Justify keeping Bedard or Roberts

[Migrant Redbird]

I've had this post saved in Notepad all day long yesterday, trying to finish it up. Now I'm just going to post what I've got, and maybe I'll never get around to finishing what I had planned to say. Some will probably be relieved.

....

First of all, thank you for a very thoughtful and detailed response. I'm not going to respond to each of your comments due to lack of time and because some of them don't really require a response, but I am going to address a few of them specifically, not necessarily in the order that you gave them.

....saying "It's unlikely that you'll ever compete with the Red Sox and Yankees again anyhow." really got under my skin, which is not easy to do. I believe you didn't actually get what I called a cheap shot. It was that one sentence that really stood out.

The thing you may not have realized is that I wanted to get under people's skins -- to break them out of this defeatist funk which I perceive as dogging the O's fan base, if not the organization overall. I wanted to break through your despondancy; the cyberspace equivalent of a slap in the face or a cold bucket of water over your head. I wasn't trying to offend or insult anyone -- just to get your attention.

I will readily concede that I am not as knowledgeable about the Orioles organization, personnel, and players as many of the other posters in this forum. If I provide any value on this forum at all, it has to be from my perspective as an outside observer who can see things differently because I'm not viewing them through the distorted prism of a diehard Orioles fan. I like the Orioles, but I don't live and die by their success to anywhere near the extent that I do with the Cardinals.

In my business, which is security, there is enormous value in being able to "think outside the box". Most people aren't very good at doing that. In 1994, Tom Clancey wrote Debt of Honor in which he crashed a Boeing 747 into the Capitol building as an unguided missile, yet in 2001 our country's anti-terrorist bureaucrats still had not incorporated that obviously plausible scenario into their defenses and airline crews were still being trained to "cooperate" with hijackers in the hope that negotiators could get them to release hostages unharmed. In 1996, a blue ribbon airline safety panel chaired by Al Gore delivered a report on anti-terrorism which ignored the concept entirely -- a scant 2 years after Clancy's book. The Department of Defense had contingency plans which considered the consequences of a suicide bomber crashing a small private plane into the Pentagon and terrorists had been hijacking airliners for over 30 years, yet no one in a position of authority to do anything about it was able to take that extremely small step which was necessary to envision 9/11.

Right now, I see a lot of Orioles fans whose minds are trapped inside of a box where they can't conceive of near term success with Bedard and Roberts, so they're determined to chase a will-o-wisp down the road in the form of "blowing the team up" and acquiring as many prospects as possible for the blue chips the team already possesses.

Losing is depressive. Too much of it alters the state of the mind, and gets people so gloomy that expectations of further failures become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Reasonable possibilities -- like using hijacked airliners as human guided missiles -- can't even be recognized.

Now maybe I'm wrong in how I perceive the overall state of the O's fan base posting in this forum -- and by extension, the rest of Orioles nation -- but I think the 10 losing seasons have cultured an attitude of despair where fans have become blinded to what should be realistic expectations for the team. That defeatist attitude can permeate the environment, conditioning team executives and players to expect to lose because that's all the fan base believes they're capable of. I think that you see it demonstrated where fans like Sports Guy are already getting ready to plaster the "failure label on McPhail even before the first warm up pitch is thrown in spring training.

Earlier in this thread, I gave several examples of teams which turned their fortunes around within a year or two and the typical response is "yes, but this organization is different. It's so bad that it can't turn around or "we're in such a competitive division". Sorry, but I'm not buying those excuses. There are a lot of good players in the Orioles organization who can be developed into winners and the turn around can be remarkable if the organization can borrow the philosophy of Tug McGraw, "Ya gotta believe!"

