The Orioles may have been swept in the ALCS, but the club believes their 96 win season (plus three playoff victories) put their division rivals on notice, writes Dan Connolly of the Baltimore Sun. Despite the excellent season, four key players contributed less than expected, which may give the team additional upside next season.
- Connolly identified five key points for the 2015 Orioles, three of which deal with potential transactions. On base percentage has been an issue in the past few seasons. The Orioles bashed the most home runs in the league for the second consecutive season, but they finished just eighth in runs scored. Prioritizing base runners should translate to more RBI opportunities for the power bats. An ace would be a meaningful addition, although Connolly notes that payroll constraints and a history of avoiding large outlays to pitchers may prevent the club from exploring the top end of the market. Depth was a big reason for this season’s division crown, and it will again be an important consideration. Per Connolly, “it’s Duquette’s specialty.”
- Bill Madden of the New York Daily News looks to the Royals as a template for the new era of baseball. Unfortunately, that could pose problems for the current Yankees roster. The aging club is years from building a young, athletic team in the mold of the Royals. They do have a good start on an elite bullpen if they re-sign closer David Robertson. Madden believes the Yankees should pursue an additional right-handed reliever with elite velocity along with reform at the scouting and player development level.
- Andrew Friedman’s decision to leave the Rays is a reflection of the state of the franchise, posits Madden in the same piece. Per Madden, Friedman recognized that his stock would “never be higher” and the Rays were headed in the wrong direction. The club has become increasingly reliant on outside additions with just six home grown players on the final roster. One damning statistic – since selecting Tim Beckham first overall in 2008, Tampa Bay hasn’t developed a player from draft to majors. Madden speculates that Rays manager Joe Maddon could be the next name out the door. His contract concludes after the 2015 season.
Every year there’s a new model to follow for postseason success, every year it is ignored, and another model emerges. But I do like the idea of getting a righty with elite velocity, not sure why team’s hadn’t thought of that earlier.
Agreed. The Yankees should absolutely get younger and more athletic, and he’s right that it will be difficult, but i’d hardly call that a “new model for postseason success.”
The Yanks can win if they can stay healthy which is a hard thing for them to do with aging players. A healthy Tanaka, Sabathia, Nova, Phelps, Tex, and Beltran would be a big boost to this team. Cashman gets bashed a lot but he made all the right moves this year, but almost all of his additions to the team had sub par years. Look at the contracts players like McCarthy and Headley will get, they good pick ups this year.
The Yankees need to learn to scout, draft and then most importantly develop talent. They have proved abysmal in the developing under the cashman era. When you look at all the epic fails on can’t miss players – chamberlain, Kennedy, Hughes, tabata, a-jax, Jesus montero, and now heathcott and williams and Sanchez, and it gets frustrating.
They also need to gut and rebuild their medical and rehab staff. There’s entirely too many injuries. Yes injuries can be fluke and random but almost every player on the 25 man roster was out significant time and the same cast of characters in the minors are out with the same injury year after year.
Until they get on top of these issues and abandon the “throw giant piles of Steinbrenner cash” at decline-phase free agents as their team building strategy the Yankees are in for a long rough patch.
Wow, that’s an unusually negative assessment of the Rays. And I think it’s true. They’ve really drafted poorly (which is opposite the conventional wisdom) and have survived on their drafts of now 7-10 years ago, plus some Friedman magic in the low-end FA market. The good part of their coming descent is it will finally force the team to move.
Assuming they can get out of their lease, where do they move to? Who has a stadium built, or do you think in this economic climate that areas would invest at least $250M of tax money to build a park?
All of the stories are related. It took the Royals 7 years to draft, develop, and trade for players to build that young, athletic team, and then wait for them to jell. Are Yankee fans going to wait half that time? It’s always been about farm systems and developing players when talking about winning teams. Where were the Yankee and Rays owners and organizational heads while the deterioration was going on? Their farm systems didn’t suddenly fall out in the last year or two.
