DrungoHazewood

I'd go further and challenge anyone to find a major league team in all of history going back to 1876/71 that didn't have a fringe player. The 1906 Cubs come close, they barely gave any playing time to anyone who didn't at least have a passable career. But besides that... the '27 Yanks had Cedric Durst and Ray Morehart and Joe Giard. Basically every team has fringe players.

To me the little games of occasionally holding someone back for three weeks or six weeks or whatever are less important than the larger problem of holding players back in general so that you can attempt to maximize the six years you have them on the team. Under the prior CBA, and every CBA for decades, teams have players spend years and years in the minors so that they're ready to be near-peak for as much of their six year window as possible. So if a player is likely to be productive but not great now, but might be great later teams will say they have a lot of development left in AA or AAA and we don't get to see them in the majors. If all players were made free agents at 28, for example, you could call up a pitcher at 20 or 21 and have them play a role in the bullpen, or have them spot start. Or start them against lesser opponents and otherwise pitch relief. You wouldn't feel this need to have them stay in the minors until everything is 100% polished because service time means nothing. You could call up an 18- or 19-year-old in September to get him innings against real major leaguers without worrying about starting a clock. The Orioles could have gotten Rutschman 150 MLB at bats by now and wouldn't be wringing their hands about losing a year when he's 29. Your backup catcher could be a 21-year-old prospect who's not ready to play every day as a starter in the majors but is a real prospect, and even then could outhit whatever .600 OPSing 32-year-old journeyman you'd otherwise stick there. Most of what they mean by "he needs more seasoning in the minors" isn't that he's not good enough to fill some kind of role in the majors. It's that their entire mindset is to maximize his six year window. Doesn't have to be that way.

At this point we're probably not changing any opinions, but I find it difficult to say someone was unsuccessful when they've been very good or even excellent at every level except the very, very highest in the world. By your definitions the vast majority of people in the world are not successful, and I prefer to not look at things that pessimistically.

He just needs a new organization to reset the expectations from 25th overall pick to underdog fighter who was written off because he doesn't look like Bo Jackson. I'd guess Steve Pearce was disappointing to Pirates fans, but is now a little bit of a cult hero to multiple franchises.

There's always a fine line between guy with no talent we clearly should have never taken a chance on and scrappy underdog making the most of his limited athleticism. Tough path for Stewart because most fans think all first round picks are somewhere between All Stars and Hall of Famers.

Yes! Exactly. Especially by that guy on the board who absolutely 100% knew that the guy the Orioles didn't take was going to be better. You know there's people here who have Austin Martin's and Nick Gonzales' MiLB pages bookmarked, ready to pounce on the Orioles' short-sighted, stupid, penny-pinching staff the moment they have a good week in AA.

He doesn't look like a fast, athletic guy and he doesn't steal bases. For the first 130 years of baseball history that was the only way to judge baserunning. Rbaser wasn't a thing.

I think it's a continuum. I think players who made their high school team have had some level of success they should be proud of, just watching my own kids play soccer I know how much work and how much of a challenge that can be at least at some schools. Anyone who played in college or the low minors is a heck of a player. Anyone who had any kind of success in the minors is better than almost any of us have known or even played with or against (some exceptions, of course, for those who're often around pro ballplayers). Just making the majors is something that's rare and special. My high school is probably a pretty typical high school, 1500 or 2000 students most years, occasionally pretty good records in football, baseball, basketball, soccer. I don't think in the nearly 40 years since I started there have we had a single player make it out of A ball. That's probably 500 players over that time, and nobody has ever gotten close to the majors. I get the idea that if you're not contributing to a good MLB team you're disappointing. But I try to keep that in context. Someone like DJ Stewart is like a politician who was in the state legislature for 15 years, in the House for a couple terms, ran for President and didn't make it out of the primaries, so to some people he's a huge disappointment as a politician. I guess I just don't like the attitude that you're some kind of loser if you're not the very, very best in the world. It would be depressing to think that almost everyone is a disappointment.