I can see the Roberts trade being desirable (and I'd love the Cardinals to get him, though I'm not willing to give up Rasmus for him), but it's very, very difficult for me to see a team trading off the likes of Bedard. To me, given how difficult it is to develop an "ace" and how long teams go between having legitimate "aces", any team with a prospect of competing within the next five is stupid to trade off an ace for prospects unless the other team is willing to grossly overpay for said ace. It would be like the Cardinals trading off Albert Pujols because they fell below .500 last season and the outlook for 2008 is pretty bleak right now.

We had a saying in St. Louis during the 1997-1999 time frame, "Don't waste the McGwire years", when the team was really mediocre due in large part to injuries depleting the pitching staff in 1997 (Matt Morris, Alan Benes, Donovan Osborne) and the botched contract negotiations which led to Andy Benes departing when he'd made it very clear to Boras that he very much wanted to remain in St. Louis. Well, the McGwire years did get wasted in terms of success on the field -- even though the box office blossomed with the "big meat patty show" -- primarily because Walt Jocketty dilly dallied around and was never able to address the shortfall in pitching. There are still Cardinals fans convinced that the Cardinals structured their team more to protect McGwire and give him maximum opportunity to break the home run record than they did to win games. In fact, that was when La Russa first introduced his innovation of batting the pitcher 8th, to increase the probability that there would be a runner on first when McGwire came up to bat, making it less likely he would draw an intentional pass.

But the Cardinals came together all of a sudden in the 2000 season, and they did it without Matt Morris or Alan Benes coming back, with McGwire's knees hobbled so bad that the Cardinals collected insurance on his salary, with Fernando Tatis's career going into freefall after a devastating groin injury, and with Albert Pujols still dominating the MVP race in the lower A Midwest League. Daryl Kile made a big comeback from his Coors experience; Pat Hentgen provided a veteran presence and ate up a bunch of innings, Garrett Stephenson somehow pasted 3 good months of pitching into a 16 win season; Rick Ankiel led the team in ERA and placed 2nd in the ROY race, and Andy Benes managed to hobble out there on arthritic knees until early August when a rookie named Britt Reames stepped in and capably filled Andy's spot the remainder of the season. The 7 starts Reames made were the only starts by anyone not in the opening day rotation! That's the kind of breaks which allow a 75-86 team to suddenly become a 95-67 team in just one season, and I'm of the opinion that the 2008 O's are more capable of that kind of a turn around than most of you are willing to give them credit for.

....I will lead you to this discussion about pitcher age and attrition rate:

http://forum.orioleshangout.com/forums/showthread.php?t=50000&highlight=attrition+rate

You have to consider the risk involved in keeping Bedard and hoping he continues to perform at his current level, not to mention everything I said above.

The chance of him pitching effectively for 12-13 years is extremely slim.

Of course, but every pitcher that you draft is a real long shot to ever reach the level that Bedard is at. He's there, and he very likely will remain at that level if he's not injured. That's why the O's need to find a way to make Bedard a part of their long term future. It doesn't have to be 12-13 years; 4-5 years would be more than enough to dramatically turn the fortunes of the O's around, if Cabrera suddenly found the key to his mental discipline, if Loewen and Penn evolve the way Bedard has the last 2 seasons, if Guthrie is the real deal. As my post above on the 2000 Cardinals points out, a pitching staff is capable of jelling together pretty quickly (and coming apart just as quickly the following season ).

....Just a quick glance up and down the roster should tell you what you need to know. There is very little upside to our roster and I would expect many of our players to decline or at most have a moderate uptick.

Sometimes it's difficult to appreciate the depths of pessimism which 10 years of losing can bring to a fan base.

....And just to be clear, I'm a Redskin fan

I thought about including the Skins (whom I detest with a passion), but I thought suggesting O's fans turn to the Ravens for solace was funnier.

....I don't see why I have to wait 15 years. Just because it took that long to develop that kind of quality pitcher doesn't mean it is going to be another 15 years to develop another pitcher.

No, it doesn't. But it does illustrate how long it can take, and why you shouldn't be quite so quick to dispose of one. They don't grow on trees; the Yankees keep having that point driven into their skulls.