Yet another reason it’s obvious to me that the AL Central is becoming a power, as the AL East continues downhill.
The AL East had the best winning % in baseball, and has two teams capable of just buying and restocking. The AL East will be fine. Maybe it won’t have 3 90 win teams in the same year any time soon, but that doesn’t mean the AL Central is becoming a power, or the AL East is going downhill.
I have been saying for years that Tampa should move but it may be too late. Freidman leaving really hurts this team and once Maddon leaves they will be cellar dwellers again. I always like moving the team to North Carolina.
They draft mainly HS players which take quite awhile to develop. The farm has bolstered the pitching in recent years and has depleted the system, but they have a few position players (age 22-24)on the cusp of being MLB players having had decent years in AA/AAA. One of which already had a call up, Kiermaier, who has drafted in 2010
Orioles will dominate the East again next year! Best Clubhouse in MLB..Every player wants to come to Baltimore and play for Buck Showalter.
Buck Showalter is the best field manager in the AL. He gets the most out of his players. On the flip side, Toronto has the worst in Gibbons, who somehow gets the worst out of his players… Baltimore cares about winning… Whereas the Jays are simply a line-cost item for Rogers Corp.
How’s the Royals brand of baseball the start of a new era, last season people were claiming the Red Sox way was the new era in the game. The Royals are in the World Series because of their great bullpen and because they got hot at the right time… their offense is below average besides stolen bases and their rotation is average at best. Not saying the Royals aren’t a good team, because fluke or not making it to the World Series is a big accomplishment, but I think each team has their own style of play, and a team having success shouldnt mean every team should adopt their style of play. And people claiming the Yankees won’t win anything because they’re old, the Giants who are in the World Series are even older than the Yankees… I do agree that the Yankees need to get younger, but the reason why they won’t win a World Series won’t be because of their age…
Finally someone talking sense! If the Yankees don’t make the postseason it will be because of underperformance. Yes they have many question marks but who doesn’t? Many of their older players (Beltran, Tex, even CC) are capable of playing better than they did this season. If they had– and hadn’t been hit with so many injuries– they’d probably have made the wild card. Point is, if a few things break differently and they can make a few improvements, the Yankees can absolutely compete for a postseason spot in ’15.
You’re really reaching here. Tex will be 35 at the beginning of next season and has declined every year since signing with the Yankees in ’09. Beltran will be 38 to begin next season and has been injury-prone since ’09. Sabathia turns 35 next season, has over 2800 innings on his arm, and has seen his average fastball velocity decline by 5 mph since 2011. Guys at those ages, with those recent track records, hardly ever improve. If a team keeps building by shelling out mega-contracts to guys in their 30s, isn’t it almost inevitable that they’ll get hit with injuries to and underperformance by multiple players at some point?
You also may want to add the high draft choices the Yankees gave up to sing those older players.
That’d just be rubbing it in, wouldn’t it?
It’s really hard to peg what Cashman is trying to do. Cashman seems to be playing it safe in recent years, signing guys that won’t cost them draft picks and making trades for guys that doesn’t cost them much (if anything in terms of assets). That’s all great but there’s a reason why those free agents he’s signing wasn’t offered arbitration and why those guys he’s traded for didn’t cost much of anything in return. He’s avoided potentially highly volatile but extremely successful signings (more or less any and/or all of the Cuban players) and had to apparently wait to see how Darvish and several other high profile Japanese players (that he could have easily had…money, it’s what the Yankees have right?)before investing in a Japanese player.
There is no such thing as an archetype team. The game changes and teams must face those changes with different roster setups.
“Since selecting Tim Beckham first overall in 2008, Tampa Bay hasn’t developed a player from draft to majors.” Except Becham himself, C.J. Riefenhauser, and Kevin Kiermaier have all seen big league time.
Those are game-changers.
