allquixotic

I didn't make this clear in my previous post, but I want the Hangout to continue to exist. I respect whatever decision Tony makes, but I value this site (despite the fact I've become mostly a lurker since 2019) as a place I've always enjoyed reading about and participating in discussions about O's baseball. Seeing it go would be a crying shame. Literally. I'm sure some posters are way more invested in the site than me and would cry at the loss of this site.

My two cents: Baseball is baseball. The people who run it, play it, and market it have always been politically active. Maybe their political affiliations have been consistent; maybe they've changed over time -- I don't honestly know. Sometimes those political statements have been loud and in-your-face in media, and sometimes they haven't. You only have to look back to the times of Jackie Robinson to find a time when baseball's politics were very much in the face of every fan, on display in every game and headline news in every newspaper. Any social activity where people get to talking is bound to brush up against political beliefs, and that's true of broadcasters on the air as well as people on a forum. I am all for keeping this forum politics-free. I don't think the fact that some people in power at MLB corporate choosing a side should prevent us from talking about and enjoying the game apolitically here on the forum. In writing this post, I thought long and hard, and spent a good few minutes really trying to immerse myself in this hypothetical situation: What if the MLB were overtly broadcasting with political beliefs I disagree with? Would I still watch the Orioles and talk about them on OH? I decided that yes, I would, but only to a certain extent. I would ignore what I perceived as the incorrect babbling of the broadcasters, and focus on the game. If things were so constant and so unbearable that they started doing things like changing the name of the "Home Run" to a "Trump Run" or something, and made that a running theme throughout the entire lexicon of the game, that's when it would start getting too much for me. In other words, I can see where someone on the other side could be looking at MLB's current politics and maybe deciding that it's "too much for them." I can sympathize with it. Like I said, I would try to look past the political exhaltations of the sport and focus on the game, but if that became impossible, I could see myself reaching a breaking point and deciding to bow out. So it's complicated, and I don't think there's a hard and fast answer that applies to everyone. For that reason I'm totally, 100% respectful of any decision Tony makes whether it's to keep the forum up or to close shop in light of the political beliefs MLB has started to espouse this year.

I think if they just play for the experience of having a baseball season and for possibly some TV revenue, without trying to put fans in seats, the season will be able to finish. The players who are there at the end of the season, healthy and playing ball, will be a roll of the dice; things could go very well or very poorly. They will finish the season unless it gets to the point that so many players are sick on teams that they can't even field a healthy club. Since that seems... unlikely, I predict the season will play out once it starts. In the worst case, some teams might find themselves fielding a B or C team from the minor leagues, hastily brought up to the majors to fill in gaps. By the way, a great number of those gaps might well be because some players are going to be less fit this season, and far more injury prone. The "fitness nut" players who give it 110% year-round will be fine and ready to play a full season whenever the season starts, but some players do seem to do the minimum, and those guys will be very tired and very rusty even at the end of a 60 game season. The stakes are so much higher once you involve the general public, so my feeling is that even if the whole League or some teams start allowing fans in the stands, that aspect of the game won't last the season. They'll inevitably end up retreating back to fan-less games. If we're lucky, a few of us could have some rare and unusual tickets to an OPACY game this season -- wouldn't that be crazy?! Even the stubs might be worth money in 20 years. Anyway, I agree with the folks who say that there's a 50/50 chance the season won't even start. But if it does, there's so much of baseball's reputation, not to mention the satisfaction of the players and the cable networks, built into them actually finishing the season, that I don't think they will be financially able to stop unless ordered to by the government.

