Over the last several podcasts, Andrew has been making fun of me for not having read Weaver on Strategy, the classic book on managing by the Earl of Baltimore himself. In the last week, I rectified that situation, so of course I wanted to talk about what Weaver had to say about baseball.
Before we got around to doing that, there was a little bit of Orioles news to dissect, mostly non-trades at the trading deadline. Some reports were made of trades that didn't happen between the O's and San Diego and also the O's and Kansas City. They were good non-trades. Oh yeah, would you have liked the Orioles to claim Cliff Lee on waivers?
Also in this segment, we stumble across another of the myriad ways that this podcast essentially represents an ongoing therapy session for yours truly - this time thanks to a strange connection with the Muppets. You'll have to listen for yourself.
And as for the book club, we talked at length about each of Weaver's Ten Laws of baseball, along with how they apply to baseball in general today, and particularly the Orioles. There were some lengthy digressions - well, duh - but we did get to all ten laws. Most of them are timeless, though if we were wondering about a couple it was Earl's particular distaste for hit-and-runs and his affinity for four-man rotations instead of five. Could it work today? Colorado is trying it, but all their pitchers aren't very good. We are curious.
Another Weaver law is that rookie pitchers were supposed to start out in long relief. Does this still have to happen? Probably not - in Weaver's day, it just meant break them into a low-pressure role. You know, instead of panicking when a pitcher in the MLB rotation goes down due to injury and calling up a prospect whom the team had sworn within the last week would not be coming up soon for any reason whatsoever. Not that any of us root for a baseball team that would do anything like that.
All this and more in this week's Camdencast, which has a run time of about one hour. An embedded player is below the jump for your listening convenience.
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