DrungoHazewood

Depends on how narrow you want to make your niche. There might be 12 to 16 people of just the right age in just the right part of Baltimore who get a small twinge of satisfaction when they hear Drungo.

Probably because Elias isn't trying to win some kind of weird inside joke messageboard thing.

Then some poor, deluded kid born in 2010 gets a cool/obscure handle on whatever platform Oriole fans of 2040 congregate on.

If it worked for Don Baylor...

They certainly could. They could almost completely make up for the losses of Bundy and Villar by fielding random .650 or .700-OPSing guys at first and short.

Even though Mancini was worth about three wins last year and would probably be replaced by Mountcastle who OPS'd near .900 at Norfolk and was the IL MVP? I don't think much of MVP trophies, but I doubt he's going to be Chris Davis bad, which is about what it would take to erase five wins from the team.

So? They had their moments. I can enjoy players of that caliber. You should try it.

Projections of 40-something wins are almost always wrong. The Oriole team that won 47 was supposed to win 70 or 80 or something. I think next year's team wins something like 55.

1. He's 28, will be 29 next year. He'll likely fall back a bit due to being past a typical player's peak. 2. He played 162 games last year, after missing 21 and 40 games the prior two. 3. 2017 happened, and he was basically replacement-level. So all in all he'll probably play 140 games, and have around a 97 OPS+ (his career mark). If he does that he'll be worth something approximating what he did in 2018 when he was worth 2.7 wins, but he'll be two years older. So if you made me write a Villar projection in ink for 2020 I'd say about 2.5 wins.

They've probably lost 6-7 wins the last few days. But if they'd stuck with Villar and Bundy and paid them about $15M they'd still have probably lost 2-3 wins.

There have been 55 #4 overall picks. Kevin Gausman, Jeffrey Hammonds, and Dylan Bundy are 16th, 17th, and 18th all time in career value. And Gausman and Bundy still might have a good bit left in their careers. So like most draft picks they've done much better than average among their peers, and are widely thought of as disappointing.

Sure, I guess. Like we watched Jason Johnson and Calvin Maduro and Rick Krivda come up as Orioles, too. I liked them... but didn't really get too upset when they left.

I voted the meh option, but I don't really think they could have gotten much more. You're not going to get a whole lot for Bundy, but you're also not going to win anything in the years Bundy had remaining with the Orioles, and he's not going to push a team towards the playoffs. They traded a guy who was a decent pitcher in 2020 for guys who might help later and are more-or-less costing nothing.

We had no idea who Wojo was in March of last year. We didn't know that Means was even going to be on the team. We didn't know Alberto or Severino or Ruiz. They all had their (sometimes brief) moments of fun. They were as enjoyable as watching Bundy eat 161 innings. There will be more of them next year. We could have the new Pete Stanicek, or Ken Gerhart, or Billy Ripken on our hands. Maybe we'll get a chance to see if somebody becomes the new Rodrigo Lopez. It'll be fine.

Sold low implies that he's about to turn a corner. I think if that happens it'll be because he's pitching in a much friendlier environment, possibly with less juicy baseballs. I think it's very unlikely he becomes anything but a mid-to-back rotation guy. This isn't Jake Arrieta, with all kinds of promise and no ability to put it together. Bundy's fastball has lost 3-4 mph and it's never coming back.

But what if it was Chris Davis that dropped the bunt?

He's all like "wow, I can give up a 368' fly ball to left and it might actually stay in the park!"

Because the Orioles' GM is very wily and sneaky and knows things you don't and can use hypnotism and sleight-of-hand to trick you into giving up a top prospect for a year or two of an average guy at arb prices.

30 innings, five hits, 40 strikeouts, two walks, no earned runs. Not a bad pro debut.

WAR is fine. It's just that he's likely to be a 2-2.5 WAR player in 2020, paid $10M. You don't get a whole lot coming back on <$10M in surplus value. If you're buying a free agent $10M gets you a single year of an average-ish player. Or often a risky guy who ends up as Yovani Gallardo.

Two of them apparently haven't pitched an inning professionally yet.

I didn't know that. But yea, they are still paying him $22M this year. That was a terrible contract. $80M for 13 wins (and about -2 WAR) over five years.

Does it? Let's say he repeats last year. If the Orioles had gone to arb with him, they win 63 games or whatever, they pay him $10M that wouldn't be available for other investments, and they probably get about the same slim market for him at the deadline. They let him go and he has the same year... they've saved $10M. They win 61 games instead of 63, or whatever. They have $10M in the bank to either upgrade the organization or pay for a parking garage full of Bentleys for the Angelos family. But they have more resources to do something with. The only way the O's look really bad is if he is an MVP candidate and some team offers up a huge package to the Marlins for 3-4 months of him. That's pretty darned unlikely.

Yes, I've done the math. I get the math. It's about time for that annual call to Directv to threaten to cancel. I'll do that over Christmas. It would be nice if there was more than one option in St. Mary's County for high speed internet. But there's not, so it's $80 or you're back to 1999.

Between Villar and Cashner the Orioles saved about $15M. If they had not traded them they would have been out $15M for about 3-4 wins on a 50-something win team. The reason neither brought back high-caliber prospects was because they had a $15M bill attached to them that the accepting teams now have to pay. I understand the position that all of that money just disappears into the ether, that the Angelos family gets to light cigars with it. Maybe that's true. But I like to think that Mike Elias gets to add at least some of that to the account they're using to upgrade the franchise in 100 ways, mostly behind the scenes. Here's a funny thing... the Marlins acquired Villar and his presumptive $10M salary. Currently they have two players making over MLB minimum. Villar and Wei Yin Chen, who will make $22M in 2020. Barring any future expensive moves they're going to have about a $50M payroll, with $32M of that going to Chen and Villar. I don't know what sense that makes, unless someone whispered in Jeter's ear that it's unbecoming to have a 57-win team with a new taxpayer funded stadium and $209M in shared MLB revenues and a $30M payroll.