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It’s also a business worth $1.72 billion that generates and spends at least $100 million each way every season. You can’t credibly divorce that from the discussion. Elias certainly can’t ignore it.

Yes, and that opinion will be cemented in place from the first wave of negative publicity explaining why there is any controversy at all. Few, if any, will make the effort to determine if the controversy is “fair” or “just”. Moral questions aside, signing Bauer would be a questionable baseball decision - is he really able to succeed in the MLB any more? There is no question that it would be a bad business decision because it’s virtually impossible to see a scenario where the upside justifies the risk.

If you have to ask, I’d stay away from it.

Ownership is unsettled at the moment. Until MLB formally signs off on the sale and the docs are signed between Angelos and Rubenstein, I suspect Elias won’t add payroll beyond a specific already agreed to figure. With payroll already around $96 million it may be the trade deadline before a significant addition is possible.

The decision to have surgery is 100% Bradish’s call. Elias could advise and make the O’s resources available, and I’m sure he has, but he’s not in a position to force anyone to have surgery. Hopefully Bradish is a sensible guy with good representation who will take the best course.

This is a good point. To the degree there’s a silver lining to this news, it’s first day of Spring Training and there are still enough external options available to have a variety of choices on how to deal with what’s clearly a substantial hit. Burnes ended any willingness I had to overpay, even a little, for Cease. Fair value deal? Sure, but otherwise I would rather look for a stopgap.

Gonna be a pessimist about this one and assume the platelet infusion is only going to delay the inevitable and the team will be without Bradish that much longer. What an absolute s***storm of bad Orioles news this morning.

Imagine this: Your competitive window is wide open and you just signed pitcher X to a 7/175 contract. Do you really want an in-house facility dedicated to helping him screw around finding new and more effective ways to add unnatural stress to his elbow and shoulder? And how often is learning a new pitch the answer to a pitcher’s struggles, especially the closer they get to the majors? I have a hard time believing that the existing team programs aren’t already trying to provide everything a pitcher needs to maintain optimum performance. Sure, there’s always the question of effectiveness but I don’t see a system-wide hole that demands immediate filling. I think the offseason academies like Driveline can serve a useful purpose, but if I were GM I would want as much control as I could get over who attends and why.

Note no Texas, and this projection has them barely above .500 over the course of the season.

I'm pretty certain that the new ownership group calculated what the Orioles' market revenue potential is six different ways before making the first bid, and the number came up a lot closer to Houston than Tampa Bay. That's the comp I'm looking for a few years down the road.

Maybe $110 million max after the trade deadline in 2024. $150-160 million-ish by 2026 due to arb raises, one or two extensions and a couple of free agents, probably pitchers. Like many, I don't expect the new owners to radically subsidize the team, but I do expect them to compete in a sustained way and that won't happen with just a first-class farm system.

If the extension is to also buy out his last two arb years, I’m guessing Hays is thinking more along the lines of 5/65 minimum, structure TBD. With any kind of decent year in 2024, he’d be looking at $9 million give or take in arb 3. The O’s have the luxury of kicking this decision down the road and they should do exactly that IMO.

Lowenstein's number

Good riddance to that twit.

At least PECOTA has us with a winning record. Progress.

Right on cue. It won't be long to where this is a realistic question for O's fans.

Why on Earth would JA kill the Burnes deal under the circumstances? I doubt the additional $6 million is going to be his burden, and I don’t think the deal took place without his approval anyway. Chris Bassitt is irrelevant to the Burnes acquisition. If the current exercise is spotting mental shifts from a distance, perhaps John Angelos is a more sporting proposition. The impact of his pending exit is certainly is a more satisfying one to think about.

We know that Elias has been working on a Cease trade for most of the offseason, so JA was already on board for an additional $8-9 million before Burnes was acquired. At this juncture is JA going to fire Executive of the Year Mike Elias over $6 million for a deal roundly considered a steal while new ownership has been announced with the paperwork already submitted to the Commissioner? If JA wants his money back, trade Austin Hays for a bag of balls, stick Cowser in LF and one currently wasted 6-years-of control problem also solved.

I'm one of those people. More like a mixture of soap iron filings in my case.

I think you have me mistaken for everyone. $150 million before 2026 is an increase of $25 million per season. The increase from 2023 to 2024 is in the neighborhood of $35 million and that's if no one else is added so my expectation is already pretty restrained. And as I pointed out in my earlier post, that would still be below the median MLB payroll; hardly "50 Cent at a strip club". I'm all for lean and efficient, but if you want to talk about extreme ends of a spectrum, the assumption that the new ownership group would be little better than the Angelos family - which is implicit in your post - now that would be extreme. I don't believe Rubenstein is going to say anything explicit about funding one way or another at least until MLB signs off on the deal. If for no other reason then out of respect and simple courtesy to the Angelos family.

History. They ran middle-third payrolls from 2012-2017 during their last competitive run. $150 million might not even reach middle-middle in the next couple of years, so I don't feel like I'm going out on too much of a limb here. Does anybody really believe that the new ownership group is going to go full private equity teardown on the Orioles?

Good, I don't like people that crass. I also don't expect him to show up cheapskate John Angelos this early in the game. But I do expect the new ownership to raise the payroll to at least $150 million by the start of the 2026 season - hopefully more - because it's abundantly clear that the Orioles aren't looked at as a necessary revenue source by anybody with a stake in the ownership group. Which is different than saying they're going to spend like Steve Cohen. I would probably lose a little of my lifelong attachment to the team if it started to behave like the Yankees, Red Sox and a few others.

Or he could have been going year-to-year like all the free agents so a new owner could have a clean slate for his own people. (No I don’t believe that, but it’s plausible)

My theory is they need an ML-ready infielder and they appreciate what Ortiz brings to the table along with the ton of control he has left and the low salary. I also think that Milwaukee has a good pitching developing program and they feel that they can harness everything Hall's big arm has in it. To put it more simply, I think Ortiz and Hall were on their radar and they agreed to the trade because they got what they wanted. Kinda nice to see some respect for both of their talent after all the back and forth from the White Sox fans in the Cease thread isn't it?

I think it's just as easily explained as the culmination of a strategy that's been in place since day one. It's certainly a refreshing new look, but I don't know why we need to paint it in psychological terms.