New Orioles executive vice president of baseball operations Dan Duquette spent about $24MM on free agents this winter, mainly adding to his pitching staff with Wei-Yin Chen and Tsuyoshi Wada. He also added a few role players via trade. The latest on the Orioles:
- The Orioles have 11 players on the 40-man roster with less than five years of service who are out of options: Robert Andino, Chris Davis, Dana Eveland, Jim Johnson, Jai Miller, Troy Patton, Clay Rapada, Nolan Reimold, Alfredo Simon, Pedro Strop, and Taylor Teagarden.
- Out of Baseball America's top ten Orioles prospects, Dan Connolly of the Baltimore Sun finds only L.J. Hoes and Xavier Avery to be legitimate trade targets for other clubs.
- MLB.com's Brittany Ghiroli speculates that the Orioles could add a veteran bat on a one-year deal, such as Johnny Damon, Raul Ibanez, or Casey Kotchman.
- The Orioles have three remaining arbitration cases. They face a $3MM gap with Jeremy Guthrie, $2.4MM with Adam Jones, and $400K with Brad Bergesen, as our arbitration tracker shows.
What a mess. New owner please
It is sad how poorly run this organization has been for the last 15 years.
That is atrocious, that is absolutely the symptom of a franchise that refuses to compete.. And its not about Money.. Angelos has plenty…. They belong in some AAAA league
At first I read “Orioles: Out of options, trading chips” and thought, that about sums it up.
One wonders how the options will affect their decision-making. Andino, Davis, Johnson, Reimold, Strop, and Teagarden are valuable enough (to varying degrees, obviously) that losing them for nothing would be unfortunate. If Wada turns out to be a bullpen pitcher, one wonders whether they just spent several million dollars on him when Troy Patton probably could do the same thing for much less. And if he’s NOT a bullpen pitcher then he is blocking one of their young pitchers needlessly. And let’s not even get into the “thinking” behind getting Eveland: I suppose it’s no great loss if he is lost, but what are the benefits of keeping him and having him block a young pitcher if he has a good spring? I guess (hope) they’re counting on no one picking him up and dropping him to AAA to provide organizational depth. Overall I don’t understand what Duquette has been doing this offseason… as several others have noted, more of the same. I hope I’m wrong and he has the big picture in mind.
Wada is worth the money because even if he does end up bullpen he can potential give you a LOT of quality innings, although I think he ends up rotation. He wasn’t really a lot of money either.
Wada is a better pitcher than Patton, but both are huge question marks.
The thinking behind Eveland is he is a late bloomer lefty.
Duquette has been adding depth this offseason so players can compete and he can better figure out where the organization is. With that said, I think he lied about his offseason plans to make the Orioles a .500 team next season, and he has done very little to improve the major league roster (including nothing to improve the lineup).
New Owner x’s 2!
Its pretty clear they aren’t going to compete this year, and I’m fine with that cuz at least they recognize it, instead of past years where they try and say they have a bunch of great pitching coming and none of it pans out. The fact is in a small-medium market, in order to keep ticket prices low, they have to draw talent from within. we haven’t had a good draft in years, our young pitchers are not what we thought they were. Tillman cant keep the ball down, Bergason hasn’t been the same since he took that line drive off the leg his rookie year, Arietta still has hope but has to learn that you need to throw strikes in the majors. I don’t see any of them being long term solutions. The Japanese pitchers I believe are a good call, they bring in viewers from japan and can eat up innings for the next two years while the minors are rebuilt, which will happen since we are now scouting more amateur players. after that they are trade-able and can be used to bring in more young players to keep a consistent flow of talent in the farm system. the other choice is for Angelos to charge more for tickets and spend more money of free agents which never seem to work out for Baltimore (E.g. Albert Belle, Keven Greg, Sammy Sosa, Derek Lee, Vlad Guerrero, ect.)
Bergeson used to be a great pitcher, then he took an arrow to the knee.
sammy sosa wasnt a free agent acquisition
Not sure EJax goes 3.5 ERA in OPACY…
Bedard was good enough that they were able to fleece Seattle in a 5 for 1 deal.
Tremendously undervalued? Yeah, right, now, the explanation why this terrific pitcher can not stick with a team. Anyone? Anyone?
Go O’s!
Thank you, Lord for a real GM, and not one of these.
Bedard, Guthrie, Britton, BJ Ryan, Jim Johnson, Uehara, Chad Bradford, Mike Timlin. I still agree with your fundamental point though (and of course you didn’t distinguish between starters and bullpen arms
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… because it’d be silly to base a 3-4 year, 8 figure contract on such a small sample size.
Thank you, Lord for a real GM, and not one of these. I appreciate you thanking the “Big Guy” upstairs. However, calling Duquette a “Real GM” questionable at best.