DrungoHazewood

Of course you're not going to find that quote. What probably happened was that either the Angelos Brothers said they wouldn't pay the arb salary, or more likely Elias decided that he would rather have $8-10M freed up for his 2020 budget for whatever purpose, than pay Villar for a few extra wins in what was almost certainly a 50-something win season.

Apparently. If he was almost 27 in low A he'd be no prospect whatsoever. Essentially there's no one over 23, 24 in low A.

Such is life. I don't know if I can handle a team that wins all the time anyway. Too much staying up until 1 am watching five hour playoff games.

Anything is possible. Don't you like this path better than the one that traded Davies and Hader? Even that one got us best record in the division for five years.

He just turned 23. But he's not young for his level. If not for COVID he'd have at least started the year in high A.

We're 20 months into at least a 3-4 year project. The wins will come.

Yea, I don't remember that either.

Yea, it's a fairly low level risk with little downside. But it won't work out a lot of the time.

"huge power and scary strikeouts." I wonder if there's anyone who ever cut their strikeout rate from low-A to the majors. Conine almost has to, unless he's going to have a .430 BABIP.

The problem is that they've rarely been in a rebuild, they've always been trying to retool with a bad farm system and a middling payroll and almost no international activity. Rebuild in 1985 was sign Lee Lacy and Fred Lynn so they could celebrate their 36th birthdays on the DL. Rebuild in 1996 was to ride OPACY sellouts to sign a bunch of 33-year-old free agents for a couple of nice runs followed up by the collapse of one of the oldest teams in MLB history. Rebuild in 2005 was mostly patching together Millars and Jamie Walkers and Jay Paytons and telling everyone Luis Matos and Daniel Cabrera were the next big things. They never picked a direction and drove towards it. It was always we'll draft better next time, and we'll sign Mark Teixeira and Prince Fielder, or we'll tell all the minor leaguers to take the first pitch since Moneyball was all about walking, and the cavalry will be here any day, just as soon as one of them can get through three starts at Norfolk without imploding. The Orioles were a mess for 30 years because they had no organizational philosophy, they were always behind in advancements, and they were always penny pinching everywhere except MLB payroll, where they did just enough to claim they weren't the Rays or the Marlins. The team under Mike Elias has a clearer vision of where they want to go and how they're going to get there than any Orioles team since Earl was the manager.

I guess. Could he have gotten a slightly better return (i.e. a grade C prospect instead of D) if he hadn't signaled a willingness to non-tender him? Sure, I guess. But the difference is way down in the noise. This is a deal that is low on the overall impact scale. Essentially no bearing on the makeup of the next good O's team.

Problem is that Villar was bringing tens of fans to the stadium every day, he cost $millions and his contract expired long before the team could plausibly be relevant. The only effective way to increase customer interest and revenue is to build an organization that wins consistently.

I'm not sure they gave up anything meaningful. Conine is in low A and strikes out 50% more than the highest strikeout guys in the majors did at that level.

I'd like to hear a scout's perspective, because I think it's highly unlikely that a guy who has Chris Davis' strikeout rate in low-A is going to make enough contact to do anything at the major league level. When Davis was in low A he struck out 23% of the time, and he was a year younger than Conine who struck out 36%. Mark Reynolds struck out 23% of the time in low A. Ronald Acuna led the majors in Ks last year, when he was in the Sally League he was 18(!) and struck out just 28 times in 171 PAs. Eugenio Suarez was 2nd, he struck out 19% of the time in low A at 20. Conine is going to make Russell Branyan look like Hanser Alberto.

Is Conine really a high quality prospect? He struck out 36% of the time in low A ball. When Ryan Mountcastle was in low A he was two years younger and struck out 19% of the time, and plate discipline is his biggest weakness.

That's your choice, but you are putting on blinders to a primary consideration in most transactions. There are many, many trades where the money is all that matters, at least one of the teams involved doesn't really care at all about the production outside the context of how much that costs.

I think that was a risky strategy if that was the end goal, because Milone's past 3-4 years were not good. If he'd had a couple more poor starts for the Os they likely get nothing for him.

I completely agree that characterizing him as a 1/2 win player is an exaggeration, but not as ridiculous as saying that Elias' trade of Villar was one of the worst trades in history. Villar was a little better than average player who was due nearly $10M in arb for a team that was going to go 55-107. It was perfectly reasonable to dump his salary, and just as reasonable to expect opposing teams to have little incentive to offer up much in return for a guy who might be non-tendered.

That's not too surprising.

Six more hours of hypothetically contending in 2020 while subtracting $10M from the budget.

Well of course it is. You said you agreed 100% with the statement that the Villar deal was one of the worst trades in history. It was trading two hypothetical wins for likely zero. There have to be 100 more consequential trades every year for the past century.

C'mon, you're not helping our case. Villar's first full year in the majors was 2016. From then through 2019 he was worth over two wins a season, including a 3.0 and 4.0. He's a solid, average-plus player.

Strategies for teams with $650M in annual revenues may not be the same as those for teams with $250M. We better hope they're different, or we're counting on the Orioles being $400M smarter than the Yanks using the same tactics and strategies.

If you average his position and yours you get pretty close to the truth.

I saw an article the other day saying that he'd been "out of organized baseball" for most of the past decade. That's not true, unless you don't count the Mexican League or the various Latin American Winter leagues as not organized. But he looks like one of those Willis Otanez types that I love, guys who play on 33 teams in their careers. You can imagine them playing because they really like baseball and the stadiums and the crowds and the life, even if the reality is that's just a better option than working odd jobs wherever he came from. In a world of Ricky Vaughns you need the occasional Eddie Harris.