The sad thing is, there's an enormously high chance that each of those #1 picks will either wash out, won't have staying power, or will get hurt before they're able to make a career out of it. We can't build a baseball team around a strategy of picking up one free possibly good player per year. We need to acquire or develop something like 6 or 7 legitimately good players per year to compete. The 2014 O's didn't win because of the #1 picks we had on our team. They won because of Delmon Young, Chris Tillman, Chris Davis, Adam Jones, and so many others we had picked up in trades or developed into good players. They won because of a critical mass of players with very timely results, many playing above expectations, doing better than their career numbers or having a career year. Even if each year's #1 prospect turns into a Manny, and we pick each one, I don't think we would be a very good team. Let's say in the 2020 draft we pick a historically good 1B; 2021, a historically good SS; 2022, a historically good CF; 2023, a historically good SP. Let's say they all get to the majors in short order and are ready to break out immediately. OK, so what? If the rest of the team is as bad as they are right now, they have zero chance to compete. Even if they hold a lead for a couple innings, the pen will give it right back up. Our 2B, 3B, LF, RF, C, DH won't ever get on base or hit home runs. Optimistically, we might get to .500 in a season because of the extraordinary performance of four guys. I think if -- if -- we get that lucky and have four amazing guys in the early to mid 2020s, we should trade them as soon as their high value is established. Basically it would be like trading Manny in the 2016 offseason, or even 2015. Get rid of them, and get a package deal of ML-ready or nearly ML-ready players with high upside in return. We don't need 4 Babe Ruths; we need 30 Chris Tillmans and Adam Joneses. We need players who are pretty good in their prime, but not HOFers. We have neither the farm system nor the budget of teams that could hope to stack up a team of hero after hero like the Dodgers and Yankees, who simply buy their way into a World Series. Our only chance of seeing the postseason is to build a "good enough" club of scrappy, nominally effective players and hope the dice are in our favor in the postseason against the elite clubs.

That's what I'm thinking. The Orioles hitters hit the same baseball the other team hits, right? If so, why are our home runs so low?

Too bad the team doesn't have a communal bunk room. They oughta give him the Private Pyle treatment

I don't. I was saying, intuitively, one would expect that the more successful players would be the ones taking PEDs. If the PEDs work at all as advertised and Enhance the Performance of the athlete, then the athletes producing the most on the field would be my first guess as to who -- if anyone -- would be doing PEDs. I don't have a good theory for why that doesn't appear to be the case. There isn't a clear relationship between how well a player actually performs, and their use of PEDs. Sometimes bad players use PEDs and are still bad. Sometimes bad players become better once they use PEDs. Sometimes there are clean players, who never use PEDs, and are still extremely good. Some probably use PEDs and the drugs don't make them any better. I wondered if, maybe, the PED problem is still as prevalent as it was a decade or two ago, except that now, players have become really good at playing the system to avoid getting caught. If that were true, then it stands to reason that many bad and good players are using them, but the most productive players are combining talent, PEDs, and hard work into one package. The others might only be doing PEDs, and hoping that will compensate for their lack of talent or hard work. Etc. You get the idea. Of course, I have no proof, but baseball players, executives and even the media seem to now be in a state of constantly lying to the general public with almost every word they say. Tony's article; Jim's statement; Rafael Palmeiro in front of the United States Congress; I mean it's just unreal how deep lying is ingrained in the culture of the MLB. If that's still the case -- and it seems to be, since we keep catching them in their lies -- then we might as well assume that the worst thing that we could imagine to be happening, is actually happening. Maybe a lot of the players are doing PEDs. Maybe they genuinely don't care about their job, and once they get that guaranteed contract, are just slumming it out there because it's not worth the effort to actually try to win? There are exceptions of course. I'm sure there are clean players, who play the game right, try hard, and have success. But I think the opposite of that is more common than we realize, and they're pretty good at pulling the wool over our eyes, or we're happy to remain willfully ignorant of the problems with these players that are hidden just beneath the surface of their lies and whitewashed statements to the media. And, you know, if that's going to be how it is, I really don't see any reason to continue to patronize baseball. Little league and independent teams? Sure, absolutely. But not Major League Baseball. The organization seems to exude this slimy, money-grubbing, lying, cheating culture that reminds me of the mob or something. It's not "America's Favorite Pastime" anymore. It's more akin to the Church of Scientology -- which, if you aren't familiar, is an organization that pretends to be a religious institution but is actually, quite literally, a scam to remove people from their money, and worse. I'm not even going to go into all that the CoS does -- it's off topic here, but I wanted to broach a comparison that at least points to the level that I feel the MLB has sunken to. The O's losing doesn't help, but viewing the entire League in this light is putting me on the edge of just forgetting about baseball altogether, and finding a new hobby or a different sport to patronize.

