LTO's

It would be OK I guess if he was speaking about this in the context of using that money he saved in those years to meaningfully up the payroll now that the team is competitive. But that.....didn't happen and reading between the lines, doesn't appear all that likely to happen in the near future.

What if he isn't trying to influence anything and was just asked a question to which he gave an honest answer?

What? lol

It's very obvious they wanted Arraez, or any established big league hitter, over prospects. Their GM has only been saying this for two years now. Most of the big trades this year have involved big league players.

The Orioles aren't in the business of giving out any contracts that could even become franchise crippling outside of the famous one so that's not really relevant. However, the Hardy extension, Ubaldo, Gallardo, Trumbo and Cobb contracts were all bad. They clearly lost the Erod trade even though it wasn't horrible. It wasn't a good trade because they decided to let him walk that offseason in favor of giving O'day only 5 mil less over 4 years which clearly didn't work out. He was never really all that great, but they clearly could've used Davies on the 2016 and 2017 teams especially when the return they got for him was horrible. I don't care enough to assign a certain pct of blame on any of the three main players, but they were all very clearly in win-now mode.

DD was in win-now mode. Not sure how you could argue otherwise. Pretty much every move he made, even prior to the Blue Jays thing that everyone is still overreacting to, was at the expense of the farm system and long term org stability.

Yeah, believe me, we're all aware.

No one is saying that. What you somehow can't rationalize is that other teams are not in a hurry to be making these kinds of trades right now. That is a glaring fact that everyone in the industry is saying and you can't get that through your head for whatever reason.

Bautista is the big one but it sounds like they are being cautious with that one. I wasn't counting on Hall to be a contributor right away and at least the injury isn't arm related. The RH depth they have now especially with the acquisition of Givens should soften the blow from Tate's injury. If Baker's second half last year was real, he will also go a long way in helping there as well.

No you don't, but that's ok. Never stopped you before and never will.

You don't know this though. Unless you have sources no one else does, you don't know who was on the table and what this FO may or may not have turned down. Maybe teams aren't chomping at the bit to trade valuable big leaguers for 50-55 FV infielders or Ramon Urias. Maybe no players that would represent a massive upgrade are available at all. By all accounts the trade market has been slower than it has been in years. Maybe they believe there will be a wider range of options that will be available to them during the season and don't want to make a bad deal now just to make one. That upsets the reactionary fans like you but it's most likely the correct strategy.

I don't have a link to give you. If you're on Instagram you can look at the official Orioles account's posts from today and Kremer is there.

Yeah, Wildcard misunderstood that. Kremer is in Sarasota with the rest of the team right now.

Spring Training is awesome especially if you're able to make down to Florida. Any time baseball is on I cherish it.

They were better than the Orioles. Maybe the weren't in April-June, but that's not what matters. Should be obvious this is true considering they ran through the AL the next year and won the WS while the Orioles needed an act of God to just reach .500. The sad fact is that the Orioles were never really all that close to winning a World Series under DD/Buck. It was much better than the decade+ that came before them but when you look at it objectively, it was never happening. if you're measure of success is just being generally competitive for a couple of years then I see why you think more highly of him than I do.

If the manager is good and has the respect of the players, like Buck did, then I would say that situation is not more difficult. You may disagree with that and that's fine. I will say that by the time DD and Buck were really butting heads, if it were up to me, neither of them would be involved in making those decisions. DD wasn't a quality ML GM at that point and Buck should've just been doing manager things. In any event, give me the team with a ton of young talent on the precipice of success over a damn near 120 loss team with no player development apparatus no matter who the manager is.

It's hilarious that people like you keep throwing in Buck as some sort of jab to defend DD. Completely out of touch with how the baseball world views them. The team won all of those games largely due to the work he and his staff did with the defense and his management of the bullpen. They routinely outplayed their pre-season projections because of this. The 1-9 was always incredibly flawed and the SP talent was always mediocre to downright bad. O'day (a Buck move) was practically the reason they had any success in the 2012 playoffs and Davis (also a Buck move) was a major reason those badly put together 2013+2015 teams were even somewhat respectable. If you had to choose Buck as this current team's manager or DD to be this team's GM. Who are you taking?

