Tracking Ex Oriole Thread

[LA2]

1 hour ago, Redskins Rick said:

The Orioles need to be kicking themselves, for not recognizing the talent they had here.

 

Yeah, that's a given--that's what I was trying to make ourselves feel better about.

[DrungoHazewood]

Haven't had a Mike Wright update in a while.  He has a 5.28 ERA for Tacoma in the PCL.  Which sounds bad, but it's the PCL, that's 3/4ths of a run better than the staff ERA.

Tacoma has THE posterboy for 2019 baseball.  Nabil Crismatt.  46.2 innings, 51 runs, 15 homers, 68 strikeouts.  10 or 15 years ago if you had 13 K/9 in AAA you'd be in Sports Illustrated.  Crismatt got sent back to AA, with non-helium baseballs, and he has a 1.94 ERA.

[Legend_Of_Joey]

1 hour ago, DrungoHazewood said:

You don't kick yourself for not recognizing wildly out of character things that might happen in the future.  Did the Red Sox kick themselves for missing out on Brady's 50 homer season?  Do the Orioles kick themselves for not recognizing that Jose Bautista would go crazy six years after he was a Rule 5er?  

Last year Yastrzemski spent a month OPSing .603 in AA at the age of 27.  The Giants picked him up because they were all out of outfielders so why not?  Just as the O's did with Dwight Smith Jr.  Nobody had a crystal ball, I doubt anyone saw the year of the superball coming.

You can't give infinite chances to every Drew Dosch and Mike Yastrzemski on the very remote chance that they're going to go all Brady Anderson on you.

You can in a season where you continually use Gentry and Andreoli.

[DrungoHazewood]

Tyler Wilson has finished his second season in Korea (I think the season is over?), going 13-7, 3.16 for the LG Twins in 165 innings.  Last year he was 9-4, 3.07.  Wilson led LG in wins, innings, starts and strikeouts.  

He's a teammate of Hyun Soo Kim, who had a pretty good year but not quite up to his normal KBO standards (.321/.389/.461, with 10 homers, 52 walks, 44 Ks.)  Also on LG is Casey Kelly, who was about as successful in the majors as Wilson, maybe a touch worse.  His numbers were pretty similar to Wilson this year.

All of this lends some support to the idea that the average KBO player is somewhere in between AA and AAA quality.

[DrungoHazewood]

4 minutes ago, Legend_Of_Joey said:

You can in a season where you continually use Gentry and Andreoli.

Sure, why not.  When you're bad, give everyone who's been halfway decent above A ball six weeks in the majors.  Might be a challenge to juggle the 40-man and you might lose some guys to waivers, but whatever.  The key is to have given a shot to anyone who could semi-plausibly have a completely out of nowhere season.

With that in mind, where is Drew Dosch, and would a six week pro-rated portion of a MLB minimum salary lure him out of retirement?

[Redskins Rick]

15 minutes ago, DrungoHazewood said:

Sure, why not.  When you're bad, give everyone who's been halfway decent above A ball six weeks in the majors.  Might be a challenge to juggle the 40-man and you might lose some guys to waivers, but whatever.  The key is to have given a shot to anyone who could semi-plausibly have a completely out of nowhere season.

With that in mind, where is Drew Dosch, and would a six week pro-rated portion of a MLB minimum salary lure him out of retirement?

This system isnt that deep, where losing somebody because of the 40 man roster, is not going to be that much of an impact either way.

 

[El Gordo]

Who else makes this plat=y? I miss him he was fun to watch.

https://www.mlb.com/video/machado-s-awesome-diving-play

[spiritof66]

23 minutes ago, El Gordo said:

Who else makes this plat=y? I miss him he was fun to watch.

https://www.mlb.com/video/machado-s-awesome-diving-play

More fun than watching our guys drop fly balls, take batted balls on the head, miss cut-off men, throw the ball around the infield, fire in eight-hoppers from the outfield, let the opponents steal pretty much at will, and run into outs on the basepaths?   

OK, I guess I see your point. 

[OldNewGuy]

53 minutes ago, LA2 said:

That's an interesting speculation. Melvin was also an extremely hard worker and was known to have said to younger players that they had to hit home runs to get the big bucks.

Here I thought that was the advice Melmo got from T-bat when he arrived from the Jays with his 41 homers.

[bobmc]

3 hours ago, DrungoHazewood said:

Sure, why not.  When you're bad, give everyone who's been halfway decent above A ball six weeks in the majors.  Might be a challenge to juggle the 40-man and you might lose some guys to waivers, but whatever.  The key is to have given a shot to anyone who could semi-plausibly have a completely out of nowhere season.

