DrungoHazewood

What's the typical breakdown? The year Blyleven allowed 50 homers 27 were with the bases empty and another 18 were with just one runner on. In '85 Scott McGregor allowed 32 of his 34 homers with one or fewer runners on base. I think I once heard that Jim Palmer never allowed a grand slam, not sure where.

To placate the fans who constantly whine that each day without a signing means Elias is just sitting in the warehouse smoking weed, playing Minecraft.

I find it occasionally works. Yea, I'll try like a $15M bonus for getting to 850 PAs or something like that. The simulation has gotten better about not falling for that over the years.

Exactly. If you asked random people at Camden Yards who played the most games at SS for the Orioles last year the rate of correct answers would be 15%. You might get more JJ Hardy than Freddy Galvis.

Oh, I thought they were just emphasizing that everyone roots for laundry. The players are all fungible. When they use replacement players they'll just plug in new faces and push on like nothing happened. The 2022 season will feature Keanu Reeves and that hot cheerleader. If they replaced all the Orioles' headshots with the random faces from The Onion's American Voices feature how long would it take the average fan to noice? Six weeks? Six months?

"and including an $11 million club option for 2023. " What are the odds that option is exercised? 1%? 0.1%? It's a lottery ticket for the O's, good on them. If they teach him an emory ball or he invents a knuckle-splitter or something and he throws 220 innings to a 2.81 they've got a deal. If all the other things happen it's like the option doesn't even exist. Sometimes in OOTP baseball I'll throw in a club option for $20M for some random player I'm bidding on just to see if I can fool the AI into accepting my contract offer.

But they do play 81 at Camden Yards, and he allowed 38 homers in 180 innings somewhere else. Maybe that's the clue to figuring out this signing: he's already tough enough to not do self-harm after allowing a homer every 4 1/2 innings, so he can survive a year in Camden Yards.

I'm a huge fan of giant rigid dirigibles, but by 1941 the use and viability of such contrivances was in steep decline due not only to the Hindenburg disaster, but also a series of weather-related incidents and structural failures involving the US Navy's massive lighter-than-air craft. Also, at the typical cruising speed of a Graf Zeppelin class airship it would take over 50 hours to go from New York to Los Angeles. Probably faster than a train, but still quite a long haul and subject to rerouting and delays if there's bad weather anywhere along the route.

Yep, by 1940 the Orioles had been on a downward trend since the '20s champs, and finally agreed to become a Phillies farm team. I don't know how that went with the fans. The Depression and the waning fortunes of the team probably decreased interest. Not sure if anyone became a Phillies fan because of it, I'm sure there were at least a few. In 1920 you could be as much a fan of an independent minor league team as you were of a major league team. The Orioles were a perfectly legitimate choice for your fandom through the 1930s, and I'm sure a lot of folks hung on after that. The 1944 Little World Series, partly because the O's home games were played in a large football stadium (Municipal, the forerunner of Memorial), outdrew the real World Series. But by the 1950s independent minor league ball died, and wouldn't come back until the 1990s. And then it was very different, made up of guys who washed out in A ball at 26.

I think the author downplays the travel difficulties. A train trip from New York to LA today probably takes three or four days. I don't think it was any quicker back then. And the Browns would have been the only west coast team, so each of the other seven AL teams would have had to go all the way out there, one at a time, to play one series. To make it in any way feasible they'd probably have to play eight-game series or something. I guess it's plausible, but pretty unlikely. The first jet airline service wasn't until 1952, so I'd say that's a more realistic back end date for a Major League team on the west coast. I think a better solution for everyone would have been to have the PCL go major in the 1950s. It already negotiated an Open classification for a while, instead of AAA. If not for the Dodgers/Giants moves in '57 the PCL makes a go of it, along with the proposed Continental League which was kind of torpedoed by expansion. More competition and at least one geographically-aligned league might have presented some advantages.

The median peak age is 27 and it always has been. Even in the 1990-2005 era it didn't move much. There's a fairly shallow curve between, say, 25-31 or so, but the typical peak is at 27. The study and the graph quoted above has a few issues: 1. It's based on wOBA, so doesn't include defense which peaks earlier than offense. 2. It's just based on the offensive performances of long-career players. A more comprehensive study would include all players and properly account for attrition (i.e. you could easily conclude that 35-year-olds were the best players to acquire if you fail to account for the fact that 90+% of 35-year-olds are out of the majors and the dataset, and the ones left were usually very, very good.) It also doesn't address pitchers. They peak at 27, too, but have a much noisier career value arc.

What's the impact of that wasted effort? What productive thing would the assistant council to the assistant GM have been doing with his hour of time that he was wasting filling in the blanks of a standard minimum-salary player contract?

So... okay. He's in the same class as Urias, Bannon, Jones, etc. Just another body who can be released at any moment. This is a non-move. Depth, insurance, call it what you will. Two days ago the Orioles' projected win total was 59, today it's 59.

