The Tanking Will Continue Until Morale Improves: the 2022 Baltimore Orioles

Yeah, I don't think there's any doubt Adley's the Opening Day starter if he's not hurt (whether he should have been up last year is a question one can discuss)

i'm really not too worried about the bullpen going forward

I admire your optimism but I look at the bullpen and I'm not seeing the 4-5 decent innings a day we're gonna need with this rotation

i think the innings are somewhere in the system, but we may be subjected to a lot of alexander wells, zac lowther and keegan akin before we land on the right mix.

yeah, i don't mean the current bullpen arms, more that a bunch of our mid-tier starters will end up as decent relievers in the next year or two. i have faith that out of "keegan akin tier" we'll get a handful of good relievers. jorge lopez didn't look bad closing. i think guys like rom and even bradish will end up there and could shine. and fangraphs seems to think hall will end up there and turn into josh hader

it's the rotation i'm worried about

bradish definitely has filthier stuff than the akin tier...boy, those rodriguez highlights from the night, though. mercy.

left forearm tightness for our only good starter

would love for the rotation to get a little more bradish, but i fear this means the imminent return of matt harvey.

kill me. if this doesn't mean bradish and grayson soon.........

Hyde said Means getting second opinions on elbow. Gonna be awhile - to get results and for him to pitch again. Hyde doesn’t know if Means will pitch again in 2022. Said doesn’t expect him back anytime soon #orioles

— Roch Kubatko (@masnRoch) April 16, 2022

On the whole, "everybody in the AL East beats up on us every year, except the Yankees whose season we keep ruining" is about as good as we can hope for right now, so let's keep it coming

will grudgingly accept this outcome. for now...

I support it.

3 out of four wins have been shutouts.

I mean this is about as good as a team scoring under 2 runs a game can be

means is getting tommy john : /

bad news for everyone in the world except matt harvey

https://blogs.fangraphs.com/introducing-the-new-orioles-bullpen/

i am a bit amazed at this team coming into the season with an original plan (setting up middle middle) and implementing it... thought that kind of thing was just for the rays and dodgers and giants

bautista is so fun to watch

it was noted on twitter today that every oriole to play so far this season is at least 25 years old

keeping rodriguez down this long is bullshit but aside from him and adley, who will be up within a few weeks, there is no one in the organization under 25 who is ready to be called up right now. and aside from rodriguez who should've pitched at AAA last year, you can't point to any other prospects and say they were held at any level too long.

and i have no idea what scocca's problem with bruce zimmermann is? am i supposed to be angry at the orioles for tanking for young prospects or angry at them for not giving up on 27 year old former prospects? should i be angry that they stuck with non-prospect cedric mullins while he was experimenting with a new approach and then developed into a player who could star on a playoff team? am i supposed to just be angry at everything the orioles do all the time even when there are positive developments on the 26-man roster that have nothing to do with tanking?

there is no one in the organization under 25 who is ready to be called up right now

The exact point is that that itself is the problem for an organization that has supposedly been rebuilding since 2018.

And nobody has anything against Bruce Zimmerman, Bruce Zimmerman rules, he represents the kind of "find unexpectedly useful guys off the scrap heap" philosophy that the Orioles have always been decently good at (Rodrigo Lopez, Nate McLouth) -- but the idea was meant to be to use those guys in combination with players you could actually expect to be good.