Why would a guy like that -- who isn't really good, and isn't playing meaningful baseball for a team that matters -- bother with PEDs? I mean, I could see it for a contender. Maybe I could even see it for Wellington last year with the O's, since we had our chances to sniff the playoffs until late in the season. Just seems odd to me that someone that irrelevant in the MLB would use, while, you know, Mookie Betts is still out there playing and hasn't yet been caught. Is it just that the rest are really good at avoiding detection, or do only bad players waste their time with PEDs? Sigh.

Oh, just you wait. I'm going to be booing him at the top of my lungs when I go to the game with the tickets I bought early in the season! And I'll probably spend the rest of my time in the concourse eating, drinking and generally not paying attention to the game, since it's 99% going to be a loss.

Good riddance to Cortes. That said, in hindsight, his performance last night was totally irrelevant. He could've pitched the rest of the game flawlessly or he could've given up 18 runs, the offense didn't come through. Steve Pearce and the Orioles offense gave us that loss.

My personal goal for the team for April: get back to .500. Don’t let March 31 be the last time the team sniffs .500 this year. If we don’t get back to .500 in April, we won’t make it to .500 at all this year, since the team habitually limps into the end of the season due to lack of effort and conditioning.

THAT WIN changes everything. Now instead of us facing down a possible sweep tomorrow, we hang an "L" on Dellin Betances, who's a really great pitcher. Manny is a hero. Beckham and Trumbo and the bullpen get (very!) honorable mentions. And the dream of the playoffs stays alive for another day.

That was a heck of a comeback game. Comeback 2-game set, really.

With the level of contagion possible from that damn Norovirus, I say they fly each of the players back to Baltimore on their own charter plane. In a pressure suit in case the pilot has it.

I think there is a very real chance that Toronto and the Red Sox will flip-flop in the standings. Perhaps they might even do that several times before the season is over. The division is tightening up a lot. The only ones who look unlikely are the Yankees and the Rays. But since it's so early in the season, even the Yankees have a shot. Perhaps unlikely though. Very unlikely for the Rays but they could still decide to win out the season, so I guess we can't count them out until August-ish time frame.

We're in first place (or tied, or mathematically ahead, or whatever) in June. June! We were doing great around this time last year too, but if I recall, we had a few too many hitting droughts and a few too many bad starts. We're having nearly a repeat year thus far, so all we need to do is figure out how to get Ubaldo back on track or let him wash out and find someone who can do a little better. It's never as good as it seems, but it's never as bad as it seems either, as long as you're not in last place. The way you have to think of it during the bad times, is: as long as we're earlier in the season than about the second week of August, and as long as we're not in last place (even a fourth-place team in a tightly packed division would have a good chance to at least get a wild card spot), we have a chance. The way you have to think of it during the good times, is: our recent success greatly helps our chances, so let's celebrate that during the microcosm of the mid-season and thank our respective supreme beings for baseball.

Hey, great point. I can't actually argue with this at all. It's valid and true. We only have to look into baseball history -- modern baseball history, even! -- to see evidence of this when baseball players weren't paid all that much.