The question should be more like what percentage of disappointing, regressing players at 25-27 improve afterwards? Also, is there reason to think that Odor is a good comp for either Schoop or Villar? Through 25 Schoop had a 101 OPS+, and that included an age 22 season where he was in over his head but the O's kept playing him presumably for his defensive value. He had an off year at 26, but has somewhat rebounded since. Villar has been inconsistent year-to-year, had a poor age 26 season, a good 2019, but has been below-average since. Odor has had a few seasons as an average-ish MLB regular, but over the last five years has been just a tick above replacement, hitting .213/.280/412. And trending even below that for the past two seasons. To me he looks like a poor man's Jonathan Schoop. I guess the upside is he plays more like 2018-19 and he's somewhere between passable and average. But I think I could say similar things about Urias, Bannon, and Jones and they don't really cost anything. What is Odor's contract value? I guess if it's somewhat close to the minimum... sure, why not?

Over his last 1090 PAs he's OPS'd .689 and has been more than half a win below replacement.

It almost never makes any sense to pay a quasi-replacement-level player free agent market rates. If you want someone who can OPS .650 and give you average defense at second base just call up the 27-year-old guy who got 375 PA in AAA last year. He's making $600k and will give you just about the same fraction of a win, and if he's 10% worse... so? The difference between Bannon, Jones, and Odor isn't a whole win, and you'd be lucky if you could pick out which of the three is better in '22. The only reason I can see to favor Odor is he might hit .230 with 17 homers by July and gets flipped for someone's #16 org prospect. Or... they really are anticipating some kind of phased-in salary floor and know they can't go into '22 with a $40M payroll.

At least they got in now before the new CBA has a salary floor and the O's have to sign Odor types to $8M contracts just to get to the floor value.

Maybe the international market as we know it doesn't work very well. Most of the 16-year-olds a team signs they give a bonus of three magic beans, and then they pay them $8000 a year. So you're not out that much. Perhaps there should be a better system than each team signing 100 16-year-olds, paying most of them a pittance, and then spending the next decade-plus sorting them out to find the 5, 6, 10 of them who will have any MLB value at all. The reason MLB contracted minor league teams is the realization that most minor leaguers have negative value to the higher organization.

Why not? Seems strange to me that a 22-year-old college junior/senior might spend a year in the minors and be a free agent seven years after signing. But a 16-year-old might be tied to his original team for 10+ years. To me team control should be whatever team and player negotiate.

The owners already proposed having free agency at 29 or something like that. I don't see how that would hurt college baseball. I agree that #2 is a much bigger change, and therefore much less likely. But how would it let big markets take over? There would be nothing stopping a team like the Orioles from signing Rutschman to a 10-year contract that would give them more years of control than they do today. You'd still have a draft, and teams controlling rights to their draftees. Just there's no limitations on what contract they can sign. I guess it's possible that some players would refuse to sign anything but very short contracts and then jump from poor organizations to better ones. But even in the pre-draft era good players signed with poor teams because there were far more opportunities there. Brooks and Palmer and others signed with the Orioles shortly after they were the terrible Browns, when they could have signed with the Yanks or the Dodger or Cardinals.

In Win Shares there is no below replacement. Players get credit for all wins above zero. An average Oriole in 2021 gets 1/26th of (52 x 3) win shares, or about six per full season.

Don't have service time have anything to do with free agency. Instead: 1. Have free agency occur at age 28 no matter how much or little you've played in the majors Or 2. Allow everyone, from the moment they're drafted, to negotiate whatever contract they can. Your #1 pick could negotiate for a 10/$50M deal lasting from ages 18-28. Your 11th rounder gets 3 years, $50k. The 22nd-rounder gets 1 year at $10k. When the 11th rounder has already made the majors at the end of the 3rd year he negotiates a new 5/$10M deal. In the first scenario you could call up your top prospect at 19 if you want, if he can contribute, has almost no impact on future earnings. Same thing with the #1 pick in the second scenario.

I should look up G/F data and other related information. But it's pretty astounding to finish last in both BB+H per inning and double plays turned. The Orioles allowed more runners on base than any other MLB team and they were still last in double plays.

Stevie Wilkerson didn't reach his lofty heights by just listening to anyone. Also, remember, the Orioles broke new ground in this area by hiring Dave Trembley as the manager. He never played professional baseball. That experience had at least an occasional moment where it didn't look like a total dumpster fire.

26 coaches. I was completely making up 46, but I was within an order of magnitude. As it is there's almost a coach for each two players. I wonder how much of a problem it becomes to make sure all 26 are on message, and teaching the same things? If you fire the head coach, you have to go find 25 other coaches, too? If I were the GM I'd avoid firing the coach just because it would take forever to hold all those interviews. In my job it would take three years to hire 25 people.