The exact point is that that itself is the problem for an organization that has supposedly been rebuilding since 2018.

i don't really see how that's the case if the prospects are still there? it's just ignoring every bit of context to make a provocative tweet. the covid year didn't help, nor did major injuries/illnesses to hall and kjerstad. i will 100% say that adley should've been up last year (he still would've been injured this year so he still wouldn't be on the team) and rodriguez should've made it to AAA and started this year in the majors. i am currently pretty furious that bradish isn't starting in the majors, though he struggled at AAA last year so i can see why they started him there again. but the rest of the prospects are still there, they're playing at the levels expected of them and being promoted pretty liberally after they come to succeed at said levels.

and santander or hays or mancini should be traded asap to make room for stowers, but then the scoccas of the world would just tweet about the bad tanking team recommitting to an endless death spiral by trading away actual major leaguers in their arb years.

everyone knows where this team started when elias actually came in. zero analytics, zero international signings, one of the worst farms in the league, an expensive go-nowhere major league team that was 2 years past any hope of being a couple FA signings away from competing again. prospective GM brady anderson. this was never going to be a rebuild like the jays or braves or tigers or white sox or padres who all started light years ahead of where this team was. there was never any sensible reason to think this team would be able to follow that sort of a timeline.

>when elias actually came in. zero analytics, zero international signings,

did not realize it was this bad. i remember about 8 years ago they were so good for a team that looked just okay-ish on paper. i just assumed they knew what they were doing behind the scenes

it was a team that combined a group of great players amassed by the previous regime with a GM that was almost supernaturally good at supplementing those players with random guys he found. there were almost never any holes on the roster.

it was also a team that sacrificed its 2016 first round draft pick for yovani gallardo

re: baby birds

would love to see stowers up sooner rather than later, dl hall will probably debut this year...a lot of people like drew rom and i'm also curious how quickly they'll move prieto and cowser.

...also think they'll give akin, wells, lowther and kremer (once healthy) a few chances to sink or swim. don't know what the leash is like for gutierrez. owings probably not long for this world.

psyched bradish is getting the call tonight. hope he gets an extended look.

Bradish certainly earned the extended look.

Walk-off unearned run on a terrible bunt!

Enjoying the Orioles playing like an ordinary bad team instead of a historically bad team!

orioles hitters in may (admittedly only eight games all at home and mostly against mediocre teams, but still): .293/.343/.448

that's v. good!

pitching is also above average but they're not getting a lot of strikeouts (relatively speaking)

Kyle Bradish is!

honestly whenever i encounter his name i start imagining (you know, if he were a yankee, or a hitter) what kind of home run call john sterling would give him

yesterday i went to opacy for the first time since the pandemic. nice to see big felix in action and a walkoff earl weaver special in the much ballyhooed left field extension.

Dang lucky you being at that game -- how was turnout?

Sounds like no Adley today, booooooooo

turn out was good! 23K paid.

happy adley day, friends.

much excited

i like the new era

Nice comeback tonight, down 6 in the 7th at Fenway, end up winning by 4.

Heck of a night for Tyler Wells!

This game is going well but that moment where it's up to McKenna and Owings to get the runs in is kinda hard to take

Grayson Rodriguez has been diagnosed with a Grade 2 right lat strain, Mike Elias said this morning, which likely won't pin him to a return to action until September.

Elias wouldn't rule anything out, but focus is on Opening Day 2023. There's a chance Rodriguez is done for '22.

— Zachary Silver (@zachsilver) June 5, 2022

Not feeling the morale improve tbh

should probably tank for a bit longer

This sucks but I don't see any reason this would have been any less likely to happen if he were in Baltimore.

Anyway, I definitely think morale is improving!

xp true, but he’d be getting paid and accruing service time

elias is no doubt secretly thrilled

Yes, good point, I was thinking about "to what extent does this timing suck for the Orioles" but the extent to which it sucks for GR himself is much greater

Maybe the DL Hall call-up comes earlier now, I dunno

yeah but this series really just felt like the clock struck midnight. and i think the bullpen just has to be too taxed to get through the like 20 straight games left to play.

