Remember life before Mike Trout? There was less joy in the world and the Angels didn’t have to spend so much money on new baseballs. There were also different expectations placed on young players. Because of Trout, though, and the era of players he ushered in, the way we look at prospect timelines has changed. Trout was the best player in baseball at age 20 and has been great ever since. Bryce Harper, Manny Machado, and plenty of other newcomers have taken the sport by storm with awesome debuts. Carlos Correa! Kris Bryant! Francisco Lindor! Top prospects now burst onto the scene and are immediately awesome. It’s fun to watch.

But it can also be distracting. The Trout-led immediacy has moved us to forget about players who don’t excel right away. I’m not just talking about mid-level prospects who aren’t getting their due, I’m thinking about good prospects who don’t have four-win seasons prior to their 23rd birthdays.

There’s an attention gap between the year you lose prospect status and the year you show up near the top of the leaderboards for the first time. Once a player loses his rookie eligibility but before he’s fully reached his cruising altitude, we sort of lose track of them unless they play for our favorite team.

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In Major League Baseball, the market tends to correct itself as clubs gain greater knowledge of players and their value. If aging players are less successful, the market for that group might slow a bit. Bullpen arms become more or less desirable depending on their scarcity. Increased revenues tend to move everyone up the pay scale. It is important to understand how and when to make adjustments in value as run-scoring environments, finances, and aging patterns change.

That is all well and good for those who run organizations and those who follow the game closely, but the arbitration process is much less nuanced. The non-tendering of contracts to Pedro Alvarez and Chris Carter, along with the trade of Mark Trumbo, are all the result of a failure to adjust — within the arbitration process, specifically — as the market slowly corrects for the overpayment of defensively- (and sometimes offensively-) limited home run hitters whose overall effectiveness has dimmed.

The arbitration process tends to favor the traditional stats that place like FanGraphs have tried to de-emphasize. Closers get big paydays in arbitratio, regardless of overall performance. As a result, the St. Louis Cardinals opted to let Steve Cishek go instead of moving to arbitration where he would receive a salary of around $7 million. Home runs and RBI tend to get paid as well, causing an overpayment for those players who rack up those numbers, but have big deficiencies in other areas.

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What the Orioles lack in sure-thing big-league prospects, they make up for with an impressive collection of back-end starters, relievers and fringe regular/bench guys. At the top of the list are the same guys as last year, with Dylan Bundy and Hunter Harvey headlining the future hopes of a cost-controlled stable of young players. Unfortunately, both are dealing with time missed due to injuries, and the O’s will have to determine how to deal with Bundy’s conundrum of not being quite ready to stick in the majors but being out of options.

Jomar Reyes and Chance Sisco are the greatest hope for the Orioles to develop a cornerstone position player, though not without risk. Sisco has defensive shortcomings and questionable power projection, and Reyes just finished up playing in A-ball as an 18-year-old. Still, what has made their Major League roster fun to watch with Dan Duquette at the helm has been their propensity for putting bench players and fringy starters into positions where they are able to thrive. Though the overall picture may leave this farm system looking grim, there probably isn’t a better team than the Orioles at getting the most out of what they have to stay competitive.

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For the second time in as many years, Mark Trumbo has become to a fanbase one of those “Remember when we had Mark Trumbo?” guys. He received less than a year’s worth of playing time in Arizona before being shipped to Seattle where he received less than a year’s worth of playing time before being shipped to Baltimore.

That Trumbo has been traded three times in two years is, in some ways, revealing on its own. Good players get traded, too, but more often its the players with glaring flaws who find themselves repeatedly expendable and repeatedly dealt. As a bat-only, power-and-nothing-else guy, Trumbo fits the mold.

Trumbo is in his final year of arbitration and will be a free agent next offseason, meaning that he’s likely to become the answer of a trivia question to a third fanbase before too long. For the Orioles, Trumbo probably serves as a stopgap. He’s set to earn something like $9 million in arbitration, which made him a non-tender candidate for a Seattle team that’s looking to become more athletic.