As another poster mentioned earlier, I agree that there's just too much money in baseball. It provides too great an incentive to cheat, because the "best" (most successful, not necessarily most talented) players can get payouts that land them in the top 0.001% or so. Even an average ML player will never have to go hungry again and can always afford to have the latest creature comforts and new cars every year for the rest of their life. If you were on the precipice of reaching that, but had a real risk of not keeping up with everyone else (a significant portion of whom are cheating to give themselves an edge), what would you do? Would you be honest and hope that you train and prepare well enough to do it legitimately? Or would you give in and take the "safer" road to success, women and shiny cars? I think a lot of people would be amoral for money if they had the opportunity sitting right in front of them. It's human nature. It's why, if you accidentally leave a wallet full of money in the bathroom somewhere and the person who finds it is really confident they can get away with it, they'll steal your money. You might get your wallet back but "someone else took the money before they found it", or you might never see it again. People will do anything for money. Anything. Doesn't make it right, doesn't excuse it, but I don't think it's surprising or unexpected, either. It's the opposite of that. If we want to actually make these players live up to the morals they and their organizations espouse, we'd have to actually police them so aggressively that even a 2-hour disappearing PED could still be detected a day or two after ingestion. But then you're looking at a bioscience problem that hasn't yet been solved, and once it IS solved, the crooks will already be looking for ways around it. It's cat and mouse, and the mouse is always a step ahead. If you don't like it, you don't have to put your money into the system; it's your choice whether to do so or not. I've been tempted on multiple occasions to stop putting my own money into it because of exactly this crap. Why should I pay a bunch of players who will lie to the public, their organization and their peers, just for the chance that they might be a little bit better and be able to afford another house or another expensive yacht or something? I've earned every penny I've ever made, and I've never cheated anyone out of anything. It sucks not to have nice things, but it's the moral high ground. Now, don't get me wrong; if I knew of a way to get out of the middle class without being a total scumbag, I'd do it. But I don't think there's an obvious way for someone with my talents (computer science and IT). I guess I should have picked a more "lucrative" field, like baseball, where doing your job one out of three times is considered good. If I did my job correctly one out of three times, I'd be out of work.

Well, the MLBPA would never allow it, but one way that would definitely stop it would be to require that all Major League contracts come with a required line stating that every penny paid out to a player under any salaried MLB contract is subject to being reclaimed by the club that paid it out, if the player is caught using PEDs. First offense, no exceptions, but leave the appeal process in to take care of corner cases like false positives, and allow the appeals panel to decide if they want to lessen the percentage of money that gets reclaimed by the club based on further investigation. So, effectively, the club you sign with would be giving you an indefinite, zero-interest loan for $XXX, repayable in full if you violate the contract in this one specific way (by cheating with PEDs). This type of system, even if there is zero missed games penalty, would be a far greater incentive not to cheat than any other proposed punitive measure. However, getting caught under this system would not necessarily bankrupt a player. For instance, if a player signed with the O's for a few seasons right out of the minors and made a total of $5 million with the club (for example), then left for another club and made $100 million, but only got caught doing PEDs with that other club, they wouldn't lose their $5 mil they made with the Orioles, just the $100 mil. A wise investor could live well for life on the proceeds of investing $5 mil into the right funds. This would only financially ruin those players who would be within their first MLB signing contract. But it would also prevent players seeking ridiculous wealth (as in, rather than a couple million, hundreds of millions) from being able to cheat and keep their ridiculous wealth. They would still be okay, but they'd have to divest a lot of assets costing them money if they've been living big and owning a lot of properties, etc.