.... Aces are rare, but they don't do you much good when they are pitching on a 69-win team.

Perhaps, but you still will need them when you get ready to step up to that next level. If you really intend to win, these are the guys that you must hang onto at all costs.

....And Chris Carpenter was a pretty nice pick-up for $300 K. Not a draft pick or trade, but still.

There will always be the serendipitous acquisitions, but you can't count on those. You build a championship rotation by using all the tools you have available, not by pitching out your capstone because you're not quite ready to install it yet.

By the way, Chris is a classic example of the manipulation by the team to retain his services for a fraction of what he would have cost on the free agent market. You should look at his contract history at COTS -- an extremely frugal pitcher (for his quality) until the Cards decided to make it up to him for paying him so little and offered him a $65M/5 year contract a year earlier than was necessary. He promptly began the season with a sore elbow which necessitated TJ surgery.

....Well, how do they compete in the AL East in the near term?

By keeping their best players and developing more through judicious trades of players who are surplus or whom can be more easily replaced than an ace pitcher.

....How do we do this without sacrificing our future success?

By not throwing away your bird in the hand on the gamble that you'll be able to trap a dozen or so replacements in the bush.

....Taking the risk of having Bedard and Roberts playing at their current levels three or four years from now is not something we should take.

I disagree. It is a risk which the team HAS to take if they are really committed to winning. They're not like the Twins or D-Rays or A's; they can afford to commit a little payroll to sensible multi-year contracts and lock up the kind of players who can form a championship team.

....The chances of the Orioles being competitive in 3 or 4 years without majorly shaking up this roster is small.

Faint heart never won fair lady.

....It is best that we acquire a stock pile of young talent that is under our control for a cheap price during their peak years.

Which is precisely the strategy I'm arguing that the O's should be following with Bedard. They control him for 2 more years. They have the upper hand! He has no choice but to accept what he gets in arbitration if the O's won't trade him or offer him an extension, and that represents a considerable degree of risk for Mr. Bedard. He's not going to go broke, but he's made approximately $6M as a ballplayer up to this point and will probably double that (roughly) if he goes to arbitration. By signing a reasonable extension with the O's now, he can triple or quadruple the amount of his contract that will be guaranteed, not at risk to the vagaries of pitching injuries. He signs the extension and transfers the risk to the O's, who can choose to insure part of it and, in any case, can spread the risk around over all their current contracts. (The losses on the arms that fail are offset somewhat by getting bargain prices on the ones that don't break.)

Erik can gamble on getting a $50M to $100M (or higher) bonanza when he reaches free agency, but he's taking the risk of never getting there with his arm intact. There's a good chance that he will, but it's not particularly wise for a player to assume all that risk. He would be gambling between a $100M payday and having to settle for the $6M or so he could get this year, when he could sign a 3-4 extension with a club option for an additional year for somewhere between $20M and $30M guaranteed, with the assurance that he will have the opportunity for another very rich contract in 2-4 years if he remains healthy and pitching well enough that the O's want to get him signed to another extension.

[Delduck]

No, its actually quite different. A backup catcher who can't hit his weight is not ever likely to hit 60 homers. Saying that a guy who is currently dominating the league (injuries aside) "could" pitch another 12 years is much more based in reality. Like somone else said...I would hate to speak to ANY of the men in the HOF, or who have ever played 20 years in the bigs, and tell them that "statistically speaking" they should have started to decline half way through their major league career. In general you may be right, but suggesting that every guy who is 28, 29, 30 should be traded as if its some magical bean is just ludicrous!

You must spread around reputation.

[ON BASE %]

In regards to Bedard and Roberts the Orioles should:

1. Trade them both for high value packages with young impact players

2. If unable to trade, extend them to reasonable contracts

3. If unable to trade or extend, then accept draft choices when Bedard/Roberts depart.

The only relevant deadline for trading them is July 31, 2009.

