Pickles

Absolutely. The Phenoms would be the guys populating a list like that.

No, I wouldn't bury them yet either. However, there's a certain time frame for returning value to the parent club. If it takes a guy 4 years, and getting waived three times, to become a big league contributor, that's great for him and his family. But it's very likely he has provided very little, if any, value to his original parent club.

Ok, I think I see where you're headed with this. It's a good question. Rookie status is 140 abs, right? So how many top 100 guys get more than 140 abs in AAA? I stand by original claim: A significant amount. I would go at least as far to say the majority of them do. Probably the vast majority. 140 abs isn't that many.

Define significant. I would expect a significant amount of them to have.

I'll see if I can't find it, and I surely encountered it on this board, but wasn't there a study floating around in the last year that had analyzed BA lists and found it was about a 50% fail rate for top 20 prospects. Surely it is higher than that for lower ranked prospects. Now, maybe our guys can beat that. There's some reason to believe that. Risk profile has been mentioned in this thread and our guys certainly have the advantage over the Rays' guys there. Less pitchers and further along in their development. Frankly, any study that wants to analyze bust rates, should be taking that into account. There's a world of difference between a top 100 guy in AAA and a top 100 in the DSL.

Almost like signing a vet stopgap as insurance while acclimating some prospects to the roster isn't an incomprehensibly stupid thing to do in a year you would like to compete.

Well, admittedly I did not follow out the transaction chain, as that would be significantly more work, but also because while important in the calculation for the Rays, it doesn't shine much light on the value the prospects provided of their own accord. I simply wanted to see what kind of players the 9 developed into in a vaccum. Now, it does suggests that some of the O's players at least won't pan out, and that trading from that stock is wise. However, that's a double-edged sword. Trade the wrong guys and keep the wrong guys, and you can end up with nothing.

Perhaps I could have put this in the original thread covering the recently released BA rankings, but that seems to be going in several different directions, and I wanted to introduce a little analysis. So as we know the O's have 8 players on the current BA list, and that is an extraordinarily high number, topped in recent years only by the 2019 Rays farm system. I thought it might be useful to see how those players' careers have progressed. The obvious caveat is that it's only been 4 years so many of these players have more career in front of them. Career WAR is provided in parenthesis. SS Wander Franco (6): The obvious bluechipper. Has lived up to it. P Brent Honeywell (- 0.2) Going to be 28 upcoming season. Hasn't pitched in majors since 2021. Now with the A's. P Brendan McKay (-0.1) Hasn't pitched in majors since 2019. Appears to be out of organized ball. C Ronaldo Hernandez Yet to reach majors. AAA in Bos org last year. Part time DH with a sub 300 OBP in AAA. 25 this upcoming season. P Matt Liberatore (-0.5) Made major league debut last season with St. Louis. Pitched to almost 6 ERA. OF Jesus Sanchez (1.8) Part-time player on the Marlins. Does not look to be a starting caliber player. UTI Vidal Brojan (-1.1) 25 years old upcoming season. Still with Tampa. Doesn't appear to be a major league caliber player. 2b Brandon Lowe (11.8) The other big success on the list. Injured last season, but has two top 10 MVP finishes in his young career. 1b Nate Lowe (6.5) A solid regular. However, for Tex and not Tampa. A couple things jump out to me: The Orioles' strategy of focusing on positional talent seems well thought out. Besides Hall and Grayson, whom he inherited, the rest of the O's list is positional talent acquired by Elias. If we look at the Rays' experience we can see why. The Rays had 3 pitchers amongs their guys, including their 2nd and 3rd guy. They have gotten nothing from any of the pitchers. In fact, none of them has produced positive WAR, and none of them are still in the organization. Such an outcome for the O's pitchers would be a bitter pill to swallow. They fared better with their positional prospects, the Lowes and Franco, developing into impactful ML players. However, they still had their misses. Hernandez, yet to reach the majors and not looking like much of a prospect currrently, Brojan, still in Tampa but negative WAR two years running, and Sanchez, positive WAR but really a 4th outfielder at best in MIA, haven't made any meaningful contribution, and seem unlikely to in the future. So even positional players in the top 100 are not going to pan out a significant portion of the time. Not to extrapolate it out entirely, but in this case it was 50%. Of intersting note, it was their two lowest ranked prospects who actually returned the value, excluding the blue chipper Franco. Not to derail my own thread, but it doesn't take a lot of squinting to see why Elias would not be comfortable just handing ML jobs to prospects, of the non-bluechip variety, in a year in which he wants to compete. There's still a lot of WAR to be produced by the players on that list. However, it is mostly all going to be produced by the players we would already deem "successful." It doesn't take too many years to see who is going to make the transition from prospect to major leaguer. Lastly, and I guess I could make a poll, but would you deem yourself satisified/not satisfied if the Orioles current crop turned out in the same way the Rays did? Personally, I'd call myself unsatisfied. I want SOMETHING from Grayson and/or Hall, and I think the O's prospects, and maybe this is only hindsight, but I think they're more talented than the Rays' guys.

Let's hope.

Well, in that case I agree.

Urias has been more valuable than Santander. Why wouldn't he have more value?

What exactly do you think Elias and company are going to learn about Urias in a couple of weeks of spring training that they haven't already learned in the last few years?

Let's talk more about Frazier. In every thread!

Possible. I honestly think Gunnar's going to be the 3b and stay there. Holliday is the long-term plan at SS, imo.

Ortiz has 115 ABs in AAA.

The only one that I don't like being away from the team is Kremer. As a general rule, I don't care about the position players' participation. But I do worry about the pitchers, particularly starting pitchers. Kremer is very important for us this year. And this is a very important year for him personally in his career. I hate to disrupt his preparation in any way. Furthermore, I'd imagine he is Israel's best pitcher far and away, and I'd hate to see them lean on him too much and/or ramp him up to quickly.

It's all speculation. I don't know. But I don't think they would have signed Frazier if they were happy to just hand a job to Westburg, and the most logical reason for why they wouldn't be is they don't love his defense at 2nd.

The Frazier signing makes me wonder.

One thing I've noticed is that the OH is generally much higher on Joey Ortiz than the rest of the industry. When that has been the case in the past, Britton and Davies spring to mind, the OH has been more accurate.

The reports on his defense have been varied to say the least, and the O's apparently aren't in love with it. I'm very interested in seeing him play with my own eyes.

I actually think he'll be a little bit better than 2022, so somewhere in between, but closer to 2022. I'd like to see his OPS+ get above 110 annd his OBP get above 330. His OPS was 700 in the first half last year, and over 750 in the second so he's trending in that direction.

Oh for sure. A lot of the Angelos' and the franchise's PR problems would go away with a consistently succesful franchise. In normal circumstances I would say virtuall all their problems would disappear, but this franchise is so poorly ran outside of baseball OPs, even on field success won't squelch all of the criticism.

MD leaving the ACC, and the general destruction of the classic conferences, has been a real shame imo.

Well, Cal Perry's hire directly tells you that Angelos is interested in lying and not telling the truth, as lying is Perry's tools of the trade.

Will be interesting to see how this affect play in AAA. I would like to see how it effects the game before really coming out for or against.