. The real oldtimers sometimes would call Buck Ewing the greatest catcher ever and even the greatest player ever, and he had a career high of 97 games/834 innings caught in a season. For Adley, I do wonder if giving him a light load early on might help him have a longer career. Bob Boone didn't even start catching until 23. Yadier Molina was in the minors from 18 but never caught 120 games until 23. Gary Carter was 23 before he caught 120 games in a season. Fisk was 24. Pierzynski 25. Parrish 23. I guess it's plausible.

Sorry to hear that. Hopefully you can find some other common interests to share with the grandkids.

Eventually we'll all be dead and the youngins will like what they like. Maybe we think it's sad that it might not be baseball (not sure either way), but my great-great-great grandfather probably never saw an organized baseball game in his life and neither did most anyone before him. It was fine. Life will go on.

I mean, I guess. But using that as a basis for turning Harrisburg into a thriving MLB franchise? The hockey team draws well, but this is the first year they didn't make the playoffs. Lets see what support is like when they have five losing seasons in a row.

Contraction was just an owner's bargaining chip. The economics or team performance had nothing to do with it. It was never serious. And as Corn says, somewhat lower attendance isn't that concerning to owners when they have more money flowing in from streaming and gambling.

I'm not an expert and I actively dislike the entire concept of Las Vegas existing, but how many people go all the way there to watch a baseball game that's probably between two teams they don't particularly care about?

I don't understand the A's fascination with Vegas, either. Metro area population is in the same ballpark as Cincy or KC, only with three hours of desert once you get 10 miles from city center. Their Nielsen media market is about on par with Harrisburg and Grand Rapids. I guess they're counting on major interest from gamblers? That's healthy. Without some unholy gambling alliance I would think there are at least 10 better candidates for a team.

This is the first year of OPACY humidor, right? So, essentially, a park that used to be 333-364-410-373-318, is now playing more like 343-394-420-383-328. Since the hotel the park has had about a 105 park factor for runs. I wouldn't be too surprised if LF turned that into 95-100. My guess is that absent any mid-season changes runs will be down across the league by about 0.25/game compared to the last few years, due to the humidor. So OPACY could be down half a run or more.

One time shot of $2B divided 30 ways ($67M), compared to dividing up all shared revenues 32 ways instead of 30 for the rest of time. Probably makes sense for the owners. But if it was a no-brainer wouldn't MLB have 40 or 50 teams by now? I'd guess that there are at least 10 cities who could come up with an ownership group with a $1-2B expansion fee.

I'm good with a team in Nashville on if they rebuild Sulphur Dell and play there. Yes, all those hills and slopes and terraces were in play. It was 262' to RF, but the hill was probably 20-30' higher than the infield, and the wall was another 20-30'. This was the configuration into the 1960s. People complained about the little hill that used to be in Houston's current park, but compared to Sulphur Dell that's trivially insignificant.

It's like the Bible and adultery. God knows if you thought about it, even if you never acted on the thought you need to repent.

Now imagine DeGrom throwing from 50 feet away against mostly hitters from low A ball, which was (charitably) the quality of what we call the major leagues in Old Hoss' time. His Providence teammates averaged 5' 9", 165 pounds. All white guys, all but three of them from the northeast US or Canada. And they played 114 games from May 1st through mid-October so they'd often have 2-3 off days a week, sometimes in a row. A good modern pitcher would be almost unhittable. Radbourne was listed at 5' 9", 168 and averaged 5.8 K/9 in 678 innings. They would have thought Randy Johnson was some kind of demon spawn.

One thing that's taken me a long time to understand is how early baseball often saw scores like 52-32. In 1871 they were still over 10 per team per game. But by 1880 we were down to under five runs a game, including roughly 50% unearned runs. I think that's mainly due to pitching rule changes. There were years in the 1860s where the pitcher had to pitch underhanded with both feet on the ground, a stiff elbow, and no breaking the wrist. Imagine fast-pitch softball, but with both feet planted on the ground and no bending your elbow. It'd be a miracle if anyone could break 60 mph. By 1884 Old Hoss Radbourne was throwing no-restrictions overhand with a full windup from a box 50' away.

One other thing I just remembered, if you look at the original Cartwright rules that the Knickerbockers and Doc Adams drew up there was no mention of nine innings. The winner was whomever got to 21 aces (runs in modern terms) first. Games only occasionally got to nine innings. It wasn't until 1857 that the original National Association's rules committee decided to change to nine innings, presumably to match the number of players on the field. So it's hard to tell just how long an 1850 game took, but it wouldn't have been unusual for 21 aces to have been scored in just a few innings.

I appreciated your entire post, but wanted to focus on this. The irony here is that baseball has probably changed the rules and structures of the game as little as any major sport. But what's happened is that this refusal to change led to players, teams, GMs, managers exploiting loopholes those unchanging rules to radically change the game. Probably 95% of the rules today are the same as the rules in 1908, when there were teams that hit six homers a year and pitchers who threw 42 complete games. Baseball has refused to change and the game went on changing anyway but often in ways nobody really wanted. Would it really be so bad to tweak things in the direction we want, rather than refuse to change anything and wake up one day to four-hour nine inning games of all strikeouts and homers?

I'm not sure I agree that there was a reason. Baseball was kind of charting new territory when it was invented in the early 1800s and then turned into a professional sport and a business from about 1860-1890. A lot of things just kind of happened. Or they tinkered with annually to try to make the game more compelling. In the 1860s the game had a time of crisis before they invented and then took a while trying to enforce first called strikes then called balls. There was a time where individual at bats would sometimes take 15 or 20 minutes as pitchers refused to throw hittable pitches and batters refused to swing at pitches 5' off the plate. Then they experimented for the next 20-odd years to try to strike a balance and make the game more interesting. What they ended up with by 1900 was a game that was typically completed in 90 minutes to two hours. And it stayed that way until the 30s and 40s and the advent of lights. There's a relevant Bill James quote where he says people like to say baseball doesn't have a clock, but until lights the sun was the clock. Umpires routinely pressed the players to move things along and chastised them for dawdling because nobody wanted the game called on account of darkness. It's a very modern idea that baseball should be this leisurely, slow-paced game where the pitcher and the batter each get to go through this routine between every pitch, and we take a 3-minute commercial break for each of the nine pitching changes. The folks who invented baseball went and changed major rules when the game started to drag on and threatened to resemble a five-day test match in cricket.

Or he was just emotionally reacting to being called out in a close game for essentially no reason whatsoever. I'm sure I'd have done the same thing.

Or, if the ump had exercised even a small amount of rational judgment.

Just watch the video. As the ball goes by the first baseman Mancini looks at it, sees it's 10 or 15 feet away, unambigously there's no way on earth he can advance to second, so he calmly, immediately walks back to the bag. He clearly had zero intent of trying to go second base. The call was obviously blown by the first base ump.