With that in mind, where is Drew Dosch, and would a six week pro-rated portion of a MLB minimum salary lure him out of retirement?

LOL I think he's ready!

 

[DrungoHazewood]

1 hour ago, LA2 said:

That's an interesting speculation. Melvin was also an extremely hard worker and was known to have said to younger players that they had to hit home runs to get the big bucks.

I try to never definitively say that someone used anything without proof.  But through age 29 Melvin Mora was a utility player who'd hit .259 with a .709 OPS. He went on to have a season where he hit .340/.419/.562.  And another year where he hit .317/.418/.503.   His career minor league slugging percentage was .380.  His career high in homers prior to the trade to the O's, majors or minors, was eight.

His top bb-ref comp at age 30 was Rick Schu.  Then he OPS'd almost 1.000 and set a modern Oriole record for batting average in a season.

Maybe it was clean living and good eating.  But that's way more circumstantial evidence than any number of guys who were more-or-less blackballed from Cooperstown for years.

[LA2]

3 hours ago, OldNewGuy said:

Here I thought that was the advice Melmo got from T-bat when he arrived from the Jays with his 41 homers.

You're right! Thanks for the correction (I've gone ahead and deleted the original erroneous post).

[LA2]

18 hours ago, DrungoHazewood said:

I try to never definitively say that someone used anything without proof.  But through age 29 Melvin Mora was a utility player who'd hit .259 with a .709 OPS. He went on to have a season where he hit .340/.419/.562.  And another year where he hit .317/.418/.503.   His career minor league slugging percentage was .380.  His career high in homers prior to the trade to the O's, majors or minors, was eight.

His top bb-ref comp at age 30 was Rick Schu.  Then he OPS'd almost 1.000 and set a modern Oriole record for batting average in a season.

Maybe it was clean living and good eating.  But that's way more circumstantial evidence than any number of guys who were more-or-less blackballed from Cooperstown for years.

You're probably right (in some unprovable or un-disprovable way), but I just want to point out that the 2003-2005 teams had a lot of "over-achievers" that remain mysteries, such as Luis Matos, David Newhan, Brian Roberts, and Brook Fordyce, and officially-accused supposed users like Jay Gibbons. 2004 is also when stars like Miguel Tejada and his B12 attaché case, Rafael Palmeiro and his index finger of Denial, and Javy Lopez arrived on the scene. It was also when Jeff Conine and B.J. Surhoff put up remarkable stats for supposedly declining players in their late 30s.

Exactly when it is appropriate to throw shade on players when they perform surprisingly well is something I've never spent much time thinking about. I think because I'm ignorant about the substances involved and the details of recent athletic training, but also because it became an important part of thinking about baseball long after my rich childhood tutelage in the mid-1960s, when I felt utter confidence in the truth of the achievements, unique skill sets, shortcomings, and declines of players ranging from Boog, Brooks, and Aparicio to Norm Siebern and Sam Bowens. Players like Charlie Lau and Stu Miller led me to think that cleverness, experience, and practice could be just as important as formidable strength, reflexes, and speed. What I saw on the field and read in the Sunday paper stat lists (Was it Sunday?) was simply a direct expression of their talents, insight, and condition (one always assumed high levels of effort). That mindset--actually an ideology--I've never really moved outside of despite the abundant evidence of PED-usage in later decades of players.

I'm so far away from the real story and evidence I can't see the point of trying to formulate and judge them. And the curious thing is that I think I disliked players like A-Rod, Ortiz, and Clemens (to give a few examples) anyway, long before the scandals made the headlines. Of course, if I were to be miraculously given a God's list of whose performance was significantly attributable to PEDs, I'm sure there would be a lot of players on it that I have enjoyed following. At which point, I would realize that it's ultimately the Game that intrigues me (it's the only Game I'm still a fan of after an adolescence of following all of the major U.S. sports)--an actualization of complexly interacting topographies, rules, and principles through which the players move like shadows projected on the cave wall described by Plato. I would take refuge in baseball's Ideal Form.

[TommyPickles]

Nick Markakis "could be activated as soon as Friday."

I don't know about you guys, but I'll be cheering for Atlanta and Arizona (if they make it) in this year's postseason.  I'd love to see Jones or Markakis in a World Series.

The Diamondbacks have won 11 of their last 13...

 

[DrungoHazewood]

10 hours ago, LA2 said:

You're probably right (in some unprovable or un-disprovable way)...

I don't know if I'm right.  I could be wrong.  But the odds of a .700-OPSing utility guy at 29 becoming an MVP candidate at 32 are exceptionally remote. 

It would be really cool if he was clean, because 1000-1 underdogs winning is always cool.  Melvin Mora was less likely than George Mason making the final four.