He's just repeating the common refrain that you have to be among the top 5-10% of draftees to not be called a failure. 85th percentile performance out of a 2nd round pick is judged by most to be a failure. Take the 2nd round of the 2010 draft, for example. Jimmy Nelson and Vince Velasquez were taken with the 5th and 6th picks. Both are like 30-45 with an ERA over around 4.50, led the league in things like losses and HBP. But have been more successful than 90%+ of the players drafted that year. I think most fans of the teams of Nelson and Velasquez are disappointed by them, despite the fact it's impossible to argue that they're not in the top tiny fraction of 1% of baseball players in the world. To most fans failure and success is only defined in the context of the best 500 or 750 players alive today. So 99.9%+ of all ballplayers are failures.

On a team in 2022 with 13 pitchers, how useful can a guy be who has a 115 OPS+ and no other positive attributes? Remembering that we're wishing and hoping for that 115, since his career mark is 97. I guess he could turn into Jim Dwyer. Also, projecting 31 games (out of 60) to a full season is stretching things more than a bit. I could probably find a 30-game stretch where John Stefero and Luis Mercedes looked pretty good. (Not to besmirch the name of Jim Dwyer, but if you shifted his career 10 years later everyone would look at the progression and say oh yea, he got some help.) (Realizing that 3/4ths of the board is too young to remember who Jim Dwyer is.)

So I ran a query on bb-ref Stathead. LF/RFers since 1970 (min 50 games at one of those positions). Through age 27 they had to have between 300 and 1000 PAs. OPS+ under 100. No more than -5 fielding runs. Results were 79 players matching those criteria. Stewart is one of them. I'll throw out some of the names on the list I recognize (career WAR in parentheses): Terry Crowley (2.4), Mark Sweeney (1.7), Ruben Mateo (0), Dwight Smith Jr (-1), Reggie Williams (-1), Phil Nevin (16), Curt Blefary (11), Bam Bam Muelens (-2), Mickey Hatcher (3), Dave McCarty (-2.2), Ken Gerhart (-1), Sherman Obando (-1). Those were the names I recognized. The rest of the list was guys like Harold Ramirez and Ron Pruitt and Junior Lake. Also John "Forces" Van Der Wal. Blefary is not really a comp, he'd been in a three-year funk by the time he was Stewart's age, and would be out of the league by 28. Nevin had a big breakout in a time when a lot of 29-year-old mediocrities suddenly started hitting 35 homers. I think there's little chance DJ Stewart has a productive major league career left in him. He's 28 and his bat absolutely has to carry him, and he has a 97 OPS+, and under an .800 in AAA. I mean, I wouldn't be stunned if he fell into a job somewhere and had a .800 OPS in 400 PAs. But I could say that about 1000 guys. Almost all of them end up as Ken Gerhart.

The writers path needs 75% concurrence of 600+ people. It's a fairly high bar, especially when the voting was so poorly designed (pick from zero to 10 players out of a whole page of guys whose only eligibility criteria is they played in some part of 10 seasons). The Vet's Committees are typically a dozen or so old dudes, some of whom have been buddies since 1974. The group that put Baines in was: Roberto Alomar, Bert Blyleven, Pat Gillick, Tony La Russa, Greg Maddux, Joe Morgan, John Schuerholz, Ozzie Smith, and Joe Torre; major league executives Al Avila, Paul Beeston, Andy MacPhail, and Jerry Reinsdorf; and media members/baseball historians Steve Hirdt, Tim Kurkjian, and Claire Smith. Of those people Alomar played with Baines, LaRussa managed him, Reinsdorf and Gillick were his GMs. Personal tie to committee members, none of whom were obviously well-versed in modern analytics. Whitaker will eventually go in. If the path follows typical HOF methods it'll be in 2044, a year after he passes, and after they've inducted Jeff Kent, Ian Kinsler, Dustin Pedroia and Gil McDougald.

Singleton was on the ballot just one year, 1990, didn't get a single vote and was dropped off. I loved Singleton as a player, but he's not really a reasonable HOFer by any definition. Old-school he was a RF/DH who hit .282 with 246 homers and the only major thing he ever led the league in was OBP in '73. By modern metrics his 42 rWAR is about 10 shy of the grey area, unless you have friends among writers (Jim Rice) or Vet's Committee members (Harold Baines). Perez got fairly good support from the writers, starting off at 50%. That almost guarantees eventual selection. But, yea, in general it's gotten far more difficult to get in. With expansion there are many more good players, but if anything the standards have gone up. Examples abound, but Harry Hooper was a guy from the teens and 20s with 53 WAR, he's in. So is Kiki Cuyler, Sam Rice, both about as good. Dwight Evans, Reggie Smith, Bobby Abreu, Bobby Bonds, Gary Sheffield all have better resumes and are out. And that's before you start talking about presumed PED guys with dramatically better cases then the Frisch Vet's Committee crowd.

