DrungoHazewood

Well, sorta. You don't lose your mind over the Orioles as much but something fills that gap. I'm a big fan of the U14 St. Mary's Strikers and U15 St. Mary's Sting, and if it's tough watching John Means lose a tight game try it with your own kids. Also, I've filled the TV sports gap with a lot of soccer, mostly teams that are more like the Orioles than not. So I won't pretend not caring about the Orioles has brought me to a state of enlightenment. Maybe if I just filled the spare time with tinkering on cars or going to the opera or something...

The counter argument is that the small teams sometimes outsmart the big ones for a while. Rays now. Orioles in the 70s and 80s. Others of course. But it almost always just for a while, and it's never a model that you just adopt and magically start winning. It's hard to go from bad to good. If it was easy everyone would do it all the time.

Isn't is obvious that you can build far more quickly and easily with $500 or $600M in annual revenues than with $250M? The Orioles are $150M behind the Yanks in payroll, but $400M behind in revenues. Really I don't care. If they win 60 games this year, okay. If they win 70, okay. When they start to look competitive, whatever year that is, I'll try to figure out how to stream games mostly legally. I'm with Moose. I'm done losing my mind about this stuff. The world will go on.

There are an awful lot of days where I think the only purpose of sports is to teach people to deal with failure and disappointment. If we counted the number of days in the last 20 years that we were happy with the Orioles they would be outnumbered by disappointment at least 30:1, at least if you're talking about current results and not some vague feeling of optimism about two years from now. I'm not even sure 2012 and 2014 were much over half.

At this point I've kind of run out of cares about this. MLB decided to bring back historic league names. Great. A year after they unilaterally decided to call them AAA East and Single A Northwest or whatever. Almost as if they were making a point that they own (literally or figuratively, doesn't matter) the minor leagues and can call them whatever they want. Sure, 100 years ago you used to be a real, fully functional, competitive baseball league. Today, you're ours. Pacific Coast League? Well over a century of history? We'll erase that quicker than hitting the delete key. We want to contract a quarter of you, we'll do it. If we want to call you The Generic Baseball League of The Midwest Where Our Second Baseman Will Play For Six Weeks Until We Need Him, that's exactly what we'll do. Now go on and develop our talent and we'll let you pretend that you matter for a while longer. Oh, and you quirky independent leagues that used to think you were so special, bucking the Majors and signing whomever you wanted? Ha, now all you're good for is the rules experiments we wouldn't even subject [insert generic minor league with historic name plastered on] to. We assimilated the St. Paul Saints, the most indy of all the indy teams, and nobody lifted a finger to stop it. Yea, that sounded pretty bitter, but I used to love the minors and now see it all as a kind of sham.

Isn't that sports in general? Are there people who root for teams that win all the time, and if so do those people have a soul? (I say this less than a week after Virginia Tech wins the ACC basketball tournament. I almost didn't know how to deal with that, my teams are always supposed to come up short, often light years short.)

When you're in the thick of a pennant race you do what you have to do.

If kids made all the rules The Massachusetts Game would have won out over The New York Game.

If/when he's called up he'll be on a very short leash. No chance he pitches 100 MLB innings.

I think everyone hopes that, but for every star pitcher there are at least 10 with as much natural ability who couldn't stay healthy.

Fangraphs projections are something like 60 innings of a 4.30 for Rodriguez and 2-3 WAR for Rutschman. Freeman has been worth 3-6 wins every year for nearly a decade, and Ray is projected to be a 3-win pitcher in 180+ innings. So, probably not.

Of course they do. 7-hour, 19-inning games haven't been fun for players since they banned greenies.

We'd probably do well to give that organizational spot to someone who can average more than 20 innings a year.

More like Baker Bowl. Just 318 to right instead of 280.

One important point that hasn't been mentioned yet is that Jordan Lyles was willing to sign a contract with the Baltimore Orioles. That's no small thing, don't find that every day.

It can definitely be overload. In soccer it's all over the stadium and the uniforms but the only commercial break is halftime. Baseball it's all over everything and there's a commercial every ten minutes that lasts four minutes.

