DrungoHazewood

Angelos' legacy is going to be that of running a formerly great franchise into the ground while making a number of key decisions seemingly on the basis or emotion or spite. The running the team into the ground part may not be entirely fair since he bought an organization that had been in decline since '83. But he walked into a huge money-making machine in Oriole Park at Camden Yards and ended up turning that into a disaster. The successes of 2012-2016 were despite a bunch of glaring organizational failings that Angelos' policies were responsible for. He could have settled with the Nats years ago but instead is fighting to the bitter end, will probably lose anyway, and has negatively impacted two franchises' ability to compete. And if the O's ever move I'm done. I will not root for any Nashville Orioles, I can't see myself switching to the Nats, and probably won't watch Major League baseball at all for a very long time.

Also, how did Buck not win manager of the year in 2012? Awards like this are usually about stories, and the Orioles were dead to rights that year. Not even relevant for 14 years. No hopes of winning. Projections for 65 or 70 wins. They make the playoffs and win 93 with an Island of Misfit Toys roster and the voters give it to Bob Melvin for getting 94 wins from a team that was only a small handful of wins under .500 the preceding two years.

It's strange how people latch onto narratives. Here I'd say many posters think of Buck as mostly a disappointment. You hear much more about the disappointing parts of his tenure than speaking fondly of the wins and the playoff appearances and the getting an awful lot out of pedestrian rosters. The 2014 Orioles won 96 games in the AL East with Chris Tillman as their #1 starter, with Bud Norris getting 28 starts, with Caleb Joseph as the starting catcher, with David Lough and Ryan Flaherty getting significant playing time. That's not talked about nearly as often as Britton and TTP and the save rule. Frank Robinson spent less than four years as the Orioles manager and had a .447 winning percentage and one .500 season. But if his tenure is ever discussed it's all about the Why Not? Orioles. Nobody shakes their fists and gets all bitter about him being 18 games under .500 over his last season-and-a-quarter. Nobody blames Earl for 1988 after his return from retirement crashed and burned. But in this thread people have said Buck set up the team for needing to rebuild.

That's a very negative take on his time here. To get to that conclusion you have to read an awful lot into the supposed power struggles between Duquette, Buck, and Brady, which to me mostly seemed like internet gossip. Blaming him for Davis is weird, in that there were at least two layers of management above him that could have just said no, even if he advocated for it. I think people focus on the bad stuff because that's just who they are, and forget or intentionally omit things like the 2010 Orioles were 32-73 when he took over and 34-23 from there to the end of the season. To me it was immediately obvious that the culture of the team did a 180 from the Trembley/Perlozzo years when he was hired.

if you want to get a substantial advantage you use a big offensive player who really can't field at DH but takes to the role and doesn't have much or any DH penalty. Or you can do like a lot of teams and just plug some random name in there, like whomever is a little banged up, and you get a .725 OPS from your assortment of six guys.

When I cut the Directv service I did some research into this and the AT&T package was not as good as the version of Hulu that includes broadcast networks, but also more expensive. So I have Hulu and use some creative work-arounds to get to MASN when I want to watch. I still think it's amazing that living 93 miles from OPACY I can more easily, cheaply, legally stream third division German soccer than the Baltimore Orioles.

Both the architect of the Why Not '89 Orioles, and the Glenn Davis trade. Maybe today we can just remember the '89 Orioles, one of the truly enjoyable teams of my lifetime.

There are golf ball trajectory simulators like this one. We know people can hit golf balls 350+ yards, but with the simulator the only way you can get there is a ball velocity in excess of 200 mph. You can also do the math on an idealized projectile, and if a 80 mph object launched at 25 degrees will go 330 feet, you have to launch the same thing 140 mph to go the 1000 feet of a long hitter's golf ball.

I follow Jones on Twitter and he posts sometimes about life in Japan, all the good food and various other things. Looks like he's enjoying the twilight of his career over there. I think this week he said he's vacationing in the Maldives.

