Tony-OH

Let's hope Fangraphs is as accurate as they've been over the last two seasons with their preseason "predictions" for the Orioles and their players. Nothing to be concerned about in my opinion.

Would you say Urias has enough arm for 3B? Because they have almost identical numbers for arm strength. Rk. Player Team 3B Throws Max Overall 2B/SS/3B OF 1B 2B 3B SS LF CF RF 1 Gunnar Henderson 188 95.8 90.2 90.2 -- -- -- 91.4 89.2 -- -- -- 2 Ramón Urías 207 84.4 79.6 79.6 -- -- -- 80.2 -- -- -- -- 3 Jordan Westburg 59 84.5 80.2 80.2 -- -- 76.1 -- -- -- -- -- Now, I would argue that both have well below average arms for 3B but Westburg has much better range and quickness. I'm not most realize how bad Urias was last year defensively as he took a major step backwards range wise and he doesn't have the arm to make up for it. Westburg probably fits best at 2B at wise, but he was actually a bit better at 3B than 2B last year in regards to OAA (2 OAA for 3B to -1 OAA for 2B). If both he and Ortiz are still in the org come opening day, I could see Westburg at 3B and Ortiz at 2B, especially if they decide to keep Holliday at AAA for a bit longer and they want to really work on Mayo in RF as speculated by Roch. I don't see Urias having a role on this team next year and I still don't understand why he was tendered.

Yep.. I'll fix, thanks.

Of course B or C didn't exactly work out. (see also: Flaherty).

They still have some time though. They are most likely going to hold out until they think one of the teams who gave them the best offer goes to plan B or until they close in on spring training.

Actually, I think this offseason will help answer that as well. If he thought he had the budget to do so, I would have imagined Elias would have been more aggressive with going Eduardo Rodriguez. I think Elias understand the budgetary limitations under the John Angelos-led ownership and that's why he is hesitant to move prospects. He knows he can't buy his way out of mistakes or injuries to key players so he needs depth. Which honestly, makes sense, but if there was mistake made, it was going after so many hitters in the first five rounds of the draft vice more pitchers over his first four drafts. I agree with you that Cease is NOT the guy you give up a Basallo or Mayo for because there is no guarantee with him. Personally, I'd like to see him do something creative like perhaps move a Norby/Stowers/Baumann/Zimmerman type prospects/players for maybe a lower level pitching prospect with upside if they can't get a Cease-level starter.

I think the wall did that though in getting both Lyles and to a better extent Gibson to sign here on relatively cheap one year deals. Neither probably sign here to rebuild their value if it's the bandbox that is was. Personally I think Elias is financially restrained from going after top free agent talent that require 3 or more years. In his comments to the press last year, John Angelos certainly not give any indication he was willing to open up the checking account to get premium free agent starting pitching. Heck, he was talking about raising ticket prices just to try ad keep our current young talent as they get more expensive.

So two years in a row of not trading for an impact starter/player despite having multiple major league ready prospects with no where to play doesn't tell you anything? Now perhaps I should have added "under the current ownership" to be more clear. I do agree with that how Elias operates is affected by his budget, and part of why he doesn't just go "all in" on a player who he may perceive as being too "expensive" when it coms to the amount of prospects he has to give up to acquire them. One other thing I'd like to add is that Elias has changed a bit in some of his philosophies. Without a doubt Elias had a draft the bats, acquire the arms philosophy through his first 4 drafts, but last year was a change in going after higher upside arms earlier in the draft. Now he still hasn't taken a 1st round pitcher, but he did show the ability adjust his strategies once he has more data.

That's a good point and something I'm sure Elias is thinking about. At the trading deadline Elias will have a better understanding of what he needs for a long playoff push. If Cease is going to cost him a Mayo or Basallo now, no thanks. If Cease returns back to Cy Young Cease this year and the orioles need that TOR, then perhaps, and I only say perhaps, Elias considers moving one of them then.

I agree with this. Personally, I think Elias is in a high stakes Texas Holdem poker game with the White Sox and the turn card has still yet to be flipped. The White Sox have no real incentive to move Cease right now so why not let the GMs percolate more and more. If I'm the White Sox, I'm probably holding out for Mayo or Basallo right now, and if that's the current cost of Cease then I understand Elias holding off. As spring training gets closer and closer, the pressure on the White Sox to take the best deal they can get will go up. It's makes no sense to keep Cease since they won't be competing for a few years at the very least, so they need a package of players that will help them rebuild. They need a SS and 2B, but they also have several top prospects in their system like Colson Montgomery, Jacob Gonzalez and José Rodríguez who could fit that bill so Ortiz and/or Westburg doesn't make a lot of sense for them. So really what they need are corner outfielders and a catcher. That would seem to mean the Orioles need to entice them with players like Kjerstad, Cowser, Beavers or Horvath and then probably have to throw in Povich or McDermott or maybe even Tyler Wells to get it done. That's assuming the orioles are not making Basallo and Mayo available. I'll be honest, I like Cease, but I'm not trading either one of those guys for him. There's still time here and probably why Elias is starting to chatter with Houston about Valdez.

