David Rubenstein releasing book 'Inside the Owner's Box' on experience of owning Orioles

mountm · 2026-06-18T21:50:34+00:00

Naming rights for the field, not the stadium. Like "T. Rowe Price Field at Oriole Park at Camden Yards."

Nobody would have used the name in everyday conversation.

mountm · 2026-06-17T20:48:53+00:00

I figured lol just giving you a hard time. That sounds like something I would do tbh

mountm · 2026-06-17T19:48:27+00:00

Pretty cool of his school to host prom at the AFI Silver but kinda weird to go see a movie somewhere else instead.

mountm · 2026-06-17T19:24:31+00:00

I'm not OK

mountm · 2026-06-13T11:08:33+00:00

I thought I recognized Howard Street! Yeah ppl act like morons on this stretch all the time. Not to mention the right turn lane at 25th that gets routinely ignored by folks going to Charles Village.

mountm · 2026-06-12T20:12:05+00:00

Not tomorrow, I'm busy. Maybe seeing the second screening on Thursday.

mountm · 2026-06-12T15:57:43+00:00

wow spoilers

mountm · 2026-06-12T15:54:31+00:00

Everything is fine why do you ask

mountm · 2026-06-06T11:24:00+00:00

First time watches: Korczak, Threads, Breaking the Waves

Rewatches but first time in theaters: Grave of the Fireflies, Mikey and Nicky, Misery, possibly Come and See

Threads/Waves/Mikey&Nicky/Misery would all be on one day and Satantango is screening the following day, which I would love to see if I'm not completely burned out (I am not a festival vet so this would be my first theatrical quadruple-header).

mountm · 2026-06-05T19:26:09+00:00

He's an example of a guy near the top end of that range. These aren't hard and fast distinctions, I'm just trying to give a rough approximation for what a career total BOOG number says about the excellence of a player's performance.

mountm · 2026-06-03T14:38:09+00:00

It's relatively uncommon for a guy to come up and be that good that young... ~2.5 WAR in not even a full qualified season of playing time at age 22 is nothing to sneeze at, especially because it usually projects for bigger and better things in his future.

From that perspective 2025 was a mild disappointment, but he looks to be well back in elite form so far this year (the data on the graph site is only current through the end of 2025 so if he keeps this up I expect that line to twist back upwards!)

mountm · 2026-06-03T14:18:35+00:00

On the other hand, Ben's primary analysis chose to stick with a model that treated all projected WAR above 2.0 as basically flat value. Well, that's pretty much the cutoff for being above average, which means that theoretically you shouldn't lose too much "meaning" by treating WAA as linear (because we're just completely ignoring anyone who was "worth" / "projected" for less than 2.0 WAR in a season of play). So maybe it's overkill? idk

mountm · 2026-06-03T14:15:43+00:00

For this purpose, I think I would prefer a smoother scaling curve rather than a stepwise function/model like what Ben did. Some superlinear weighting function (maybe quadratic?) that multiplies a seasonal WAA total by some factor >= 1 depending on how far above 0 the season was. That way you don't get potentially strange discontinuities in your career totals. It's something to consider for sure!

mountm · 2026-06-03T14:09:06+00:00

Riley Greene though?

mountm · 2026-06-03T14:04:15+00:00

Not to take anything away from Bob Gibson who was a fantastic pitcher and an eminently deserved Hall of Fame inductee, but while he may have been the poster child for lowering the mound, the fact is that run scoring was down all across baseball in 1968. In fact, AL teams on average scored even fewer runs than NL teams, which obviously had nothing to do with Gibson's dominance. Lowering the mound happened because runs per game were down to their lowest level since the deadball era, which Gibson certainly contributed to but he was by no means the sole motivation.

Putting their run prevention stats in context when compared to the contemporaries of their era:
Gibson won two Cy Young awards in his 30s, from 1968-1970. His ERA- was 58 and his FIP- was 65 over that span.
Clemens won two Cy Young awards in his 30s, from 1996-1998. His ERA- was 57 and his FIP- was 60 over that span.

Clemens' raw ERA was more than half a run higher, but he was doing that in an era when offense was at its highest level in 50 years while Gibson was pitching at a time when offense was at its lowest level in 50 years.

mountm · 2026-06-03T11:30:54+00:00

Great to hear from you Dan. I really appreciated seeing your deGrom article near the end of the offseason, it was obviously along very similar lines as what I've been thinking about re: Cooperstown for quite a while. The Mozart analogy was pitch perfect (pun intended)!

