Friday, January 20, 2017
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World Champions 1983, 1970, 1966 American League Champions 1983, 1979, 1971, 1970, 1969, 1966 American League East Division Champions 2014, 1997, 1983, 1979, 1974, 1973, 1971, 1970, 1969 American League Wild Card 2016, 2012, 1996 Friday, January 20, 2017 Columns: Orioles announce three-year deal with Mark Trumbo, designate Adam Walker for assignment The Sun 1/20 The math behind hitting in baseball when the game's not on the line The Sun 1/20 Orioles apparently won't have a power shortage for quite some time The Sun 1/19 Orioles re-sign Trumbo to 3-year deal MLB.com 1/20 Jones hired as off-ice official for AHL's Gulls MLB.com 1/20 Weekend negotiations led to Trumbo deal MASNsports.com 1/20 Trumbo deal is officialMASNsports.com 1/20 The Trumbo agreement, the ripple effect and what’s next MASNsports.com 1/20 Orioles nearing deal with Trumbo (updated with terms) MASNsports.com 1/19 A look at Mark Trumbo’s impact on the lineup, payroll and more MASNsports.com 1/20 A take on Mark Trumbo’s return MASNsports.com 1/19 Mark Trumbo: one-dimensional, but very good at what he's best at ESPN.com 1/19 Mark Trumbo stays with Orioles, signs 3-year contract ESPN.com 1/19 Report: Mark Trumbo agrees to three-year, $37 million deal with Orioles SI.com 1/19 With Mark Trumbo's Return, 2017 Orioles Looking A Lot Like 2016 Orioles PressBoxOnline.com 1/20 Orioles, Mark Trumbo Agree To Three-Year Deal PressBoxOnline.com 1/19 Orioles Spring Training Tickets On Sale Saturday CBS Baltimore 1/20 Orioles Re-sign MLB Home Run Leader Mark Trumbo CBS Baltimore 1/19 Report: Mark Trumbo signs three-year, $37.5 million contract with Orioles NBCSports.com 1/19 MLB Hot Stove signings: Orioles re-sign slugger Mark Trumbo to three-year deal CBSSports.com 1/19 Trumbomb! O’s Sign Slugger to 3-Year Deal Baltimore Magazine 1/20 It’s official: Trumbo’s an Oriole BaltimoreBaseball.com 1/20 How does the Orioles’ signing of Trumbo affect Mancini’s future? BaltimoreBaseball.com 1/19 Pending physical, Trumbo to sign three-year deal with Orioles BaltimoreBaseball.com 1/19 http://www.baltimoresun.com/sports/orioles/blog/bal-orioles-announce-three-year-deal-with- outfielder-mark-trumbo-designate-adam-walker-for-assignment-20170120-story.html Orioles announce three-year deal with Mark Trumbo, designate Adam Walker for assignment By Jon Meoli / The Baltimore Sun January 20, 2017 The Orioles today announced their three-year deal with slugger Mark Trumbo, and designated outfielder Adam Walker for assignment off the 40-man roster. The $37.5 million contract represents the biggest deal the team has made this offseason. It brings back to Baltimore the major-league leader in home runs who batted 256/.316/.533 and earned his second career All-Star appearance back. "Mark’s presence in our lineup gives us a slugger," executive vice president of baseball operations Dan Duquette said. "He’s an established power hitter. He’s a real threat pitchers have to be concerned about. That also sets up our lineup pretty good, and creates a lot of challenges for our other hitters. We’ve got a lot of established sluggers in the lineup, like Mark Trumbo. He’s got elite power, and he’s a good teammate, good work ethic, and it’s a good ballpark for him. We’re both looking to capitalize on the great year he had last year." Duquette noted that the team's brightest young star, third baseman Manny Machado, reached out to him Thursday to express how glad he was to have Trumbo back in the lineup. "I’m sure some of our other hitters [feel that way] too, because he’s a real threat in the middle of our order," Duquette said. Under the terms of the deal, Trumbo will have a limited no-trade clause to seven teams and receive $11 million in salary each year, with $1.5 million payments being issued annually in the three years following the expiration of his contract in 2019. Trumbo, who was one of the higher-profile free agents remaining on the market, found that a return to the Orioles was the best fit as other sluggers took shorter deals than expected at the outset of free agency. "Obviously, he had a great year for us last year, and we told him that we wanted to re-sign him," Duquette said. "I think we just had to give a little time for the market to establish itself. After our initial conversations, Mark was looking for a longer-term deal, and he went out and he reviewed the market, he and his reps, and then they came back to us and we were able to make a deal. They started indicating that they were really interested last