this offseason is going to be very interesting. i'm not really sure how elias is going to handle it, and i don't envy him. this team is in such a weird position relative to the normal tank/rebuild cycle, because so much of the value this year has come from young, cost-controlled guys that weren't major prospects and don't have all-star ceilings. hays, santander, urias, mateo... and probably mullins and mountcastle at this point. all solid players who deserve full-time major league spots (and there's no obvious platoon splits either aside from maybe mullins), only one older than 27 (urias, 28)

this team's main quality is its depth. adley's the only guy you can confidently project to be a 4 win player going forward, but nearly every position has contributed solid value, even the starters. the only real hole has been 2B. and backup catcher i guess. there'd be a lot more room for improvement if those wins were distributed more unevenly.

and this is an organization that still has a lot of good hitting prospects in AA and AAA - guys with higher ceilings than a lot of the big contributors this year. cowser, westburg, norby, ortiz, mayo are all potential impact guys who could be up by the ASB. stowers and vavra are already in the majors struggling to find ABs. gunnar doesn't even have a set position.

obviously some guys are going to get traded, but how often do you see full-tank teams start to trade top-100 minor league talent (i do think those AA/AAA guys are all top 100 except westburg, maybe mayo who still wouldn't be far off) when only 2 major prospects have been promoted? you have to give other prospects a chance to figure it out, there's too much potential there.

i think there's a very good chance next year's team is worse than this year's team as the solid 1.5-3 win players are replaced with struggling rookies. and even if we get a full year of rodriguez, the return of means, and trade for/sign better starters, there's still less room for improvement after voth/kremer/wells all came out of nowhere to pitch well.

anyway, i'm sure some major leaguers and minor leaguers are going to be traded. it's just going to be nutso to see how it all shakes out. there's so much depth and not a lot of room. looking at the 14-17 astros, not an easy comparison - those offenses were deep, but the solid non-prospect contributors were older soon-to-be FAs, not difficult guys to cut bait on.

also a lot of the improvement this year came from the bullpen and defense, which aren't very reliable year to year. idk, i really don't have much hope in next season i guess.

also i'll say this here because i can't say it anywhere else, but if elias does trade santander, mateo and urias to bring up prospects this team will be blindingly white. he drafts like marge schott.

it's possible i'm just not used to having this much talent in the high minors at once

A smalll step back next year wouldn’t surprise me. Let the young guys calibrate to the majors and focus on plugging holes with low-risk free agents in 2023 - then spend in earnest for 2024 on free agents and maybe dealing away some of the prospects in the lower minors for major league talent.

I get you from a tactical perspective but boy I would be sad to see santander and especially mateo go

that'll do it

just a real crap time for the bats to go frio.

almost back to back CGs. so close to a maddux for bradish! granted he was working with the world's biggest strike zone

who needs bats, let's just have complete game shutouts and an occasional hit by Rougned Odor

bradish notched a 90 game score last night, fwiw.

what in the world

does mike elias have something on astros hitters? are our pitchers doing some sort of reverse trash can magic to throw the right pitch every time?

The Jays are doing their hapless thing, so do not abandon hope.

imagine if we didn't lose 2 to the tigers lol

xp seems more likely that the Mariners manage to collapse despite their incredibly easy schedule and extend the playoff drought

ugh, that game might have been the death blow, but what can you do, you can't count on sweeping the astros

Bradish is absolutely baffling to me.

This game.

so, after that crazy summer push, feels like a bit of a let down to not nab the third wc spot, but locking in at least .500 season and hanging in the playoff race through september is a huge achievement for a team that hasn't had a winning record in five seasons and has lost well over 100 games in three of those seasons. rutschman and henderson look like the real deal.

ramon urias winning a gold glove and jorge mateo winning a fielding bible award were not things i expected out of 2022.

An Orioles fan should start a new thread without "tanking" in the title...If Baltimore goes on to win the World Series, remember to thank the Blue Jays for letting them know once and for all they're really for real (which I'm sure they knew anyway).

There’s literally a 2023 Orioles thread.

Polite as ever, but thanks, didn't know.

And just to set your troubled mind at ease, I did search "Baltimore," but not Orioles. I tried, I really tried.

lol not really