Quick Hits: Kevin Cash, Orioles

Good news Rays fans, Kevin Cash is rising the ranks, up to 9th from 15th on nbcsports.com’s list of most handsome managers, per Mark Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times. Apparently winning agrees with him. There’s not much action around the league here on the morning of Christmas Eve, clearly, but MLBTR will be here throughout the holiday season to keep your baseball appetite sated. For now, let’s check in with the Baltimore Orioles…

• It’s a slow burn offseason for the Orioles and new decision-maker Mike Elias, writes Roch Kubatko of MASNsports.com. The new Executive VP and GM has tempered expectations since taking over last month, but even after checking the first box on his to-do list in bringing new manager Brandon Hyde over from the Cubs, player acquisition remains on the backburner. Given that Elias wasn’t installed until the offseason was already underway, it’s a good sign that Baltimore seems focused on the organizational recalibration of a new regime. The work of installing new operations and philosophies organization-wide isn’t sexy work, and it doesn’t produce much fodder to keep fans interested, but as Kubatko notes, it’s more pressing than roster construction at this juncture for the Orioles.
• That said, the additions they have made aren’t wholly irrelevant, not for a team likely to give extended tryouts to younger players at the major league level: Richie Martin, 24, is a former first rounder who hit .300 his second time through Double A last season, Drew Jackson, 25, spiked his power output to .196 ISO as he, too, repeated Double A, and Rio Ruiz, 24, has struggled at the major league level, but he’s also a known commodity for Elias, who drafted him with the first pick in the fourth round in his first season in Houston. Granted, there’s always a little smoke and mirrors when a player’s production jumps the second time through a level, and in Ruiz’s case, it’s hard to tell the difference between familiarity as a positive and sentimentality. Still, though it may not seem like much, some of Theo Epstein’s first moves in Chicago were taking Hector Rondon in the Rule 5 draft and trading for a player he’d previously drafted who had struggled to that point in the big leagues. That’s not to say Ruiz will turn into Anthony Rizzo – Rizzo was a highly touted prospect prior to his struggles in San Diego whereas Ruiz was a waiver claim – but these minor moves always have the potential to snowball into something more, and they’re the right kind of gambles for Elias and his team to be making barely a month into their Baltimore tenure.