One-dimensional non-tender candidates in their final year of team control don’t tend to carry too much in the way of trade value, and so all the Orioles had to give up for Trumbo’s services was Steve Clevenger. Clevenger is a soon-to-be 30-year-old catcher who bats left handed and is out of options so he’ll see some playing time in Seattle, but also seems likely to see playing time in Triple-A. He’ll do some things for the big league club, but he won’t do more things. He hasn’t hit much, but last year he hit a little, and he doesn’t carry any kind of defensive reputation one way or the other. Seattle doesn’t have any left-handed catchers in the high minors and he can also play some first base, so in that way, Clevenger is a fit in the loosest sense of the word. This is more than enough about Steve Clevenger.

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Chris Davis is a man of prodigious strength. His efforts, or sometimes lack thereof, have been chronicled by FanGraphs multiple times. Since Davis’ first season with the Baltimore Orioles in 2012, he leads all of major league baseball with 159 home runs and only Edwin Encarnacion is even within 20 home runs of him. Just 10 players are within 50 home runs of Davis over the last four years, which means even if Davis had hit zero home runs in 2015 instead of 47, he would rank in the top 10 over the last four years. As power has become increasingly rare over the past decade, Davis made a great comeback after a disappointing 2014 and is set to get paid in free agency this winter. Looking for comparable players, we can attempt to find out how much that great power is worth as Davis heads into his 30s.

To find historical comps for Davis, first I looked for players from 1960 through 2008 who’d produced a similar number of wins in a similar time framce — in this case, between 10 and 20 WAR through their age-29 seasons. As this is not an incredibly high bar, there were more than 300 players in resulting pool. To further narrow sample, I looked for players who fit a similar offensive profile, so within 10 points of Davis’ 121 wRC+ mark and at least a .200 isolated slugging (Davis’ is .251). This narrowed down the list to 42 players. Limiting the list only to players within 25% of Davis’ 3,512 plate appearances left just 31 players. Davis is coming off 47 home runs, a 147 wRC+, and a 5.6 WAR. Eliminating all players with a wRC+ below 125 or under 400 PA in their age-29 seasons left 15 players, many of whom appear very Chris Davis-like.

Chris Davis Comps Through Age 29

Name	PA	HR	ISO	wRC+	Off	Def	WAR
Lee May	3716	176	0.214	127	107.9	-58.2	19.6
Kirk Gibson	3104	126	0.205	128	112.9	-31.8	19.1
Trot Nixon	2739	106	0.218	122	77.9	-1.4	16.8
Carl Everett	2726	103	0.202	117	63.0	19.2	16.4
Tino Martinez	3495	157	0.211	115	67.4	-19.1	16.4
Cliff Floyd	3556	132	0.209	121	107.4	-54.8	16.3
Ryan Klesko	3369	165	0.242	128	120.8	-61.3	16.0
Jason Bay	3259	149	0.234	130	141.4	-88.2	15.9
Frank Howard	3445	162	0.210	127	108.2	-77.1	15.4
David Ortiz	3584	177	0.252	129	116.9	-89.3	14.9
Bobby Higginson	3434	134	0.208	118	80.9	-60.3	13.5
Dave Kingman	3385	204	0.252	115	55.4	-44.8	13.2
Pat Burrell	4145	188.0	0.221	117	73.1	-78.5	12.9
Tony Clark	3212	156	0.225	117	67.8	-61.8	11.5
Jay Buhner	2944	129	0.215	122	73.4	-69.3	10.2
AVERAGE	3341	151	0.221	122	91.6	-51.8	15.2
Chris Davis	3512	203	0.251	121	86.8	-67.6	14.5

Davis comes up a little bit higher in terms of power, but in offensive value, he is right around the midpoint of the group. In a comparison Scott Boras is likely to love, Davis’ career through age-29 looks a lot like David Ortiz’. Nor is it just through age 29 where the comparison exists. As only players with good age-29 seasons were included in the group, here are the above players’ age-29 seasons, among which group Davis compares favorably.