Oh, you guys had to start this, didn't you? Now I have to recreate my list. I used to have one somewhere that included all high-level sports and it was approaching 100 stadiums. For baseball... Memorial, OPACY, old Yankee, The Vet, Riverfront, RFK, Tropicana, The Big A, PETCO, Dodger, Kaufmann, Tiger, Skydome, Exhibition, Stade Olympique, Jacobs Field, Wrigley. Had tickets to Fenway but was rained out when we were standing outside. Been inside the current San Francisco park during a non-game day. Minors/Summer League/spring, etc: PG County, Grove, the weird park the Aberdeen indy league team played in 25 years ago, Salem (VA) Municipal Field, Pirates' spring park, Orioles old spring park in Ft. Lauderdale, Oneonta NY, Pilot Field (Buffalo), Thunder Bay Ontario, Midway (St. Paul - we had Bill Murray's seats), Anchorage AK summer league, Foothills Stadium (Calgary, Alberta - saw Eddie on a rehab assignment when he was 41), Harbor Park, The Diamond (Richmond), Wilmington DE, Altoona Rail Kings park, Harrisburg Senators park, Binghamton Mets, Canton-Akron Indians, Regency Furniture Park. Rained out of a game at Bowen Field, Bluefield. The Field of Dreams, but nobody was playing. Doubleday Field, just to walk around. English Field (Virginia Tech). Football: Lane Stadium, RFK, The Vet, Scott Stadium, Williams-Brice (South Carolina), BC, Pitt Stadium, Heinz, Superdome, Meadowlands, Orange Bowl, Pro Player/Dolphins, Gator Bowl, Tangerine Bowl, WVU, Rutgers, Skydome (CFL Argos-Tigercats), FedEx, Carrier Dome, Rich Stadium, Kyle Field. Wherever they played the '97 Music City Bowl in Nashville. Ficklen Stadium (ECU). Soccer: RFK, Audi, Olympiastadion Munich, Allianz Arena Munich, Generali/Alpenbauer Sportpark Unterhaching, Audi Park Ingolstadt, Victoria Road Dagenham/London, FedEx, Maryland Soccer Complex. Tour of Lord's Cricket Ground, London. Colosseum, Rome. Cody Nite Rodeo, Calgary Rodeo. Cassell Coliseum, Verizon Center, Richmond Coliseum, Cap Center, for basketball, and a couple three hockey games. That's from memory, probably forgot a few.

So... Rutschman is guaranteed to play like 130-150 games this year?

I don't know, what's the percentage of very good or great players who finish top five in ROY? Mussina, Bedard, Markakis, Roberts, Machado, Britton... none of them did. Bonds finished 6th. Beltre and Utley got no votes. Abreu zero votes. Vlad finished 6th. Miguel Tejada, no votes. Johnny Damon, Jim Thome, zero. Jim Edmonds finished 8th.

Don't really care at all. There's already advertising everywhere else. If the trade had been commercial breaks half as long in exchange for ads on uniforms I'd take the ads in a second.

One 30-team table, top 12 make the playoffs. Or two 16-team leagues with no interleague, aligned geographically East and West.

I don't know why the super rich teams would be for 14-team playoffs. If I were the Yanks I'd want 4 or 8 team playoffs. Actually, I'd want 2-team playoffs. In the 1920-65 era the Yanks won the league as often as not, and just went straight to the Series. Today if you only had one seven game playoff series you could probably charge near SuperBowl rates for advertisers and still make a killing. Especially if two years out of three it was Yanks-Dodgers.

I don't know how you could do this 150 years into pro baseball, but having more than one thing to play for is a crucial thing. North American sports are almost forced into a situation where many teams can secure playoff spots because there is only one trophy anyone cares about. If you don't have multiple things to play for and you have just two, or a very small number, of playoff teams then you get situations like the old St. Louis Browns who'd be essentially eliminated on May 7th every season and 350,000 would pay to watch them the whole year. Or the Orioles. A modern team in a beautiful ballpark and 5700 people show up to a home game because (shh!) there's nothing to play for. Yea, yea, love of the game, next year's contract, blah, blah, blah. I know you guys just love when I bring up soccer, but in most leagues there's the Championship. Then there's the open cup, where every team from that league's Yankees on down to semi-pro teams can (in theory) win it, and sometimes the 20th-best team in the league actually wins it. There are English teams who've won the FA cup the same year they were relegated to the 2nd division. Most leagues also have some other cup competition, like the League Cup. And then there's club competitions like Champions League or the Europa League. Then there's national teams to root for with many of your favorite club team players. And promotion-relegation battles where even 20th place teams can have 50,000 fans show up the last day of the season in a game that decides if they get to stay in the big league. But not in our sports. You win it all or you're nothing, which means it's glaringly obvious that you're nothing a small fraction of the way into the season for many teams. If I were MLB I'd shorten the regular season to 130 games and have a club competition with all the teams from Japan and Korea.

What's confusing? They need 162 games to make money, then they need a 14-team playoff to make more money.

I'm not saying the owners pocket 50%, I'm saying that after player payroll and bonuses they still have nearly half of $10+ billion to pay other expenses and take profits.