For me, the top priority is to build a strong minor league organization from the ground up. The purpose of this minor league organization is to enable the Orioles to have sustained success at the MLB level. Therefore the primary areas of the Orioles focus should be:

1. Player Development

2. International Scouting and Free Agents (Including Japanese players who are MLB ready and don't have draft pick compensation.)

3. Amateur Scouting

4. Professional Scouting

5. Advance Scouting

6. Avoidance of signing Type A free agents who cost draft picks.

7. Efficiency in negotiating MLB contracts (maximize dollar per Win).

Whether the MLB team is competitive in 2009, 2010, or afterwards is irrellevant to me. Let's build a strong minor league foundation and go from there.

[Delduck]

It would take less than 30 minutes for anyone with a clue to figure out what kind of offer he is worth and what level you are willing to go.

BTW, are you going to answer my question? 6/110 contract for Bedard..Yes or no?

For the love of God man can you just give it a rest, and stop with the baiting posts?

[wildcard]

I've had this post saved in Notepad all day long yesterday, trying to finish it up. Now I'm just going to post what I've got, and maybe I'll never get around to finishing what I had planned to say. Some will probably be relieved.

First of all, thank you for a very thoughtful and detailed response. I'm not going to respond to each of your comments due to lack of time and because some of them don't really require a response, but I am going to address a few of them specifically, not necessarily in the order that you gave them.

The thing you may not have realized is that I wanted to get under people's skins -- to break them out of this defeatist funk which I perceive as dogging the O's fan base, if not the organization overall. I wanted to break through your despondancy; the cyberspace equivalent of a slap in the face or a cold bucket of water over your head. I wasn't trying to offend or insult anyone -- just to get your attention.

I will readily concede that I am not as knowledgeable about the Orioles organization, personnel, and players as many of the other posters in this forum. If I provide any value on this forum at all, it has to be from my perspective as an outside observer who can see things differently because I'm not viewing them through the distorted prism of a diehard Orioles fan. I like the Orioles, but I don't live and die by their success to anywhere near the extent that I do with the Cardinals.

In my business, which is security, there is enormous value in being able to "think outside the box". Most people aren't very good at doing that. In 1994, Tom Clancey wrote Debt of Honor in which he crashed a Boeing 747 into the Capitol building as an unguided missile, yet in 2001 our country's anti-terrorist bureaucrats still had not incorporated that obviously plausible scenario into their defenses and airline crews were still being trained to "cooperate" with hijackers in the hope that negotiators could get them to release hostages unharmed. In 1996, a blue ribbon airline safety panel chaired by Al Gore delivered a report on anti-terrorism which ignored the concept entirely -- a scant 2 years after Clancy's book. The Department of Defense had contingency plans which considered the consequences of a suicide bomber crashing a small private plane into the Pentagon and terrorists had been hijacking airliners for over 30 years, yet no one in a position of authority to do anything about it was able to take that extremely small step which was necessary to envision 9/11.

Right now, I see a lot of Orioles fans whose minds are trapped inside of a box where they can't conceive of near term success with Bedard and Roberts, so they're determined to chase a will-o-wisp down the road in the form of "blowing the team up" and acquiring as many prospects as possible for the blue chips the team already possesses.

Losing is depressive. Too much of it alters the state of the mind, and gets people so gloomy that expectations of further failures become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Reasonable possibilities -- like using hijacked airliners as human guided missiles -- can't even be recognized.

Now maybe I'm wrong in how I perceive the overall state of the O's fan base posting in this forum -- and by extension, the rest of Orioles nation -- but I think the 10 losing seasons have cultured an attitude of despair where fans have become blinded to what should be realistic expectations for the team. That defeatist attitude can permeate the environment, conditioning team executives and players to expect to lose because that's all the fan base believes they're capable of. I think that you see it demonstrated where fans like Sports Guy are already getting ready to plaster the "failure label on McPhail even before the first warm up pitch is thrown in spring training.

