We Means It, Maaaaaan: The Baltimore Orioles of 2021

the best reason i've heard for keeping him down is that anyone on a 40-man will be locked out for at least part of 2022 (probably), and it makes more sense to have your big prospects getting reps in AAA than sitting at home.

also if he was brought up it would make the team better when we're only 1.5 back of the dbacks and i WANT THAT PICK IT'S ALL I HAVE TO LIVE FOR

What, so you can once again have the thrill of hearing analysis say "weird, I thought that guy would go at 10-12, must have something to do with underslot issues"

As Matt Harvey turns back into Matt Harvey.

What, so you can once again have the thrill of hearing analysis say "weird, I thought that guy would go at 10-12, must have something to do with underslot issues"

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Monday, August 16, 2021 7:59 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

they took adley at 1, i have faith they'd do it again if there's an undeniable player there, and by all accounts there will be

adley is a college guy and now 23 years old; when they drafted him in 2019 *lots* of ppl were all like 'he could play for the big league team right now'. he didn't really hit like it that summer, okay.

so now he's spent 2020 at the alternate site. and he's put up a .400 OPB in the minors this year. and admittedly pedro severino is eminently serviceable and practically a star in this lineup.

but the team is terrible and adley -- tHe ToP pRoSpEcT iN bAsEbAlL -- is learning *nothing* in the minors while the o's stall his clock. maybe he'll get there next april 16th when he's 24 i guess.

with a different, less shitty team he'd have been in the majors a year ago, and there's no reason we shouldn't all want that.

rodriguez is only 21 but he's fanning like 15 per nine innings now in double-a. can he possibly be worse than the shit they regularly roll out? do we not want to see the best available players playing in the majors?

also sucks for cedric that he's not even eligible for arbitration until after *next* year -- he'll probably get a $10K raise to $600K after putting up 5 WAR this season. (and if he were eligible for arbitration *this* winter you know goddamn well he'd have been traded at the deadline)

anyway sorry -- the o's are just the most egregious current example of how fucked up the entire system is. the pirates/marlins/etc are little better if perhaps less blatant.

i really hope it all burns down this winter!

Seriously, fuck this

Why Not? '22

two homers off ohtani in the first!!!1!

won a game

what a moment

break em up

love this team again now

as cedric mullins goes, so go the orioles...but keegan akin w/ the out of the blue gem. what? 71 gamescore!

lol wasn’t he like 0-9 with an 8 ERA or something

Keegan Akin's last three starts: 17 IP, 5ER, 10H, 8BB, 14K, lift your head and breathe the fresh replacement-level air

aww

with two w's for Keegans two wins (so far!)

...and a happy john means to all who celebrate

big series win in da bronx

Keegan Akin Can't Lose

akin to be

you gotta hand it to hanser alberto

but then hanser is compelled to hand it back to cedric mullins

"zac lowther with a great outing lowers his season ERA to 6.91" is a thing Orioles fans say

Manny Barreda gets his moment

what a day

what a day

"zac lowther with a rough outing sees his season ERA tick back up to 9.92" is a thing Orioles fans say

Ugh. A game we should have won. Bullpen troubles.

seems crazy that cedric mullins is the first o ever to have a 30-30 season. maybe don baylor got closest?

It was pitching defense and the 3 run homer not pitching defense and the 30 stolen bases

fucking fleas.

In a fitting homage to classic Orioles baseball Mullins did indeed reach 30-30 with a 3-run homer

maybe don baylor got closest?

Thanks to Play Index I can tell you that the closest is Reggie Jackson in 1976, 27 HR and 28 SB. Baylor is the only other guy to get to 25/25. We are not counting Ken Williams, a 30-30 man for the 1922 St. Louis Browns.

most steals he ever had in a season...crazy how many bases that team stole for a weaver team. can't imagine ever sending belanger for how infrequently he got on base.