Kevin Kiermaier had a fWAR of 3.8 and a .765 OPS. So i’d say he can change a game.
And in limited time.
You’re right. I change my mind. The Rays have drafted masterfully since 2008.
Right because that’s what i said…
Why should Maddon be out the door. The guy is good. Has he been drafting or developing? For that matter has he been the one creating the budget for player development or the one hiring the scouts? In this day in age when you count solely on the draft without Dominican signings or international free agents your farm will suffer. Joe Maddon should only be leaving the Rays if he desires. Good luck to the Rays on finding a better manager than him.
Madden’s point was that Maddon would jump on a job with another club.
Gotcha, was a little confused with Maddon’ s recent PC comments saying he would be open to an extension this winter.
The Royals had an average at best offense, okay starting rotation, great bullpen and great defense, which allowed them to sneak into the playoffs and get hot once there. I’m not sure that is much of a model for other teams to follow.
Teams just need to tell their hitters not to hit homers until the postseason clearly it worked for the royals.
Having watched at least 80% of the Royals games this year, is disappointing to read how their success has been fluffed off as “getting hot” or “getting lucky”, after talking about areas of their team that are not strong. This is going on with many all over America.
The Royals play a 6 inning game – getting ahead by one run and having it stand up is the way they’ve played all year. As Moose said a week ago, they can beat a team with stolen bases, hit and running, bunting, and at times – home runs. All their defensive players are above (major league) average at their positions, with the possible exception of Akoi – who has been replaced all year with Cain moving over to RF and Dyson going into CF. They force teams into mistakes and take advantage of it. They get ahead by a run by hitting a ground ball to the right side to get a runner from second to third, and then hitting a fly ball to get him home.
There is nothing the Royals are doing in the post season that they did not do during a good portion of the season. Many people that did not watch them play are quick to dismiss them. They are a smart team that plays fundamental baseball – their most impressive trait being that when they make a mistake, they catch themsleves and don’t let the game get out of hand by making more, retaining their poise. They played 3 of the best AL teams in the playoffs and swept them all. Yet they’re being marginalized because they don’t have big name players that make off-field headlines or produce gaudy numbers in area of play.
Has there ever been a team in the history of baseball that didn’t win it because they got hot? Surely you aren’t arguing the Royals are THIS far above all the teams they played, right? To sweep every team you have played so far, you have to be really hot at the right time. That’s as obvious a statement as one can make.
And the question isn’t really how the Royals win. Everybody knew that during the year and going into the playoffs. The question is is that a model that other teams can copy, or SHOULD they copy??? And I’d argue the answer is no, at least to the latter part. It’s not a model that is going to lead you to success most years.
Don’t worry about it. Fans from the teams that don’t win spout the lucky thing all the time. The Red Sox fans dealt with it last year and the Royals fans will have to deal with it this year. Sure they got hot at the right time, but the truly great teams do. They are an exciting young ball club, and they play the game with heart, hustle and good fundamentals. They may not break any offensive records, but they have a solid starting rotation, a fantastic bullpen, excellent defense, and insane baserunning skills. Good luck to your team in the WS, they’ve certainly earned their spot, and I know a lot of baseball fans are pulling for them.
“There is nothing the Royals are doing in the post season that they did not do during a good portion of the season.”
There hitting homers, and they didn’t show the ability to that all year. They had an average offense all season, and that really hasn’t been the case this postseason.
Here’s an alternate description for exactly what you just said, choosing instead to spin it positively:
“The Royals didn’t give away games. They won the games they played well enough to win, and that resulted in a playoff-caliber team now competing in the World Series.”
They’re playing in an era of low offense and they built a team, consciously or unconsciously, to take advantage of that. They don’t give up unnecessary runs, but they can create them despite an overall average offense — which, mind you, got poor contributions from typically consistent hitters. I don’t see how this is spun as negative or luck. Whatever luck helped them “sneak” into the playoffs is offset by the terrible luck of 6 out of their 9 regular hitters performing below their career averages offensively, most of those by double-digit percentages.