We all know Elias has absolutely done a fantastic job in rebuilding this organization from the ground up. With the Orioles coming off a 101-win season but a sweep in the playoffs to a white hot Rangers team, Elias knows this team needs one more legitimate veteran starting pitcher. We also know that Elias now has a lot of depth in the upper minor leagues with major league ready prospects. They are literally backed up with Connor Norby (2B/LF), Colton Cowser (RF/LF/CF), Heston Kjerstad (RF/DH), Joey Ortiz (SS/2B/3B), Kyle Stowers (RF/DH) all with 330 or more AAA PAs with success. Coby Mayo (267 PAs, 3B/1B/RF) and Jackson Holliday (2B/SS) are also pretty close or ready despite less AAA PAs. So with this in mind, if Elias is unable or unwilling to part with his prospect depth for this needed starting pitcher, it will tell us how he wants to build teams. We've heard the stories of Sig Mejdal wanting to hoard prospects, and hoard them Elias has done so far trading only Darell Hernaiz (who was a #15-#20 level prospect in the org) out of his top 30 prospects. After winning 101 games last year, he may look at his current options and feel decent, especially after he won 101 games with them minus Kyle Gibson (who did win 15-games). Now he barely got anything from John Means last year so he may be thinking he's the Gibson replacement. That could be true, but Means made all of four starts last year before getting shut down for the season with left elbow pain after coming off Tommy John. Means will be 31-years old next year and it's unknown really what he will be able to provide. So going into 2024, he can pencil in Kyle Bradish, Grayson Rodriguez, and Dean Kramer into his rotation. If you want to pencil in Means, then fine, that's 4 guys. That leaves Tyler Wells (who has never pitched more than 119.1 innings in any professional season) and Cole Irvin in the battle for the 5th starter. Chayce McDermott and Cade Povich are the AAA depth starters that could weigh in at some point as well. Maybe he believes that's enough depth if he can't get the right deal for a starter like Cease or Valdez. Maybe he's right, I don't know, but what we will know if he doesn't make any significant trades is that he values prospect depth more than he values trading for legitimate major league veteran players. The Orioles did win 101 games last year after an offseason that seemed disappointing at the time. I have little doubt that Elias knows more about building his team than I do, so I'm not saying he's wrong or not, but I do think we will know more about how he plans to build his team each year after this offseason. He has the prospects, he has his needs, and now we will see what he does to set up his 2024 squad to be a legitimate World Series contender.

Well, I've said for awhile that I would try him in RF before first base so I'm glad Roch must've heard something. I'm not sure why he was not playing some last year honestly. First base would be a waste of his arm and he runs well enough to play RF in Camden Yards. Now I still think he can play 3B well enough that his bat will make up for any defensive shortcomings, but if he could become an average right fielder, that arm will be special out there.

I have little doubt he's working on his defense. He's too hard of a worker overall to not try and get the most out of himself.

You can never have too many AAA quality catchers.

Everything, and I mean everything oozes that Mayo is going to be a special player. His jump in plate discipline last year, especially once he adjusted to AAA pitching was the payoff for his hard work. He really puts in the work to be the best that he's going to be. He's such a smart hitter up there to go with all of his tools.

Nothing wrong with adding AAA depth. If one does well and provides value, then great!

The 2020 COVID season really had a lot to do with his availability since teams couldn't see him very much. I think if his season plays out he would have flown up the boards and more teams would have been willing to take a chance on him and his price tag. Here's what I wrote after he was drafted.

I will say it came on the heels of the Frazier signing so most were already riled up. I believe I noted that his EV and the lack of shift could help him, but I felt he was unneeded and too expensive to sit in AAA. Congrats on O'Hearn for proving us all wrong and Elias and crew right on this one. Not that this is what this thread is about, but his second half numbers last year do give me some pause moving forward this year with him. Still, he's pretty cheap depth to have.

I believe I had them around 85 wins give or take a few wins. Happy to be very wrong.

Thanks. I had a lot of access back then to people like Tony DeMacio, Shawn Pender, Gil Kubski, and Marc Trumata from the scouting side to learn from. Shawn Pender may have taught me more about scouting and the scouting process than anyone else. Of course I also used to spend ungodley amount of hours at minor league parks before and after games, talking with scouts, coaches and executives. I still remember having a conversation about job from the Mets after meeting one of their assistant general managers. Of course I was in my early 30s back then and had a lot more energy and drive and still thought I would one day work in professional baseball. But in the end, it made more sense for my family to stay in the military and finish out the career. But by that time, kids were in private school or college and I couldn't take the financial hit to try and work my way up through the ranks of baseball. Now, organizations like the Orioles want young, cheap, smart guys/gals willing to work ungodly hours for the chance to be involved in baseball operations. It's a completely different world then it was 25 years ago. Now you have to know how to use the metrics and date provided by the exquisite systems now used to access players. everything from their spin rates, to their extensions, to their hip to hand rotations speeds are captured and now scouts are replaced by analysts who put that together into a projected picture. Because we're still talking about humans, it's not perfect by any means, but I think we will see a lot less misses in the upper portions of drafts like we used to see. I mean think about scouting before the internet or computers. It's almost amazing that outside of the obvious talents (that still ended up missing a lot) that teams found players, especially in high school where it was word of mouth or scouts connected to their local high school coaches network that keyed them in on talent. The teams with the most scouts back then typically were the teams that did better in the draft because they could see more players. Now top high school players go to showcases where they are seen and accessed by every team and I believe most DIV1 programs have trackman and/or rapsodo collecting data on players. The one thing we can say since Elias got here is that the Orioles don't seem to completely swing and miss on a top 5 selection. In other words, they at least have some minor league success vs flaming out in rookie ball or Low-A. Sure, there are misses like Servideo (2020 draft plus injury) and Watson, but both did make it to AA. A lot of that is the data they have before making the selections and of course the quality of their analysis of that data.

