Moose Milligan

Grumpy Spring Training Frobby is an underrated version of Frobby.

That’s not Adam Jones.

I should have also mentioned that while Roch coined the phrase "Dynamic Duo" for Adley and Grayson, the fact that Frobby threw it up in the headline with the "Get Used to It" adjoiner is just screaming for a jinx of epic proportions. @Frobby, I adore you, but you should know better. Stop it right now.

I dunno. I think if anyone is surprised about G-Rod getting kept down for a month or so they haven't been paying attention. But you're probably right, this place would be in a meltdown mode.

Exciting stuff. I still think there’s a good chance that G-Rod goes to Norfolk to start the season because there’s some things Elias thinks he “needs to work on a few things,” and makes his debut after a certain date.

If Mayo shows better plate discipline than Mountcastle, that's all I need to see. I like Mountcastle, I just don't know if he's a irreplaceable piece.

This was a good article, it illustrated how deep the system is, especially from an offensive perspective and how we're going to eventually need to part with some of these guys in a trade to bring in someone like Corbin Burnes. I hope Mayo mashes and makes Mountcastle expendable.

By and large, I like the City Connect jerseys. Looking forward to seeing what they come up with for the Orioles.

I didn’t know Frobby was French for spring training wet blanket.

I like Mateo, but he's expendable. I think that's a weird headspace for some people, the idea that some of our players can be expendable due to the fact that there's a stacked system with a lot of other possibilities waiting to come up. I fully expect Mateo to be the OD SS starter but after the first month or two his lack of hitting ability will send him to the bench or packing.