1. I've never held any stock in this one. Cruz picked up a lot of wins for us where we would have lost in the early going last season, but we had injuries and lack of contribution from even more players than we had early on this season. I never had any confidence at all that Cruz would have a good season in 2015, either, regardless of which team he plays for. 2. Losing Miller got me fired up at first, I'll be honest. It was a huge blow. But we totally lucked out (or scouted incredibly well) to pick up Chaz Roe, who's more-or-less filling his shoes, as incredible as that sounds. I'm kinda eating crow on this one, though, because I wanted Miller. I wanted what I knew was going to be an awesome reliever, rather than the uncertainty of IF we'll be able to find a Roe out there. But we did, so I didn't need to worry. 3. I kinda-sorta bought into this one, and kinda-sorta still feel this way. He's okay. Maybe my good memories of the years when Markakis was a bit more than okay make me wish that we still had him. He was, at least, a known quantity, a solid contributor. 4. I didn't really prejudge Paredes, that I recall. I tend to give new players the benefit of the doubt. He impressed early on, and by then I was sure that we would give him more looks until he lets us down. So far he's lifting us up more often than he lets us down. 5. That was true when Delmon was a regular out there, and Davis was stuck at first base. I thought it, but never said it or typed it. 6. It's true, but so far, we're dealing with it. It would be unbelievably awesome to see him return to 2014 form, but this year, we would be higher in the standings with a replacement-level starter than with Bud. 7. I've said this to friends and maybe even posted this on the boards. It was good to see him throw 7 zeroes today, but I wonder how much of that was due to a deflated and demoralized Indians club, and a crowd that bought 85,677 tickets total to the doubleheader rallying behind the Orioles. 8. This is the worst one. I was totally advocating for this last year. I'm eating mouthfuls of crow now. 9. I've never had a problem with Miggy. He's a middle of the rotation starter. We got him for a bag of balls and he's been a much needed piece. We DO need Gausman, long term, but I trust our coaches to determine the best time to bring him up for good. 10. I've always been higher on Hunter than most, and not too down on Matusz (a little, yes, but not a lot). We had hoped these guys could be starters for us, but instead, they're now veteran arms out of the pen. Lately they inflate the bullpen's ERA higher than it would otherwise be with the remaining overachievers (especially Brach, Roe, O'Day and Britton), but I don't know how you can move them, get something back that's better, and not have to give up the farm or some bona fide talent elsewhere within the ML roster. Dumping Matusz and acquiring someone like Andrew Miller is not going to be easy to do, at all. Why overpay? Apparently the club agrees with me, since these guys are still with us. 11. I kinda blew this one off when I read others writing about it - I never took much stock in this opinion at any point. I don't like to extrapolate past DL history to the future, especially if the club does their tests (as they would be fools NOT to do) and determines that the risk is acceptable. 12. Backup? Haha. Flaherty is a well-deserved starter for us now. It's great seeing him out there. I've never been of the opinion that we need to rush to replace Flaherty. 13. I still think Joseph is amazing behind the plate. He's more or less made Wieters irrelevant when it comes to catching. I mean, both of them are very, very good, but Wieters isn't so much better that we cringe when Caleb catches. The only thing going for Wieters is the potential to put up great power numbers at the dish, which Caleb hasn't ever really proven he can do consistently. 14. Machado has slumped just like any other player, but again, I've never really felt the need to complain about this to others. He has so much promise and so much riding on his shoulders that I give him the benefit of the doubt. In that respect, he is kinda like Adam. When a bad player is bad, you throw rotten tomatoes at him. When a good player is bad, you just shut your mouth and wait until they stop being bad, which probably won't be that long most of the time. You caught me with a few of those - things I've said that I'm now eating crow about - but many of those statements are also incredibly reactionary in my view, and not something I would even think of saying at any point this year.

Huh. Even though wild card hopes are fading for the Jays and the Yanks, the honor of second place in the division seems wide open. I don't think it's outlandish to talk about the Rays finishing the season in second place in the East. Not sure any of the three teams will get a wild card spot, but they all have a fair shot at second.

The Yanks have regressed some, losing 4 of 5. The Rays haven't really regressed, but they had a loss followed by an off-day, which set them back significantly since both the Orioles and Blue Jays played and won on those days -- knocking them back by a game and a half-game, respectively. Feels like it was just a week ago that I was biting my nails about the Yankees and hoping for the Jays to beat them. Now the Jays are looking like they are the real threat. The Jays have 9 games left against the Rays and 7 against the Yankees, before the season is done. This trio of teams will continue to beat up on one another (and we'll continue to beat up on them) throughout the season. Oddly enough, the Rays have to play 9 games against both the Yankees and the Jays before the season is done. They could either take that opportunity to leap-frog into contention, or that could be what buries them. But that's not the most extreme AL East schedule of the bunch. The Orioles' schedule -- of course -- takes the cake: we play the Yankees 10 more times, the Jays 9 more times, and the Rays 7 more. My conclusion is that, with 56 games remaining in the season, the Orioles are going to have to play very well in their 26 remaining games against the AL East contenders (Rays/Jays/Yanks), and in order for us to maximize our chances, ideally the Jays, Rays and Yanks will end up splitting their series. Since all of those teams are potential contenders, the worst possible outcome is for one team to sweep another, because that makes it marginally harder for us to keep in first, realistically assuming that we are going to lose at least 30-40% of our games in the BEST case (it's baseball, after all).