Chris Davis Comps at Age 29

Name	PA	HR	ISO	wRC+	Off	Def	WAR
Tino Martinez	685	44	0.281	141	35.9	-5.9	5.3
David Ortiz	713	47	0.304	157	45.7	-17	5.3
Trot Nixon	513	28	0.272	152	33.6	-0.2	5.0
Carl Everett	561	34	0.286	135	27.1	3.3	4.7
Bobby Higginson	679	30	0.238	131	30.5	-8.5	4.3
Cliff Floyd	609	28	0.244	139	35.0	-18.4	3.7
Kirk Gibson	521	28	0.224	136	27.3	-9.5	3.6
Ryan Klesko	590	26	0.233	135	29.2	-13.7	3.2
Jason Bay	670	31	0.236	133	32.8	-24.8	3.0
Lee May	647	29	0.206	137	26.6	-24.0	3.0
Jay Buhner	436	21	0.263	138	21.5	-10.6	2.5
Frank Howard	549	18	0.164	127	16.4	-10.4	2.3
Dave Kingman	448	28	0.276	131	14.5	-8.8	2.2
Tony Clark	497	16	0.194	125	15.3	-14.7	1.7
Pat Burrell	567	29	0.245	126	14.6	-18.1	1.5
AVERAGE	579	29	0.244	136	27.1	-12.1	3.4
Chris Davis	670	47	0.300	147	36.3	-5.5	5.6

While Davis’ age-29 season puts him even with some great seasons by David Ortiz and Tino Martinez, his inconsistent past, including a 2014 season in which he hit just .196/.300/.404, keep his comps on a more terrestrial level. The end of 2014 resulted in a 25-game suspension for Davis after he tested positive for Adderall twice. He had a therapeutic use exemption for the drug prior to 2013, but did not have one for either 2013 or 2014 when he was suspended. He gained an exemption this past season for a different drug to treat his attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, so the matter is unlikely to cause trouble again.

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For the last three years, the Baltimore Orioles and Washington Nationals have been engaged in a feud over television rights fees. As both Wendy Thurm and I have previously discussed, the origins of the dispute date back to 2005, and Major League Baseball’s resolution of Baltimore’s objections to the Montreal Expos being relocated to Washington, D.C. (territory belonging at the time to the Orioles).

In order to alleviate the Orioles’ concerns, MLB structured a deal in which Baltimore would initially own 87 percent of the newly created Mid-Atlantic Sports Network (MASN), the regional sports network that would air both the Orioles’ and Nationals’ games. In exchange, the Nationals were scheduled to receive an initial broadcast rights fee of $20 million per year from MASN, an amount that would be recalculated every five years.

Jump forward to 2012, when Washington requested that its rights fee be increased to $120 million per year. MASN and the Orioles refused, and as a result the dispute ended up in arbitration, with a panel of MLB team executives – the Mets’ Jeff Wilpon, the Rays’ Stuart Sternberg, and the Pirates’ Frank Coonelly – ultimately awarding the Nationals roughly $60 million per year in broadcast fees.

Still not satisfied, the Orioles and MASN then went to court in 2014, asking a New York judge to overturn the arbitration award on the grounds that the panel was biased. After initially blocking MLB from enforcing the arbitration decision that August, presiding Judge Lawrence Marks gave MASN and the Orioles a more lasting victory on Wednesday, officially vacating the arbitrators’ award.

As a result, the Orioles and Nationals are back to square one in their dispute, potentially impacting both teams’ 2016 offseason plans.

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It’s almost that time of year again, when individual hardware is bestowed on the best players in each league, complete with the requisite hue and cry from constituencies exhorting the merits of their respective choices. In general, I tend to not get too worked up about such things, but will dip my toe into such discussions when my interest is piqued. Last year, I thought that Felix Hernandez deserved to win a close decision over Corey Kluber in the AL Cy Young race. This year, the NL Cy race is a particularly interesting one, a three-way dogfight among Dodgers Zack Greinke and Clayton Kershaw and Cub Jake Arrieta. Today, let’s utilize the batted-ball data at our disposal and try to make a call on this exciting race.

