geschinger

As long as he keeps hosting his show on Bloomberg, there will be plenty of opportunities for him to be asked about the Orioles. I can't think of many owners who have as public a profile as he does outside of Mark Cuban.

No idea if accurate or not but on podcast I listened to recently David Samon (former Marlins Presiden) and John Skipper (former ESPN President) were arguing buying the O's was a bad investment for Angelos. They were discussing if there should be concern about the low sale price and that Angelos would have done significantly better financially if he had put the purchase price into the S&P 500 instead of buying the Orioles.

His death was not the trigger for the payroll dump and running afoul of the debt service requirements. Although his health was almost certainly why they went all-in as much as they did. I don't think they are a good example of what can be done in a given market if you engage your fans in a way that communicates we are invested and doing all we can to win. The revenue from the attendance increase didn't come anywhere close to covering their increased spending.

I'm not sure the Padres are a great example. They've had to dump ~50m in payroll this offseason to get in line with MLB's debt service rules.

My guess if Elias was allowed to do what wanted is that eventually, payroll would settle in at a ~$150-$160m range in today's dollars.

Somehow, I don't see them or any of the streaming services getting into the bidding for a team like the Seattle Mariners' non-nationally broadcast schedule.

Escalation is a lot less sure than it was a few years ago with the implosion of regional sports networks revenues. Teams could be in for a rude awakening as existing contracts expire.

I know it's necessary, but I really dislike that many options. It makes practical roster construction difficult for a team w/o unlimited payroll. You only have to account for that extra 150m if he's a disappointment and not worthy of having on the roster.

It's less likely, but Machado is a good comp on why either should consider turning it down if they are risk takers. Sign the massive deal at 26 with the opt-out to give you the ability to get an even bigger yearly salary and more years at their absolute peak (~age 30). And if they haven't performed, they still have a massive payday to take them into their mid-30s. The Machado approach will earn the player tens of millions, if not more than any extension followed by FA by 30.

I hope they are exploring extending someone like Gunnar now. I'm not sure I see the case for extending Adley as unless he is risk averse it doesn't make sense for him, and it doesn't make sense for the Orioles to go the number of years he'll get on the FA market considering his age and position. If Elias was not held back by Angelos, I'd be very surprised if his approach to young talent would differ from the approach Houston has taken. Try to extend players but be willing to walk away if it would require committing well past the players prime age years. Gunnar is in a situation that is prime for a win/win extension. 7-8 years so he gets paid now and he's still in line to get a silly money FA contract from someone else as a ~29-30-year-old.

A new stadium equated to ~$40m increase in gate receipts for the Rangers. What is $600m in improvements to Camden Yards going to equate to an increase in gate receipts to the Orioles? Can't say I've seen any estimates or guesses on that.

No doubt, their gate receipts for the years prior to opening the new stadium hovered in the 75m range and they were 115m in 2022.

Gothca. I will be interested to see what the Rangers revenue increase ends up being. They increased payroll by ~60m and increased attendance by 500k. Is that a net gain or net loss for the bottom line and their ability to raiser payroll further to retain some of their young talent.

Agreed, I'm just not sure the type of pitcher that we think would be a good target at 3/60 is not going to end up getting 5/100 if the market overheats again. I'd much rather see them go after one of the Seattle pitchers or other younger options. I have little interest in seeing the Orioles commit more than 2-3 years to someone exiting or already having exited their peak age years.

What good is an increase in revenue if it comes at the expense of costs that rise faster than revenue? Many (not all) of the Padres issues are attributable to their spending on outside talent They were making cash calls and taking loans for significantly more than the revenue hit they took from their RSN contract blowing up.

I think that was the plan last year and maybe again this year, but now with the rhetoric ("lift off") kept in check. A lot of the guys in that going into the 2022 offseason that many thought would be good targets for 2-3 year deal ended up getting 5 or 6 years - deals didn't/don't make sense.

I'm not 100% convinced this matters much if the analytics show that the hit rate on identifying and acquiring pitchers from other organizations is higher than using valuable draft capital to acquire. We haven't seen Elias start to move any of the excess positional prospect assets yet but I'm not convinced those positional prospects aren't a better way to bring pitching into the organization than spending a significant portion of limited draft capital on pitching would be. Jury is still out IMO.

I don't think an extension for Adley is in the cards, basically for the reasons you state. It doesn't make a lot of sense for either side - O's should not consider extending him into his mid-30s and unless he's super risk averse, Adley should not consider an extension where he's a FA after he's already or at least well on his way exiting his peak. This will hopefully work out to be a textbook example of how this approach to team building should work. Talent pipeline develops what is hopefully a quality replacement to plug in that makes it much easier to walk away when there is no path for a deal that makes sense for both the team and the player.

I'm not advocating moving Holliday anywhere at this point, but when he's ready, if the Orioles have a need at a position other than SS that he could fill and optimize the Orioles roster/lineup there should be little hesitation to do so. It would be a similar situation to when Machado - another high pick who was drafted to be the long-term SS - made his debut and ended up sticking at 3B.

The hot starts certainly help with perception. While of course, he'd still be a top 10 prospect in all of baseball, I wonder if he would be an almost consensus #1 overall his production in Aberdeen in May (1.137 OPS) and June (.702) were reversed.

I think the two have a chance to be similarly productive if they play to their potential. Cowser ~0.50 higher in OBP and Kjerstand ~0.50 higher in SLG. I value OBP a bit more, so Cowser was my choice.

They do the best they can and they will be wrong sometimes - that is the risk. I look at a team like the Braves who have been very aggressive playing rookies with no fear of accepting the acclimation period the past few years and it's worked out brilliantly for them. But I'm sure there are examples of orgs who misjudged and ended up worse off having played the young guys.

What a player projects to be should be part of the calculus, not just who is producing now. If for example, they project player X could produce at an .800 OPS clip but it may take 100 ABs at a .600 OPS for him to acclimate to MLB, I'd take that every day over the veteran who we know is going to give us a ~.700 OPS. There is of course some risk there that the player doesn't acclimate. But I'd rather play to win instead of playing not to lose.

Maybe wishful thinking but it could also just be an issue of needing some time to acclimate defensively as well. Not uncommon for a young OF coming up to sometimes struggle a bit getting used to tracking the ball in venues with a third deck.

Even while not hitting yet, Cowser is getting on base 35% of the time and making an impact scoring 8 runs in 7 games.