Finally finished this book last night. In regards to the OP, there's a brief paragraph where it talks about Luhnow and Elias being Trump supporters and they'd rag on Brandon Taubman for being a Bernie Bro. Luhnow and Elias also went on a diet that was almost all meat based (I've done this before, it's ****ing fantastic) and Elias would call Taubman a ****y for eating vegetables which would make Luhnow laugh. There's also a quote about Eve Rosenbaum "Eve Rosenbaum left," an Astros executive said. "And it's not like she went to the Orioles because she just really liked working with Elias." I suppose someone could take that as the two having more than a professional relationship. That's really all that I saw. Truth be told, Elias really isn't in the book all that much. IMO, this book is really about Luhnow and how he got the Astros to where they were towards the end of the decade. There's a lot of talk about Mejdal, Taubman, Mike Fast and a couple other guys that were key in getting the Astros to the top. There's also a lot of discussion about the cheating that the Dodgers, Red Sox and Yankees were doing. And, surprise, surprise, I knew Alex Cora was a douchebag. However, if you're reading this through a lens of an Orioles fan and looking for things to apply from this book to what Elias has done here there are a few corollaries, namely that Luhnow didn't want to spend a dime more than he had to. He didn't want to spend on Free Agency unless he absolutely felt that it was necessary and that seems like it could be a parallel for what's going on here. I parsed out some other quotes that reminded me as I was reading about what Elias has done since he's been here or things that are interesting and I've included them below. Pardon the formats didn't know there was an upload limit. Reached it after the first 3 jpegs, the rest of the quotes are after: “Taubman, who was making six figures in investment banking, had never been to Texas before his job interview. He read up on Luhnow and Mejdal and Elias. He grew inspired by the idea of building a sustainable pipeline of players and then being religious about letting those players walk in free agency when they no longer became cost-effective assets.” — Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball's Brightest Minds Created Sports' Biggest Mess by Evan Drellich https://a.co/cLRf7v5 “The attempt to sign Springer was just one piece of a larger puzzle. The Altuve extension had emboldened Luhnow to direct Taubman to construct a flurry of similar offers for young players, including Jason Castro, Matt Dominguez, Robbie Grossman, Jon Singleton, and, eventually, Dallas Keuchel and even prospect Carlos Correa. Castro’s offer was dated March 9, a $ 12 million guarantee with the potential to make $ 30 million. Grossman’s was dated March 10, a $ 7 million guarantee with the potential to make $ 23.5 million. Both players declined. The scattershot approach was purposeful and, in fact, targeted. The Astros knew that some of the deals, had they been accepted, likely would have worked out poorly. “The idea of the strategy was that it would be OK to go bust on thirty to forty percent, which is like an alarmingly high number, because the surplus value on the ones that do work out more than compensates for the losses,” an Astros exec said. “It’s a venture capitalist sort of approach. You take a handful of big bets instead of making a multitude more of small, safe bets.”” — Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball's Brightest Minds Created Sports' Biggest Mess by Evan Drellich https://a.co/0Pb8x2V “Meanwhile, the international market, by Taubman’s calculations, was an area where the Astros had not been aggressive enough. Uncertainty with international amateur players, most of them from Latin American countries, was high. Many do not pan out as big-league players. But teams at that time had no cap on how much they could spend internationally.” — Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball's Brightest Minds Created Sports' Biggest Mess by Evan Drellich https://a.co/2DMthAa ““Once Jeff started having to make decisions of, ‘Should we sign this free agent? Should we trade for Verlander?’ Sig started pushing back on him a lot on those sort of things,” a different executive said. “Sig was never able to switch gears. He wanted to hoard every single, not even prospect-prospect, but like, org piece that we had. He didn’t like spending free-agent money; he didn’t like trading for established players. I think he really thought that building through the farm and staying with those players was the way to build a ball club.”” — Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball's Brightest Minds Created Sports' Biggest Mess by Evan Drellich https://a.co/aCpOE1Z “As with Hinch’s extension, Crane got involved to make Altuve’s happen, although it wasn’t as acrimonious. In the early going, Crane and Luhnow had both been adamant that the Astros would spend at the right time, and by ensuring Altuve would stick around, they were making good. Crane and Luhnow still never wanted to use free agency as anything but a supplement, but the extension for a homegrown star, even at a team-friendly price, was encouraging. “It comes down to a question of how much of your payroll do you want to tie up in one or two players, and when you have a lot of good young players coming through that you’re going to have to pay through arbitration and potentially locking them up in free agency, you have to keep that in mind,” Luhnow said about a month before Altuve’s extension.” — Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball's Brightest Minds Created Sports' Biggest Mess by Evan Drellich https://a.co/6CQbgZ9 "Elias was keen to keep costs down, just as Luhnow was. The Astros had begun offering club option years in contracts not only to players, but to their own employees, including scouts. When he left the Astros in 2017, Alex Jacobs had an offer from Elias to stay for one year, plus an additional club option for another year, with a $ 10,000 buyout.” — Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball's Brightest Minds Created Sports' Biggest Mess by Evan Drellich https://a.co/1hMQWox ““Sig was not offered a contract renewal,” an Astros executive said, echoing others. “He did not choose to leave.”” — Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball's Brightest Minds Created Sports' Biggest Mess by Evan Drellich https://a.co/3ZILrWu

https://theathletic.com/4243021/2023/03/01/sarris-ten-deep-sleeper-pitchers/ Two are relevant to us: Did you hear that sound? That's SG getting all excited:

Salutations, Psychobird.

You think so, huh?

Baltimoreans be like "It's gotta have Old Bay, the Maryland flag and an Under Armour logo on it to be considered Baltimore!"

I don't know if all the Padres spending will help get them past the Dodgers. From what I can tell, the Padres have gutted their system to make trades. The Dodgers are always stocked with talent in their system. That said, I'm rooting for the Padres. I'd like to see Manny and Soto get a ring.

Sir, this is a Wendy’s.

Gotta like Povich striking out 3 in 2 innings.

He never should have left here. Not locking him up was one of the worst things Angelos ever did. But it’s ok. We are where we are right now and I don’t think I’d trade that for anything. The just better not botch this in the same way.

This game today isn’t televised right?

This is a good one.

I only saw the one, the Orioles posted it to twitter. Looked like it was an opposite field shot.

Most excited I’ve been in quite a long time. Probably since 2014, 2015. Seeing that Kjerstad bomb today was nice.

Gunnar.

It wasn't a thing when I was in the 4th grade. But astroturf was, and that's gone. It wasn't a thing when I was in the 5th or 6th grade. Or 7th or 8th. Or all the way up until I was a married father with a kid. And if Sterling K. McCrotchety could have made $300 dollars for the 1885 Soda Springs Idaho Bottle Poppers then he f'ing should have.