For the two Dodger aces, this is not their first Cy Young rodeo: Kershaw has won the award in three of the last four seasons, and Greinke won one with the Royals back in 2009. As for Arrieta, well, this is the first time he has even pitched enough innings to qualify for the ERA title. Kershaw, 27, and Greinke, 32, were slam-dunk, top-half-of-the-first-round high school blue chippers. Though Greinke has had some unique roadblocks along the way to perennial excellence, there likely aren’t many scouts who’ve watched either him or Kershaw from the beginning who are very surprised by what either has accomplished in the game.

Arrieta, 30, on the other hand, was a humble fifth-round Oriole draft pick out of TCU in 2007 who had previously been drafted out of high school and junior college. His progress through the minors was glacial compared to his Dodger peers, and he was eventually, famously dealt from the O’s to the Cubs along with Pedro Strop in exchange for Steve Clevenger and Scott Feldman in the summer of 2013. Now Clevenger has done a nice job for the Orioles of late, but I’d still surmise that they would like to have a do-over on this deal.

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“So you’re just studying oddity pitchers,” said Zach Britton over my shoulder as I took our conversation over to Darren O’Day. I bristled at the word oddity, because it implied some sort of freak-show gawking. “No! I’m into pitching, and you guys have interesting pitches,” was my earnest response. Eventually, most of the Orioles bullpen was in our scrum, talking pitching and pitches.

He wasn’t wrong, though. At the heart of that bullpen are three very… odd pitches. And checking out the three of them can teach us something about arm action.

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Before this season, Manny Machado was a talented young player who’s remained something less than elite due to injuries and a bat that was closer to average than star. He added offense to his game this season and earned his status as a star-level player. Debuting just a month removed from his 20th birthday back in 2012, Machado combined an above-average bat with amazing defense, but a switch flipped this season and Machado joined Mike Trout and Bryce Harper as one of the very best players in the game. Machado is one of the game’s very best third baseman defensively, but a couple times this week, the Orioles have experimented with him at shortstop. While the long-term implications for Machado and the Orioles are unclear, early returns suggest a happy outcome for the club and the 23-year-old, were he to return to his original spot on the diamond.

Drafted out of high school as a shortstop, Machado was projected to remain at shortstop given his solid hands and arm, although there were whispers that somewhere down the line his body might outgrow the position. The Orioles certainly expected his future was as a shortstop, putting him there for all but two of his 208 minor league games. When the Orioles found themselves in a pennant race in 2012, they already had one of the best defensive shortstops in the game with J.J. Hardy so they moved Machado to third base. The move worked, as the Orioles won a wild-card spot and an ensuing wild-card game to make the American League Division Series. With Hardy continuing to provide excellent defense, Machado has remained at third base until now.

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It wasn’t supposed to be this way for the Orioles. After a second trip to the postseason in three years, one in which they got about one-sixth of a season from Matt Wieters and half a season from Manny Machado, making the playoffs in back-to-back seasons for the first time since 1996-1997 was the clear goal. It hasn’t happened that way. The team recently dropped six straight, and has dropped eight of their last 10, to give themselves a firm uphill climb toward a wild-card berth.

Perhaps what is most frustrating for the Orioles is that they have significantly outscored all four teams standing with them or in their way of the second wild-card slot:

American League Second Wild Card Competitors

Team	W	L	Run Diff	BR Run Diff	WC Playoff Odds
Texas	65	61	-29	-43	28.2%
Anaheim	65	62	-4	-20	31.8%
Minnesota	65	62	-9	-80	13.0%
Tampa Bay	63	64	-19	21	10.7%
Baltimore	63	64	49	9	7.7%

BR = BaseRuns, WC = Wild Card

When you expand from actual run differential to BaseRuns run differential, you can see that the Rays have a legit case to be positioned ahead of Baltimore, but overall that has to be a pretty frustrating table for the Orioles and their fans.

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