Who said anything about luck? And what does how the Royals won games this year have anything to do with a potential model that can be followed. The question isn’t whether the Royals are good. People can stop coming to their rescue, everybody thinks/knows they are good. The question is it a model that can/should be followed?
The Orioles have served notice. The Royals are the new template. The Giants are the team everyone needs to model themselves after. Oh, wait, that’s the Cardinals. Blah, blah, blah. Do we need to go through this nonsense every postseason, glorifying the teams of the moment? It’s baseball. We have 130 years of history here. It is what it is…until next season.
When Whitey Herzog’s Cardinals won with defense and speed playing 3 CF’s in he spacious outfield in St. Louis, how come everyone in MLB didn’t try to do the same thing?
That is the nice thing about being an MLB fan. You don’t have much of the copycatting one finds in the NFL.
Totally agree. We hear this stuff every year. There is no single correct way to build a baseball team.
As a Braves fan, I would LOVE to see Joe Maddon replace Fredi Gonzalez. But, I’d also love to not see Fredi Gonzalez in a Braves uniform.
Also of note for the Rays:
Their franchise player (Longoria) had a really bad year at a fairly young age.
Their best young starter (Moore) had TJS.
Their best young player who they sold out for (Myers) broke his wrist.
One of their other cornerstone young players (Jennings) had a blah year.
Also, Hellickson and Cobb saw extended trips to the DL and they had to deal with the whole David Price saga.
I think that was their main issue, not what Bill Madden woke up from his 25 year slumber and saw.
Everyone is looking for the right formula but as we see with Tampa you can’t win trying to develop all your team through prospects. Teams need to use all their resources to build a team that wins. Pitching is the most important aspect of a winning team and yet is the most unpredictable. Once the team gets into the playoffs the outcome is Outlier. These tournaments at the end of the year are money maker and have little to do with the best teams playing.
It’s terrific the Royals have had the year they have had-good for their fans, and good for baseball. But Madden is just off the mark here. There is no one business model that’s a guarantee of success, so the best organizations adapt to their circumstances, size of market, and the resources they have in the their farm system. Baseball is awash in money, and money is going to find a way to be spent. The CBA affords mechanisms for lower revenue and lower performing teams to obtain high draft picks, which also creates some aberrant results, like the cardinals getting competitive balance picks and the red sox earning high draft picks for finishing last twice in three years (sandwiched around a WS win.) There are a lot of ways to win, and the trick is to build a sustainable model for success.
Four hitters that got more than 100 PA were drafted by the Rays when they went to the World Series in 2008:
Longoria, Upton, Crawford, Riggans
Other players to get more than 100 PA:
Pena (FA), Iwamura (IFA), Navarro (Trade), Hinske (NRI), Gross, Bartlett (Trade), Zobrist (Trade), Aybar (Trade), Floyd (FA)
Amongst pitchers, Shields (215 IP), Sonnanstine (193.1 IP), and Hammel (78.1 IP) pitched more than 20 innings and were drafted by the Rays. Sonny had the 2nd highest WAR at 3.7 trailing only Shields.
That’s a total of seven homegrown players on a team that went to the world series.
What about Kiermaier?
One of the big issues was I think Friedman got a bit too much credit when you figure they had the number one overall pick in the draft for like 20+ years. When they were founded as an expansion team they even got additional supplemental number one picks the first year or 2. I’d imagine any team would have at least some bit of success with the ability to draft the number one overall talent for what was almost 2 straight decades. Had they hit on all of them that’d be 20 out of 25 on their mlb roster would have been number 1 overall picks. Freeman missed on quite a few when you look back, and I assume even casual fans would have been able to realize David price should be picked 1st his draft year so there wasn’t much skill there; though there didn’t seem to be much skill trading him for middling yuck players to Detroit.