Thinking next year's thread title should be something along the lines of "Mullin it over: J.Q. and Eephus discuss whether or not the 2022 Orioles will be any good"

Like I don't even exist

lol

This is important context: The first time that a Baltimore season ticket holder renews for next season, that person will have committed more dollars to the 2022 Orioles than the club will have in payroll obligations. https://t.co/CvSX9kis1i

— Buster Olney (@Buster_ESPN) September 24, 2021

if only chris davis didn't retire

The quote tweets on that tweet are kind of insane. I'm an Orioles fan, and I will stay an Orioles fan through it all, but I cannot grasp the level of stannage required to spend your day bashing Buster Olney for stating the obvious fact that the Orioles are not trying to put a major league baseball team on the field. Like, it's a rebuild, I get it, but how can you be so in the tank that you insist THIS is the exact rebuild you want? Have these people not noticed that the 2017-21 Astros are not the only good team in the league, and all the other good teams didn't tank like this?

this isn't the exact rebuild i want... that one would involve us having a presence in latin america before like yesterday... but i'm extremely happy with how it's going

i latched onto orioles baseball in 2005 and had to wait 7 years for a winning team, after 7 consecutive years of never fully committing to a rebuild. imagine if i'd latched on in 1998. i never wanna go back there again. can't handle it. absolutely give me one more #1 draft pick before we start to improve. and i think we will improve next year, faster than people think. i don't doubt that the team will spend money again like they did 5 years ago. part of me wants them to sign one of the big shortstops, like the padres signing machado before they were good, but i can understand the windows not really aligning. maybe it isn't worth it to sign carlos correa and potentially waste his age 28 and 29 seasons.

one thing i do wish we were doing is spending money to tank better. i think that's really all a salary floor will do. take costlier chances on players that can be spun at the deadline. take a chance on trying to fix a robbie ray instead of a matt harvey. take on bad contracts from other teams in exchange for their prospects. but no one really does that.

and barring us obtaining the smartest FO on the planet (TB), i don't think it's actually possible to compete in the AL East without tanking. not without preexisting latin american talent or a lot of money. congrats to the giants for overcoming the dodgers without tanking but can you really count on that happening reliably? they still had four consecutive seasons losing seasons before this one and might go right back to it next year.

not to mention we don't have the rockies or dbacks or second half padres to rip apart. us vs the world babey. adley will take us there

i don't think it's actually possible to compete in the AL East without tanking. not without preexisting latin american talent or a lot of money.

What would you say the Rays are doing?

By the way I am an optimist too. I think the core of a good team DOES exist in the system now, if management is willing to spend around it. But I think we would have been in the same place with the rebuild if we'd been losing 90 games a year instead of 110 games a year, and it would have been less embarrassing. There is one guy, Rutschman, we truly got as a direct result of the ultra-tank, and that took one year of being horrible. Is the core of the next good team Heston Kjerstad and Colton Cowser? Or the guys we got in trade for our entire major league roster like Dillon Tate and Yusniel Diaz and Dean Kremer. Seems more like besides Rutschman it's John Means, Ryan Mountcastle, Cedric Mullins, Austin Hays, Grayson Rodriguez (drafted after 2017 when we were bad but not on purpose), maybe Keegan Akin if the second-half form is real... all guys we'd have even if we hadn't been running so much Pat Valaika and Richie Martin out there day after day after day.

What would you say the Rays are doing?

that was the first thing i said. they're the smartest FO in baseball. i'd like to have them as an FO, but that's not possible right now. "preexisting latin american talent" also applies to them.

but also.... even though they didn't outright tank, they had 4 sub-.500 years in a row not that long ago. i get annoyed with the "they've figured out how to compete every year" meme. also while we're on the subject of embarrassment, i'd be embarrassed if the orioles traded away every great hypothetical player they develop before they hit arb2! i would hate that.

i also think you're not being fair to kjerstad, who might be great, or cowser, who has been fantastic so far. not to mention coby mayo, who is absolutely hitting top 100 lists next year and was only signed because of that fat #2 slot money saved on kjerstad. don't care about the manny trade busts, they were made by a miserable lame duck GM who was already pretty bad at trades. elias somehow got much better returns for dylan bundy and jose iglesias. i'm counting those.

I would not be in the slightest perturbed if the Orioles had 4 sub-.500 years in a row (I've been a fan since the '80s, how could I be?) What's on the field right now is clearly something different than that!

Kjerstad and Cowser of course could be great! Any top-5 pick COULD be. Most aren't. If I believed Elias was uniquely good at turning high picks into valuable major league players, it might be a different story. Then again, if the Orioles had put a better team on the field, maybe we would have picked 7th in 2020 instead of 2nd and you know what? By all accounts Kjerstad would still have been available!