We Means It, Maaaaaan: The Baltimore Orioles of 2021

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!

But the slot money wouldn't have been there to get Mayo and Baumler... I know everyone hates the underslot strategy but it really makes a lot of sense given the deranged slot value differences at the top of the first round. Pick 2 grants you way more cash to spend than pick 7 even if you don't spend it all on pick 2.

what if you don’t actually want to be granted more cash to spend

so now you're shaming the orioles for NOT spending money.......smh......

man we sacrifice the #1 pick for the good of humanity and the nats can't even finish the job i hate them

good news -- the orioles will not surpass the 1916 philadelphia athletics -- who finished 40 games behind the 76-77 washington senators -- for (what may be??) the biggest gap between last and next-to-last teams

it's not really the same, of course, and the 464-run difference in run differential may be another story