The organization wasn't "highly dysfunctional" when DD took over. They had just made their best managerial hire in decades and he had already made two great acquisitions as the interim GM. This was also on the heels of one of the team's greatest all time trades and greatest draft picks. The 2014 team didn't win the WS because KC was clearly better than them. I suppose if you believe everything is luck then you can make yourself feel better that way but in reality the Royals smoked them and then won the WS the next year while the O's were .500. He didn't get another job because teams were not interested in his perspective in this new era of Baseball. Every other reasoning, including a situation from 4 years prior, is silly. I'm pretty sure he didn't even get an advisory role or anything like it. You'll never lose this argument if you deflect any and all blame onto someone else. But hey, we'll always have that one playoff series win in 7 years to look back fondly on.

Elias job was/is tougher. Whether or not that's more enviable I suppose depends on the type of person you are.

He won everywhere he went but didn't get an serious consideration for any job after he was fired. Why is that? Almost like successes from 20-30 years ago mean nothing when it's obvious to everyone that the game has passed you by. And no, I don't think playoff success is largely random chance. Even if I did, making it to the ALDS only 2 out of your 7 seasons as GM isn't exactly a ton of chances. His teams were always massively flawed, a big reason for their up and down nature year to year and their pre-season projections always being low. That showed up in all of their playoff failures when they just weren't able to consistently string together hits/baserunners. His image is what it is because of the 14 years of losing previously and peoples (rational) hatred of Peter and their (irrational) hatred of Buck. The state of the org that he inherited when he became GM was so much better than he how he left it. It's not even close. I personally don't think 2012 and 2014 were appropriate trade offs for how bad things got toward the end. If it's an unpopular opinion here then so be it.

All true. But when he arrived he was in a far more enviable position than Elias. That team was young and on the come up and had a respected manager that had just made two moves that were as good if not better than any DD ever made. Elias inherited a completely stripped down ML roster, middling farm system mired in complete dysfunction from a PD standpoint, and the same empty international pipeline that DD dealt with. And if I remember correctly, he brought in his own guys to do international scouting that resulted in......nothing. I'm sorry but I don't buy the whole "DD was a secret analytical genius kept down by Peter and Buck" thing that's spouted here. His work in Montreal 30+ years ago was admirable but irrelevant when discussing his body of work in Baltimore. His big FA SP acquisition was absolutely terrible, he forfeited picks, traded two SP prospects from a barren farm system for limited value and gave out bad contracts to aging vets. I know I'm out on a limb in this forum but I truly believe DD was more bad than good from organizational standpoint.

What does this mean in practice? What were the things he wanted to do but wasn't allowed to? And what proof do we have of this? Wouldn't his rep around the league still be strong if this was an obvious fact? He's completely out of the sport. He made mistakes that led to a terrible state of the org and his ultimate firing. Doesn't mean he didn't do some good and have some success but as Interloper eluded to, there was more success to be had there. History will show they won one playoff series and didn't win a single ALCS game. I wanted Buck gone but I do think he is a better manager than DD was a GM and I think most people in the sport think that as well. No disagreement here. I do think he should be graded on a curve a tad considering DD had vastly higher payrolls afforded to him, but if all he accomplishes is one playoff series W and no ALCS wins, then that's a massive disappointment and he will be criticized as much as I have criticized DD.

Weird how the man responsible for winning "so many games" didn't get a look at any of the numerous GM vacancies after he was canned. Meanwhile, the manager everyone here vilified in order to defend DD, is still employed and is thought of highly by nearly everyone in the sport. I understand everyone's love affair with DD here. I'll take the heat. He was a mediocre GM that did some good things and did some bad things while dealing with a bad owner. However, at the end of the day, the lack of playoff success, the 2017/2018 teams and his current status in the sport speak for themselves.

The previous regime won one singular playoff series and ended their run with a terribly bloated payroll and the worst team in franchise history. The best players were acquired by the previous regime and Buck in the interim, and they were good because of the defense of those players and Buck's management of that otherworldly bullpen. Duquette wasn't a good GM which is why even though the Orioles had success under him, he didn't even come close to getting another GM job. I'm pretty sure he's helping sell baseball equipment nowadays while Buck is still managing. People look back on that era fondly because of the previous 14 years but the fact is that it was a greatly squandered opportunity. And the prospects that he gets credit for, like Grod and Hall, get on podcasts and quite literally laugh at how poorly he ran things during that time.