ChosenOne21

So everyone except Hays, Odor, and McKenna are underperforming their xwOBA? That's encouraging. This offense still has some room to grow

Tyler Wells and Dean Kremer looking like they can be average-ish MLB starting pitchers is pretty huge, too. Add GrayRod, Means, and Hall and that's potentially a great rotation. Zero rotation depth, but a great top 5

Kremer was like 91-93 with the fastball last year. This year he's been more like 94-96. The command is better, too. Not sure what happened with him, but I hope our other pitchers are taking notes

I'm pretty sure either could do better than .590 or whatever Nevin is OPSing right now. Probably play better defense, too

At least for all but two months a year

Haven't seen him, but from what I've heard it's somewhere between average/below average but won't kill you and in a handful of years probably won't be a major league shortstop

Better than Grayson's? Wow

Jeez, it's a lat. He's going to be fine

"I could use the cash" -Andy MacPhail

I'm sure Hall could come to the majors right now and have some success with the fastball and the current state of his secondaries. But I'm fine letting him spend the year in the minors building innings and working on his secondaries. He doesn't have that many innings under his belt during his professional career and I think he can probably better work on his secondaries in low pressure situations. The Orioles certainly aren't going to call him up and have him throw his secondaries endlessly to ML hitters, nor should they

Yeah. Akin has been aces (though not as a starter), Zimmerman, past two starts notwithstanding, has looked like a decent starting pitcher, and Kremer and Baumann have a good chance to find a useful role. I don't think that's a bad outcome at all seeing as how none of them were really top prospects

This is looking like addition by subtraction even if Velez never gets it together

Wasn't there some thing where Jones and Markakis had giant home/road splits on one of the advanced defensive metrics, maybe UZR, and ink was spilled wondering if something about Camden Yards messed with UZR calculations?

Teams tend not to report signing bonuses for players from Venezuela because they have a kidnapping and ransom problem down there

Then we lose the DH for a game. Not that big of a deal

Sounds like that time the Yankees turned that double play with Jeter being like three feet off the bag and Trembley got tossed for arguing and on his way out "ejected" the umpire

I don't remember Lakins throwing 95-96

Agreed. I thought maybe, MAYBE, they'd let him throw ten. Got to ease him back into things. Can't have him getting injured again

Not really, although I've never understood the obsession with shortening baseball games. NFL games routinely go longer than three hours and no one cares

1.5 is an average. It's certainly possible for a manager to add more than 1.5 wins to a team compared to the guy he replaced. What I'd like to know is how many wins in 2011 you think are attributable to Buck Showalter and why you think that.

I remember some years ago Baseball Prospectus tried to quantify the difference between the best and worst MLB managers in a given season and came up with something like 1.5 additional wins on average. Buck Britton would likely be a great major league manager and might improve the team by his presence alone, but 8-10 wins is hyperbole

So is Baumann in the pen or the rotation?

I've done the comparison before, but Mountcastle is basically Mark Trumbo, IMO. That's fine as long as you don't break the bank for him

Yeah, I wouldn't offer that deal either, since he's almost certainly going to opt out after a year and we're still at least that far away from being interesting. With no opt outs, I would have done it in a heartbeat though