DrungoHazewood

I think Ruth could probably play major league baseball today, but even if you dropped a 27-year-old Ruth into 2022 he'd have a lot of adjusting to do. Look at YouTube videos of him batting, he used a nearly 50-ounce bat and usually took a step-and-a-half as part of his swing like it's slow pitch softball. The catcher would be throwing it back to the pitcher by the time he got done with that process today. Old Ross Radbourn's twitter account suggests he's the greatest pitcher of all time. He threw more innings the first week of August 1884 than Hunter Harvey has in his career, and that was while he had both The Consumption and Syphilis.

Also, it's baseball and it's a fair number of old media types, so when in doubt drop everyone who's played in the last 30-40 years and replace them with dead guys. Wouldn't surprise me at all if no one in the top ten was active after 1990*, but Jeter and Rivera are in 10-20. * Nolan Ryan was active in the early 90s and he always seems to sneak into these lists about 50 places higher than logic would indicate. So maybe he gets in the top 10.

Jeter had a better batting average, Rivera a better ERA. Duh.

All of these lists have selections that appear to be designed to be controversial to draw eyeballs and clicks and comments. There have to be a million books, web pages, forum posts, etc. about the top 100 players of all time. Joe Posnanski put out a book recently that's titled The Baseball 100 that's been on bestseller lists for a while. My thought was "really, we needed another book ranking baseball players?" If it's not controversial with picks that kind of don't make sense why would anyone read it? This list was picked by votes from "dozens of writers and editors" from ESPN. For all we know they polled Chris Berman and the blonde who interviews Texas Tech's coach as he running off the field at halftime. Because they knew the results from people like that would be kind of wacky and get some more views.

In 1980 the O's best draft pick was Ken Dixon, with 2.4 WAR in his career. 1981 it was Tony Arnold, -0.1 WAR. 1982 it was John Hayban with 6.2, but just 0.5 for the Orioles. Bill Ripken was also taken in this draft, career 5.9 WAR. 1983 was no one. 1984 was Jeff Tackett at 0.6. 1985 was Brian Dubois at 0.8. 1986 was Blaine Beatty with 0.5, but 0.0 for the Orioles. Finally in 1987 they picked Pete Harnisch, Anthony Telford, Steve Finley and David Segui. Also Mike Mussina, but he didn't sign until they drafted him again in 1990. So seven years of drafting and the very best player they got out of hundreds of players picked was Bill Ripken, whose entire career was worth less than a single decent Cal Ripken season. From '83-86 they got nothing out of the draft. You just can't compete when your drafting and development is that bad for seven years. It's kind of amazing the teams from '89 into the late 90s competed. For comparison, every Orioles draft class from 2010-15 was better than any of their classes from 1980-86. And that's with a lot of players in those recent classes still active and accumulating more value.

He hit .304 with 34 homers and 119 RBI across three different minor league teams in '82, so I wonder if they could have stuck with him a little longer. Not like Todd Cruz was good. The rest of the '83 season at Rochester he hit .343 with a .917 OPS. Didn't play that well in AAA in succeeding years. But at 28 he was in the Mexican League and hit .345-36-123 with a 1.047 OPS. Teammates with Darryl Motley, who hit .370, and Union Laguna still finished 59-69.

As for the DeCinces-Ford trade, that was one of the low points of my childhood. DeCinces was favorite player, I used to write up fan club newsletters and tack them to the wall of my treehouse. I clearly remember my Dad's boss coming over for something and saying "Did you hear they traded Doug DeCinces?" and my heart just sank. It was salt in the wound that Ford was awful and DeCinces had some very good years with the Angels.

I'll offer up (and I'm mentioned this before) that the '83 Orioles draft was be the worst draft class in history. Not one player they drafted that year made the majors, and only a handful even got cups of coffee in AAA. The #1 Wayne Wilson never played above A ball, the #2 Mike Conley had a 7.11 ERA at Bluefield and never played again, and the 3rd rounder Mike Pavelka didn't sign and never played professionally. The only player in the O's whole draft to get to the show was 7th rounder Mike Price, and that only because he managed the 2014-18 Reds. As a player he never signed with the O's and eventually peaked with 44 innings in AAA with the Angels.