weekend, so we’ve been working on it since last Sunday. It came together in the last couple of days." In addition to Trumbo, the Orioles signed free agent catcher Welington Castillo and traded for outfielder Seth Smith, all in an effort to keep the team’s high-scoring offense at the level it was in 2016. Trumbo is expected to be re-introduced at a press conference next week, in advance of the team’s FanFest on Jan. 28. Walker, who was a waiver claim from the Milwaukee Brewers, has been a prolific minor league slugger with 124 home runs in five minor league seasons, but struggles to hit for average. He has seven days to be traded, claimed on waivers, or assigned to the minors. http://www.baltimoresun.com/health/maryland-health/bs-hs-baseball-stat-20170120-story.html The math behind hitting in baseball when the game's not on the line By Jonathon Pitts / The Baltimore Sun January 20, 2017 Now 34 and preparing for his 13th year in major league baseball, Baltimore Orioles shortstop J.J. Hardy is perceived by some to be in a state of athletic decline. The same player who slugged 30 home runs as recently as 2011, for example, belted just 8 last year, and injuries have forced him to miss about 30 percent of his team's games over the past two years. But there are many ways to measure success in a sport as complex as baseball, and if a team of computer scientists at Johns Hopkins University is to be believed, Oriole fans might have reason to feel hopeful about the two-time All-Star. A study led by Anton Dahbura, a research scientist in the computer sciences department at Hopkins, revealed a striking dichotomy; while Hardy was all but useless as a hitter in 2016 when the outcome of games was already more or less decided, he hit nearly 200 points higher — more than .290 — when the results hung in the balance. The finding is among the more interesting nuggets to appear in "Padding the Stats: A Study of MLB Player Performance in Meaningless-Game Situations," a 55-page paper that Dahbura made public in December. A lifelong baseball nut, Dahbura wrote with the help of Jaewon Lee and Evan Hsia, student researchers and engineering undergraduates who also love the game. The project examined how every major-league hitter performed last season when, by the authors' calculations, either team in a given game had a 95 percent or better chance of winning. Dahbura said it's beyond the study's scope to assign definitive meaning to such figures, but the baseball fan in him can't help speculating that they open up new lines of inquiry in a sport that is already one of the most rigorously analyzed in the world. "What does it tell you that Hardy did so poorly when a game was already decided, batting a mere .100 in those situations, but so dramatically better when it wasn't?" he asked. "It's hard to say with certainty at this point, but the numbers are so striking they're very likely telling us something." The goal of the study, Dahbura said, was to raise awareness about the fact that not all at-bats during a season are equally important. Hardy's performance was actually a striking exception to the trend the team set out to explore. "Some players have been able to significantly improve their overall season statistics by maximizing their performance" in so-called meaningless game situations, the article reads. Dahbura, 56, is one of those baseball geeks lucky enough to have a passion and a gift for mathematics and statistics. It's a blend of talents in growing demand in baseball front offices as franchises increasingly seek to blend the benefits of computer-aided analytics with the intuitive wisdom of more old-fashioned scouting. A former player, coach and manager at Johns Hopkins, Dahbura — now executive director of the Information Security Institute, a center for cybersecurity education and research within the university's computer sciences department — said he first became interested in how players perform in what he calls meaningless game situations in 1999 and 2000, when the temperamental slugger Albert Belle played for the Orioles. He always suspected Belle tried harder, upped his game and padded his personal stats in low- pressure situations that mattered little to his team. The databases of baseball information needed to test his hunch had not yet been established, however. In the years since, as Dahbura — who earned a PhD. in electrical engineering and computer science from Hopkins in 1981 — made his way through a variety of successful gigs in private business, including at Hub Labels Inc., a Hagerstown printing company his parents founded.