Earlier in this thread, I gave several examples of teams which turned their fortunes around within a year or two and the typical response is "yes, but this organization is different. It's so bad that it can't turn around or "we're in such a competitive division". Sorry, but I'm not buying those excuses. There are a lot of good players in the Orioles organization who can be developed into winners and the turn around can be remarkable if the organization can borrow the philosophy of Tug McGraw, "Ya gotta believe!"

I can see the Roberts trade being desirable (and I'd love the Cardinals to get him, though I'm not willing to give up Rasmus for him), but it's very, very difficult for me to see a team trading off the likes of Bedard. To me, given how difficult it is to develop an "ace" and how long teams go between having legitimate "aces", any team with a prospect of competing within the next five is stupid to trade off an ace for prospects unless the other team is willing to grossly overpay for said ace. It would be like the Cardinals trading off Albert Pujols because they fell below .500 last season and the outlook for 2008 is pretty bleak right now.

We had a saying in St. Louis during the 1997-1999 time frame, "Don't waste the McGwire years", when the team was really mediocre due in large part to injuries depleting the pitching staff in 1997 (Matt Morris, Alan Benes, Donovan Osborne) and the botched contract negotiations which led to Andy Benes departing when he'd made it very clear to Boras that he very much wanted to remain in St. Louis. Well, the McGwire years did get wasted in terms of success on the field -- even though the box office blossomed with the "big meat patty show" -- primarily because Walt Jocketty dilly dallied around and was never able to address the shortfall in pitching. There are still Cardinals fans convinced that the Cardinals structured their team more to protect McGwire and give him maximum opportunity to break the home run record than they did to win games. In fact, that was when La Russa first introduced his innovation of batting the pitcher 8th, to increase the probability that there would be a runner on first when McGwire came up to bat, making it less likely he would draw an intentional pass.

But the Cardinals came together all of a sudden in the 2000 season, and they did it without Matt Morris or Alan Benes coming back, with McGwire's knees hobbled so bad that the Cardinals collected insurance on his salary, with Fernando Tatis's career going into freefall after a devastating groin injury, and with Albert Pujols still dominating the MVP race in the lower A Midwest League. Daryl Kile made a big comeback from his Coors experience; Pat Hentgen provided a veteran presence and ate up a bunch of innings, Garrett Stephenson somehow pasted 3 good months of pitching into a 16 win season; Rick Ankiel led the team in ERA and placed 2nd in the ROY race, and Andy Benes managed to hobble out there on arthritic knees until early August when a rookie named Britt Reames stepped in and capably filled Andy's spot the remainder of the season. The 7 starts Reames made were the only starts by anyone not in the opening day rotation! That's the kind of breaks which allow a 75-86 team to suddenly become a 95-67 team in just one season, and I'm of the opinion that the 2008 O's are more capable of that kind of a turn around than most of you are willing to give them credit for.

Of course, but every pitcher that you draft is a real long shot to ever reach the level that Bedard is at. He's there, and he very likely will remain at that level if he's not injured. That's why the O's need to find a way to make Bedard a part of their long term future. It doesn't have to be 12-13 years; 4-5 years would be more than enough to dramatically turn the fortunes of the O's around, if Cabrera suddenly found the key to his mental discipline, if Loewen and Penn evolve the way Bedard has the last 2 seasons, if Guthrie is the real deal. As my post above on the 2000 Cardinals points out, a pitching staff is capable of jelling together pretty quickly (and coming apart just as quickly the following season ).

Sometimes it's difficult to appreciate the depths of pessimism which 10 years of losing can bring to a fan base.

I thought about including the Skins (whom I detest with a passion), but I thought suggesting O's fans turn to the Ravens for solace was funnier.

No, it doesn't. But it does illustrate how long it can take, and why you shouldn't be quite so quick to dispose of one. They don't grow on trees; the Yankees keep having that point driven into their skulls.

Perhaps, but you still will need them when you get ready to step up to that next level. If you really intend to win, these are the guys that you must hang onto at all costs.