Also with former Oriole (sort of) Tsuyoshi Wada, who has mostly been with Softbank since 2006. If you remember the O's signed him as a kind of follow-on to Koji Uehara in '12, he was about as big a star in Japan as Koji. But immediately got hurt, came back, pitched reasonably well in Norfolk but never got a call up. Went to the Cubs and threw 100 innings of a 3.36 before going back to Fukuoka.

Who isn't? But I'm not at all convinced that signing a guy who's 2 wins below replacement for his career moves the needle towards competitiveness at all. But I'm also not in any way a fan of signing a bunch of Kevin Millars. The 1998-2011 Orioles won 72 games a year, spent nothing on development, still had an average payroll for God knows what reason, and it was almost miraculous they had a pretty good team from '12-16.

In the naughts they'd sign a bunch of average-ish 32-year-olds for $7M, so they nonsensically paid good money for a 70-win team. They paid above sticker for a Buick Encore. This is $7M+ for a player who, on the surface, looks bad. This is paying $22k for a 2011 Chevy Cruze, presumably on the hopes that they can stage 3 tune it without it blowing up.

That's probably the most likely case. The Orioles weren't the only team that thinks he has some hidden potential and someone else offered him almost that much.

Sure. I'm just trying to spitball reasons why a good analytics guy would spend $7M plus and $11M club option on a guy who's been worth $3.22 and a bag of magic beans over an 11-year career.

I'm not willing to go with the idea that Mike Elias and team are dumb. Because they're not. If the answer "Mike Elias = Syd Thrift" I'm going to disagree.

I agree that Elias isn't stupid and there is probably some kind of justifiable rationale for this, but I'm having a hard time coming up with one. Your #1 is kind of plausible, #2 doesn't make any sense (why overpay for a guy everyone can see stinks and no one else would pay half that?), and #3... maybe? I think it's somewhat likely that the Orioles see a floor coming when the CBA is ironed out, and know that they have no chance on good free agents so they need to do something to get the payroll up to the floor. If that's the case I'd prefer they just give Mullins, Mancini and Means $5M raises.

I'm sure you remember paying just $7M for Jaret Wright. And another $6M for Danys Baez. And only $4.5M for Jamie Walker. And another $4M for Kevin Millar. And a couple million for Steve Trachsel. The all of a sudden we have a pretty substantial payroll for an old team going nowhere. Why pay $7M for a 30-year-old replacement player when you can get the same thing for $600k? This is the team that fired coaches apparently to save $100k or $200k, but they can afford $7M for a guy who is below replacement across an 11-year career.

The road to hell is paved with paying free agent rates for below-average players.

I'd love to see that. Never going to happen. Most certainly not this year. In most of the park that would require major renovations and construction. They could slightly turn the field and move the plate back a bit like they did in 2000(?), and put up some screens to make the fences taller.

There are a lot of guys in the world who can give you five innings, 3-4 runs once a week. Most of them don't cost $7M.

I don't see the point of spending $7M for win 58 when you could spend $600k and win 56 or 57. Especially when the guy is home run prone, coming to a huge home run park, and there's a non-trivial chance that he'll go all Dan Straily on us.

I'd argue that you should never pay anything like $7M for a guy who was below replacement both last year and for his career. I suppose you don't usually pay healthy veterans the minimum, so maybe I'd value him at $1-2M, at which point I'd rather just throw Bruce Zimmerman out there for 30 starts.

It's the anti-Moneyball. Find an undervalued asset and them pay him what you think he's really worth! Maybe the A's would have won the World Series if only they'd paid Scott Hatteberg $8M a year.

He's 30, he has over 1100 MLB innings, and an ERA+ of 82. And he's coming to a very good hitter's park, a very good home run park, and he's going to be playing in front of a defense that as it currently stands should be below average. Most likely case is that his ERA+ is going to be around 80, which in 2021 OPACY terms is something like 5.50.

Just making up numbers. I know no one throws 220 innings anymore.