You are trying to pick a fight where there is no fight to pick. I even said that the 1999 draft was pretty weak overall, especially in the 1st round where if you take away the big performers, you get a lot of misses. I'm not really sure why you seem to want to play contrarian (something you love to do with me which is fine) when we are not disagreeing. I even broke down each draft pick explaining two were injury washes. Sure, he could have selected Jennings instead of Paradise or Rios, but that's nit picking and can be done in any draft. However, I'm not going to say it was a good 1st round for DeMacio because he had 7 chances to take good talent and ended up with Roberts.

While you numbers are correct, I think this analysis is missing a lot of context by just going with overall WAR and averages. Let's face it, Brian Roberts made up almost all of that WAR for the Orioles in the first round (taking all the supplemental picks into consideration). At the end of the day, DeMacio and his scouts only hit on one of seven selections, two if you want to lower the bar for a "hit" to include Bigbie's one decent year. I will say hitting on Roberts and Bedard in a draft overall made it a decent draft for DeMacio, and if he didn't have 7 "1st" round selections, you probably would be very happy with the draft overall. The Orioles certainly had much worse drafts than 1999 though. Heck you can go back to the 1970's and 80s draft and they were mostly absolutely awful.

Actually we had Tony DeMacio making picks, not Thrift. While DeMacio and his scouts certainly whiffed way more than they hit with those picks (Brian Roberts the last of the 7 being the only hit), this was under a system that did not have slot bonus amounts and I was told DeMacio had to make several of the picks due to signability vs talent. Plus, the 1999 draft was not a strong one overall. Picks #3-#8 saw just two players make the major leagues and they put up a combined -1 WAR at the major league level. DeMacio whiffed on Mike Paradis (#13), but when you look at the picks behind him for college pitchers, he really only missed on Jason Jennings (11.9 WAR) who was selected #16. Alex Rios (27.3 WAR, #19, who also signed for the least amount of money of anyone within the first 37 picks at $845K) was the biggest miss for him since he took both Paradis and Richard Stahl ahead of him. As for Stahl, I don't consider him a whiff per se, because he's an injury cause miss. Stahl had a mid-90s fastball and some good offspeed pitches, but back problems ended his career unfortunately for him and the Orioles. Larry Bigbie looked like a pretty safe pick when he was selected and did put up a nice year in 2004 at the major league level before some injuries and lack of power limited his career. Keith Reed had upside tools, and was a bit of a lottery ticket that did not pay off. He may have become a better player in a better organization. LHP Josh Cenate's career was ended by a torn labrum in his left shoulder after his first season so he's similar to Stahl. And then you have Scott Rice who was the youngest player drafted and did eventually make the major leagues as a situational lefty. We also have to remember that DeMacio and all of the other scouting directors did not have the luxury of having rapsodo and other technologies that they use now at showcases for high school players and with data they get from college games. They also bring players into pre draft camps and can run them through these systems giving them a leg up on identifying talent better than the old school way of having scouts put eyes on them only. I'm not taking anything away from Elias and his crew because they use the technologies to their advantage, just that it was much different back in 1999 when Demacio had all those picks.

I agree that you can certainly build a case for Adley to be the best of the group and still should be the #1 overall due to all of the things you mentioned here. But, I'm just saying that if I could only have one of them right now, and thankfully we don't have to make this decision, I'm going to take Henderson because I think his upside is a little higher especially with Adley's offense leveling a bit (but still very good). Adley absolutely has been a huge part of the organization's turn around and I would never want down grade his impact, but Henderson is three years younger and his ceiling is as high as anyone's in the system while playing a premium defensive position.

At some point, Elias is going to need to need to focus on what's best for the team in 2024. He certainly does not want to just give top prospects away, but prospects are commodities that should ultimately be used to win baseball games at the major league level for the Orioles. Whether that be while wearing an Orioles uniform or traded for a player that helps them. I think we all agree the Orioles should be a World Series contenders going into this season. Adding a Cease or Valdez certainly helps those chances by added needed depth at the top of the starting rotation. I feel like they are going to have to give up a Cowser or Kjerstad in those deals and if Povich has to be included, I'd be willing to do that.