All of that works much better, as do most strategies, when you have a fully-functioning pipeline of inexpensive, quality talent coming out of the minors. The Orioles are working on it. When they get there a lot of strategies will look more promising. Without the talent Bullpen Year won't be much better than a traditional approach.

He wasn't awful, but he was a typical Oriole free agent. Had been great years before, played well at times for us but wasn't a center fielder anymore but we kept running him out there. And missed six or eight weeks with various injuries every year. It's not like we didn't know what we were getting, he was 33 when he signed and had been missing a month or two a year since he was 28. Last time he was Fred Lynn, future Hall of Famer, was 1979 and the O's got him in '85.

Ben's a good guy but with the Orioles he was 58-53 with a 111 ERA+, made just 142 starts, and never played in a postseason game. The O's HOF voters seem to put a lot of emphasis on whether or not you were on teams that went to the postseason. Kind of surprising Stoddard isn't in, given his ties to the teams of the late 70s and early 80s, and the fact that 14(!) '79 Orioles have been inducted. Really Kiko Garcia and Steve Stone are the only regulars on that team who aren't in, and I guess Full Pack, and if you want to count Sammy Stewart. Williamson made me realize that the only '89 O's in the O's HOF are Ripken, Devereaux and Anderson. No Milligan, no Tettleton, no Joe Orsulak. Oh, I guess Gregg Olson is in. No Kevin Hickey, no Dave Johnson. I don't know, maybe that's enough. But I'd have a big ceremony honoring both the '89 and '12 teams. Have them all come back, give everybody Why Not? shirts and cardboard cutouts of Chris Davis lifting Nate McLouth over his shoulder.

I always wondered if Stanhouse was as good as his ERAs. He had terrible walk numbers, terrible baserunners allowed, and poor FIPs. He allowed 25 of 65 (41%) of inherited runners to score, versus a league average of 33%. And he blew 22% of his save opportunities. In '78 Tippy Martinez had an ERA 2.00 runs a game higher than Stanhouse, but allowed just 15 of 54 (28%) of inherited runners to score.

I think most people believe that the front office is doing what they think is in the best interests of the team within the constraints that the ownership group levies on them.

So if you were in charge you'd spend the extra $75M a year to win 72 games with players who have no future on the next good Orioles team?

I think the mistake is the belief that teams are tanking primarily to get the #1 draft pick. I think the main reason is to save money. The 2007 Orioles had about a league-average payroll and were a laughingstock. The 2021 Orioles had one of the lowest payrolls in the league and were a laughingstock. If you're going to be a laughingstock, why also pay $75M extra for the privilege?

Gotta make sure Taylor Teagarden gets his bonus.

I've looked at this before, and I think the idea of catchers moving to another position in mid-career to keep healthy and hit much better is almost a total myth. It's rare. Bench moved to third his last couple years and those are his worst two years. Fisk tried to move to the outfield, didn't even last a season. Berra spent a few years playing some outfield so Elston Howard could finally play, but he was 36 and it was kind of meh. Piazza tried to play first at 35, again, meh, went back to catching. I guess you can say it worked for a couple years for Joe Torre. Mauer played first for five years, one of which was anything like Joe Mauer. Ted Simmons became mostly a DH when he was old and no good. Brian Downing had a whole second career as a LF/DH after moving out from behind the plate, but he also had a remarkable and somewhat suspicious transformation into a body builder at almost the same moment. Victor Martinez probably extended his career by DHing. Anyway, I wouldn't count on Rutschman gaining value by moving to another position.

Or maybe inflation goes crazy and we've locked him into 2022 rates, so his $25M in 2030 is below the league-average salary.

You can just look at it as the Orioles really, really, really overpaying for June of 2016.