Both of these are exaggerations. As others have said it might reduce overall homers in the park by 10, 15, maybe 20%, and shorten the average game by tens of seconds.

My guess would have been sometime in the late 20s or early 30s. There are years in that era where something like 25% of NL plate appearances are from Hall of Famers. When Frankie Frisch was head of the Veteran's Committee he made sure a lot of his former teammates and opponents found their way to Cooperstown. Scanning through the Cardinals and Giants of that era many years they had 6-7 HOFers. Looking through the NL rosters of 1929 every team had at least one HOFer and the median was probably about four.

Yes, I'm sure it'll be a little less interesting to the visiting players who'd count on coming to town and picking up three or four homers.

He batted leadoff: 21 games in 1969, and had a .333 OBP in the role. That was also the year he had a .351 OBP overall. 14 times in 1970, and actually had a .411 OBP. Although his overall that year was just .303. 10 times in '71. 13 in '72. Twice in '73. 17 times in '74 despite an overall .598 OPS. Handful of times in '75-76. Never in '77. 24 times in '78, with an overall .213/.299/.250 line. Al Bumbry was hurt most of the year. Just a handful of times the rest of his career. So I'd say it justified in '69, perhaps even in 1970 because of his performance in prior year. But it's hard to imagine many cases where he was a reasonable choice to lead off after that. In 1978 when he led off 24 times they had 10 other players with 100+ PAs and a higher OBP. He had 130 PAs batting 1st or 2nd in '78 with an overall OPS of .549.

They forgot to mention that the wall will now be faced with a 6' thick airbag to cushion the impact of running into the wall. You never have to slow up, just go full out right to the fence with no chance of injury.

The change may be in place for decades, but there's nothing guaranteeing that any outfielders on the current roster will be here in 2023.

I want them to make that cutout an acute angle, so the ball could be home run if it's hit 381 feet, but not if it's 385.

Former Oriole Charles Johnson had 534 PAs in the #9 spot and OPS'd .955, which is the highest 9th place OPS (min 500 PAs) since 1900. Wes Farrell, the pitcher who should have been put in the Hall of Fame instead of his brother Rick, had an .811 OPS in 1247 PAs hitting 9th. 4th-best on the list. His managers apparently batted him 9th by tradition, as there were years like 1931 when he had the highest OPS on his team but almost exclusively hit 9th. In '31 he had a team-best .994 OPS and was third on the Indians with 9 homers in just 128 PAs but batted 9th in 125 of those PAs. Bill Mueller had a .948 OPS in 794 PAs batting 8th. In the old, old days it was customary to bat the catcher 8th, and HOFer Gabby Hartnett had 1630 PAs in the eighth spot with an .898 OPS. Roy Campanella hit 8th almost 1000 times with an .873.

For context, what percentage of money spent on stadium modifications and renovations come from MLB teams, and what percentage comes from governments? I'd like to know exactly how ambivalent I need to be about this.

But it is. My way is better, it was proven. I have a paper around here somewhere.

Nobody ever complained when their team hit a game-winning homer. But when 50-win teams hit 200 homers and the 9th-place hitter on a last place team could homer at any moment it's no longer a special event but just a thing. Maybe today's fan wants to look at their phone for an hour or two or three while a bunch of strikeouts happen, then glance up at the game when the homers come. I think the sport can do better.

The biggest surprise of the 2021 baseball season was that the Atlantic League moved the mound back a foot and strikeouts went slightly up. There was some speculation that moving it even a foot would be catastrophic, that pitchers would take years to adjust, especially their breaking stuff. The reality was that it was barely a blip. I think they're eventually going to have to move the pitching distance back 3', perhaps more. At least if we're going to ever go back to a game that doesn't involve 20 strikeouts every night.