DrungoHazewood

You know, birds aren't real. It's about time the Orioles dispense with this ruse that they're cute little feathered animals and get on with the reality of apocalyptic spy drones.

My kids are 15 and 13, although they could probably pass for 12 and 10. Still doesn't help even if I was dishonest.

Really? So 25.185 is 25 and 185 days? Huh. So I didn't have to put on the engineer hat and chastise @Frobbyfor decimal point abuse? You're taking the fun out of everything. Baseball and their non-standard decimals. 7.1 innings is really 7.3333333, and 30.098 is really 30 and 98/365ths* years. Makes spreadsheets hell to calculate. * WHAT ABOUT LEAP YEARS?!? It's really 98/365.25ths. Ugh.

Nice. For me I'd be adding 180 miles of round trip gas, so something like $35. But a ballgame at Camden Yards for $50 still isn't bad. And I'd have to bring the kids and the wife and they'd be far less likely to play along with the cheap game thing.

With the Orioles you're never quite sure if they're going to lose 15-0, 8-2, or 4-3.

I love how you've listed this to three decimal points. .001 of a year is eight hours, 45 minutes and 36 seconds. Although I'm curious where you got birth data that precise. Even for myself all I know is that I was born sometime in the afternoon, when the Blue Angels were flying around the county on Air Show day.

I think that the biggest change to the menu at OPACY this year is that they're allowing you to bring your own food and drink in again. If you don't want to eat obscenely priced stadium food, buy a $1 hot dog, a $2 bag of peanuts, and a $1 soda outside and bring it in. Going that route plus a cheap/Stubhub ticket is almost certainly cheaper than going to your local movie theater and buying the bushel of popcorn and a gallon soda deal.

While that's true, it makes more sense to just give their real age with a decimal point or two. It's a little wacky to claim that Nelson Cruz and Manny Machado, with birthdays right around July 1st, are a year younger or older than players born within a week of them. Tyler Nevin and Jahmai Jones are about two months apart in age. It doesn't really benefit us to claim that Nevin is a year older and in some ways its probably a little detrimental to analysis. Especially if you're comparing two 18 or 19-year-olds for whom a year could be a big deal.

It's not really an internet forum if you don't assume that we're all smarter than all 30 MLB GMs, and if they'd just listen to us they'd be pulling off Houston's side of the Glenn Davis deal like every week.

It's not really an internet forum if you don't assume that the people in charge threw this together in about 15 minutes without any careful consideration or analysis, and that any dude sitting in his living room in his boxers with a bag of Doritos would have done better with an online CAD program and three beers.

Strange. Of all the things to complain about. Not that this has anything to do with the article (I guess, didn't read it, just saw exerpts) in 1989 the Orioles ditched the cartoon bird and it seemed appropriate. Everyone at the time loved the ornithologically correct bird and the new black-themed hats and uniforms. It was a clean break with the malaise and crapulence of the 1984-88 era. I wouldn't be opposed to some kind of 2023 uniform and/or logo change signifying a new era of success.

So... you give an earpiece to the shortstop. And whenever Joe Smith is up and you are throwing him a curve, he shifts three steps to the left. Haven't you just spent a lot of time and effort and a fair amount of money to avoid sign stealing, when all the other team has to do is look for where the shortstop is?

If it was a complex, cutting-edge technology baseball would still be 40 years from considering it. It's relatively straightforward to encrypt the signal and make it very difficult to hack. I assume they use something like this in this system. Unless you have an inside source supplying the other team with the encryption key.

Does anyone have any idea what Orioles radio broadcast revenues are (separate from streaming)? My guess is that you could round it off to zero. Wouldn't pay for two months of a utility infielder. But I could be wrong. When I was a kid in the 80s I could pick up the Orioles on my transistor radio on any of two, three, four strong, close stations on any given night. We had a local affiliate here in St. Mary's County. I'm not sure I can find one decent signal for games today. Looking at the affiliate list it looks like my best bet is the station in Crisfield, about 40 miles away as the crow flies. Of course streaming the radio feed on MLB.com is much better quality.

Or if something were to happen that would allow large numbers of people to not pay for MASN and all the other RSNs if they don't watch them.

I have no idea, but I'm sure people will line up unless they see MLB falling off a cliff shortly.

I'd like to know about how this long vetting process seamlessly approved Newcastle being bought, more-or-less, by the Saudi royal family. Like six months ago. And Putin's buddy Abramovich was/is Chelsea's owner despite clear and obvious connections to a repressive tyrant, and his money came from shady dealings after the breakup of the Soviet Union. I don't think either of these would have gotten to step one in the MLB approval process. People like Mark Cuban, who is squeaky clean by comparison, were basically told to just not try to buy the Cubs because he wasn't MLB ownership material.

Good. I'm sure the hidebound traditionalists are already queuing up their fist-shaking screeds about how this is wrong because it wasn't done this way when they were 12. But I'm good with it. It'll eliminate the nonsense of sign stealing is fine if you just look at the guy from second base, but it's a hanging offense if you use a camera or binoculars or that electric buzzer from the 1890s and beat on a trash can, and it's enforced by throwing at the other guy's head and then we get to have an endless Twitter war about unwritten rules and blah, blah... Let's just play some baseball.

Angelos bought the team for $174M in 1993. Forbes now values the team at 1.375B after almost 30 years of mostly being horribly mismanaged, with zero championships and only a handful of playoff appearances. Major League franchises are one of the few investments that have been almost guaranteed to appreciate in value even if they're run by a group of chimpanzees on LSD. Who wouldn't want to buy that? This is probably the 26th-most successful franchise of the past three decades and it still appreciated in value faster than stocks. And on top of that you get to be one of 30 MLB owners in the world.

You could just get into German soccer. The Germans have the 50+1 rule, where the club, basically the sum of all the supporters or season ticket holders or however they pay to support the local sports club (no matter if they've transformed over a century-plus into a multi-multi-million dollar soccer enterprise), have to have 50% plus one of the votes on the board. You will sometimes have a rich guy come in and buy a controlling share of a team, but he can't have more than 50% minus one votes on the board. So the locals always control the team. Wouldn't it be lovely if the controlling interest in the Orioles was kind of like the Green Bay Packers, just the sum total of the season ticket holders? Although there's a strange sort of exemption or looking-the-other-way for Bayern Munich, who seem to have more money than all the other German teams combined. And even with the other teams it's not unheard of for the rich guy to feud with the supporters on the board and the team devolves into chaos as they veto everything the rich guy wants. The English Premier League is the one league that appears to have zero vetting process for owners besides do you have enough money to buy the team. Although I'm not that familiar with the ownership situations in France, Belgium, Italy, etc.

It was much like the Royals signing Zach Greinke recently.

Sir Sid! He of the beating up of a judge in Aruba on Christmas Day (or was it New Year's Day?) fame.

Not to speak ill of the recently deceased, but they hadn't really figured out DHing or the relative value of someone with zero defensive value back then. Davis was not productive, and each year they had guys at Rochester with .850+ OPSes.

The Russian soccer and hockey leagues have both had seasons where there were teams in both St. Petersburg and Vladivostok, separated by 11 time zones. It can be done, at least if everyone drinks a gallon of vodka a week.

They're lucky they only included MLB teams because I'm guessing the Orioles aren't in the top 35 baseball teams in the world. They probably wouldn't finish over .500 in the NPB.