RBI worse than PAs... actually, yea. Certainly could be. Rickey Henderson's career high in RBI was 74, Jay Gibbons' was 100. If someone told me I had to come up with a system to allocate bonus money by some kind of performance metric I think I'd divide up the pool by WAR and available pool dollars. Let's say you have 100 eligible players, worth a total of 150 WAR, and $30M to give out. Give everyone with positive WAR $20k per 0.1 WAR. If you're a 0.5 win player you get $100k. If you're a five-win player you get $1M. 10-win, $2M. I'm sure someone will pick holes in the edge cases, like giving some guy who goes 1-for-5 a $100k bonus, so you'd have to put a floor like maybe min 100 PAs or 30 innings to get a bonus.

Pre-arb bonus pool for the top 30 based on fWAR, I'm assuming? That's what the owners proposed in some earlier test idea they floated. Really would hate to be in that 25-35 range. Just to get kind of an idea of what this will look like I ran a list of the top WAR totals for non-pitchers in 2021 for everyone 26 or younger. The 25th is Luis Robert at 3.6, 35th is Austin Hayes at 3.1. So a tenth of a win or less will separate those getting a bonus from those not getting one. I'm a WAR advocate, but in no way would I definitively state that a glove-first shortstop with 3.1 WAR is better than a pitcher with 3.0. Fangraphs and bb-ref WAR for pitchers sometimes varies by a win or more because of the philosophical underpinnings of each model (which is a feature, not a bug). If anyone tells you that a half a win difference between any two players is definitive you should be very skeptical. This model is using that kind of difference to hand out potentially tens of $millions. Wander Franco was a 3.5 win player in just 70 games because the Rays didn't want to start his clock, so JP Crawford and his 3.8 WAR in 160 games get more of a bonus. And what happens when Statcast or BIS or someone retroactively gets better data and in 2025 the formerly 32nd-ranked player by fWAR is now 27th? What happens when your manager uses you in relief and it would take an epic season to break into the top 30 in 60 innings, while your similarly-talented teammate starts and breaks into the top 30 and gets a bonus? What if you're in 32nd place on September 22nd and your team decides your slightly sore hammy is a good reason to shut you down for the year? Just a bad idea to tie money to specific metrics. There's a reason they won't let contract say something like "$100k bonus for 100 RBI".

Today, no. But in the past it was dramatically more likely to call up a talented young player who hadn't spent X amount of time at each level. You could call up someone and give them a shot without worrying that you just blew your chance at his really productive age 29 season.

Yea, that's pretty much it. I look at the Orioles from before the free agency era and they were just handled very differently. Has the game changed enough since then that these observations are not valid? I don't know, maybe. But maybe not. Palmer was in the majors for good at 19 after a season in A ball that today would have gotten him sent to AA. Brooks debuted at 18, got some time in the majors at 19, 20, was a regular at 21 even though he didn't hit. Today he would have spent age 18 in a complex league, 19 in low A, 20 in high A, 21 in AA, 22 in AAA, and would be just getting to the majors at the point where he had 1000 PAs in real life. Wally Bunker jumped from A ball to the majors at 18 and won 19 games at age 19, hurt his arm but ended up with a Chris Tillman-like career. Today he would have spent his age 19 season in A or AA, and might well have hurt his arm before ever having significant time in the majors. Milt Pappas pitched three minor league games between high school and being in the majors for good, and he won 209 games. People laugh about ripping off the Reds in the Frank Robinson trade, but Milt Pappas won 110 games with the Orioles before he turned 27. Today he wouldn't have had a chance to win a single major league game until he was 20, 21, 22. Now... I don't want to exaggerate. There were plenty of players in that era who spent 4, 5, 6 years in the minors. But it was because it took that long for them to be better than somebody on the MLB team. Not because they were afraid of giving up a good year at 28 or 29.

I think what you're saying has merit and some players might be hurt by being called up into a reserve or relief role early. But guy like Brooks and Palmer and others were routinely called up years before we'd call them up in the free agency era.

Ugh. That was the only thing I really cared about.