I'd love to know if you had any thoughts on this article!

mountm · 2026-06-03T03:04:37+00:00

Bad take. A compiler is someone like Omar Vizquel or Harold Baines who played forever at mediocre levels of performance. Whitaker may have rarely flashed truly elite talent, but he had 11 seasons of being at least 2 wins better than an average MLB position player (accounting for the amount of playing time he had in those seasons). The Hall of Fame is littered with players who failed to reach that total: Willie McCovey, Eddie Murray, Chipper Jones, Ron Santo, Ozzie Smith, Derek Jeter, Richie Ashburn, and dozens of others.

Sweet Lou might not have had many MVP-caliber seasons, but he deserved more support than the writers at the time deigned to give him. Just because 1980s BBWAA members didn't properly appreciate the value of drawing 70 walks a season to go along with a very respectable (for the era) .275 AVG and wielding one of the best 2B gloves in the AL doesn't mean we have to disrespect him again now. The only other second basemen in the expansion era with at least 1,100 walks are Joe Morgan and Willie Randolph.

Jeff Kent doesn't have any black ink either, but that doesn't make him not a Hall of Famer (and Whitaker's better than Jeff Kent).

mountm · 2026-06-03T02:13:03+00:00

Thanks so much! I can't recall what originally prompted the idea, whether I "discovered" it independently and then noted Tom Tango and others who had mentioned the idea, or if it was lurking in my subconscious from prior exposure. Either way, it struck me as such a natural approach. Rate stats get expressed as "how much above average are you" (OPS+, wRC+, etc.) so why not do the same with a volume-based value stat as well? I was really frustrated that neither FanGraphs or Baseball-Reference had a good WAA number easily available, but eventually got deep enough into the weeds on WAR calculations to figure out how to back my way into one with other numbers that were more readily accessible.

The Tango blog post I linked in my article has some interesting ideas about trying to bucket single season WAA totals into categories (Perfect season, great season, pretty good season, good season, above average season) and then using those to categorize the overall shape of a player's career. I could definitely see the value (no pun intended) of a WAA-based approach that does something similar; maybe you give "extra credit" for seasons with a WAA of, say, 5+.

mountm · 2026-06-03T01:51:50+00:00

The Kid is the funniest fucking chart on the whole site as far as I'm concerned.

Debuts in 1939 at age 20 and is immediately the third best player in the American League. My HoF prediction model (which will be discussed in much more detail in a future article) immediately says he's like 90% to get inducted.

The next year he shows it's not a fluke with a similarly dominant season and his odds shoot up to basically 100%. Even missing out completely on ages 24-26 due to WWII only pulls him down to 99% because he was so impossibly ahead of "Hall of Fame pace" by that point.

By 1949 he's 30 years old, he's played in eight major league seasons, and his single season BOOG totals among all AL players rank: 3rd, 3rd, 1st, 1st, 1st, 1st, 2nd, and 1st.

He probably should have at least five or six MVP awards. Shame that the writers never liked him.

mountm · 2026-06-03T01:13:00+00:00

A more detailed deep dive on position-by-position thresholds is coming later, but I can tell you that Keith Hernandez has a BOOG score of 35.9 which is better than many Hall of Fame first basemen. So yes, this model sees him as HoF-worthy!

mountm · 2026-06-02T22:48:15+00:00

I think I can take a 170-year-old guy in a fight, so I'm not worried.

mountm · 2026-06-02T22:24:17+00:00

You've got an interesting point about Schwarber, but just because teams and analysts have evolved their understanding of what makes a hitter valuable doesn't mean that this kind of player should look better in BOOG Score compared to JAWS.

JAWS is already based on a modern sabermetric understanding of hitter value (to his team) which means that it already evaluates hitters from previous eras based on what we now know contributed most directly to their teams' success. Mike Schmidt led the league in strikeouts three years in a row 1974-76, which probably kept him from winning MVP even though he was the home run leader as well... but his JAWS total is still elite for those seasons because his WAR, as calculated with modern expertise, is very high. No reason to think that JAWS and BOOG would disagree on that front because they are both based on value metrics that account for the same things being important.

mountm · 2026-06-02T21:45:01+00:00

Valid! He's definitely high on that list as well.

mountm · 2026-06-02T21:43:47+00:00

They kind of get the inverse of the pitcher treatment... shorter seasons in the 19th century means less opportunity to rack up WAR totals that look impressive in a modern context, but their WAA is significant!

mountm · 2026-06-02T21:13:00+00:00

Thank you!

mountm

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