There will always be the serendipitous acquisitions, but you can't count on those. You build a championship rotation by using all the tools you have available, not by pitching out your capstone because you're not quite ready to install it yet.

By the way, Chris is a classic example of the manipulation by the team to retain his services for a fraction of what he would have cost on the free agent market. You should look at his contract history at COTS -- an extremely frugal pitcher (for his quality) until the Cards decided to make it up to him for paying him so little and offered him a $65M/5 year contract a year earlier than was necessary. He promptly began the season with a sore elbow which necessitated TJ surgery.

By keeping their best players and developing more through judicious trades of players who are surplus or whom can be more easily replaced than an ace pitcher.

By not throwing away your bird in the hand on the gamble that you'll be able to trap a dozen or so replacements in the bush.

I disagree. It is a risk which the team HAS to take if they are really committed to winning. They're not like the Twins or D-Rays or A's; they can afford to commit a little payroll to sensible multi-year contracts and lock up the kind of players who can form a championship team.

Faint heart never won fair lady.

Which is precisely the strategy I'm arguing that the O's should be following with Bedard. They control him for 2 more years. They have the upper hand! He has no choice but to accept what he gets in arbitration if the O's won't trade him or offer him an extension, and that represents a considerable degree of risk for Mr. Bedard. He's not going to go broke, but he's made approximately $6M as a ballplayer up to this point and will probably double that (roughly) if he goes to arbitration. By signing a reasonable extension with the O's now, he can triple or quadruple the amount of his contract that will be guaranteed, not at risk to the vagaries of pitching injuries. He signs the extension and transfers the risk to the O's, who can choose to insure part of it and, in any case, can spread the risk around over all their current contracts. (The losses on the arms that fail are offset somewhat by getting bargain prices on the ones that don't break.)

Erik can gamble on getting a $50M to $100M (or higher) bonanza when he reaches free agency, but he's taking the risk of never getting there with his arm intact. There's a good chance that he will, but it's not particularly wise for a player to assume all that risk. He would be gambling between a $100M payday and having to settle for the $6M or so he could get this year, when he could sign a 3-4 extension with a club option for an additional year for somewhere between $20M and $30M guaranteed, with the assurance that he will have the opportunity for another very rich contract in 2-4 years if he remains healthy and pitching well enough that the O's want to get him signed to another extension.

Excellent post. It was well worth waiting all day to post it in the middle of the night.

The O's (and the O's fan base) need to take a more positive approach to becoming a winner. This pie in the sky, win some day approach is too wispy. Gillick turned the team around in an off season. To think it should take 4 or 5 years is a defeatist approach that may never come to a climate.

MacPhail is supposed to be a veteran club builder. Well let's see some club building in the short term. He's got the positive field manager. Keep the impact players and build around them. It is the fastest path to contention.

[Frobby]

The O's (and the O's fan base) need to take a more positive approach to becoming a winner. This pie in the sky, win some day approach is too wispy. Gillick turned the team around in an off season. To think it should take 4 or 5 years is a defeatist approach that may never come to a climate.

MacPhail is supposed to be a veteran club builder. Well let's see some club building in the short term. He's got the positive field manager. Keep the impact players and build around them. It is the fastest path to contention.

Gillick inherited a team that had finished substantially over .500 in 1992, 1993 and 1994, and finished 2 games under .500 in 1995. That is a little different from inheriting a team that has finished under .500 ten years in a row, has gotten worse three years in a row, and finished 24 games under .500 last year.

P.S. -- That 1995 team that Gillick inherited actually outscored its opponents 704-640. The pythagorean record for that team was 12 games over .500. Poor managing by Phil Regan was the downfall of that team.

[NoVaO]

Right now, I see a lot of Orioles fans whose minds are trapped inside of a box where they can't conceive of near term success with Bedard and Roberts, so they're determined to chase a will-o-wisp down the road in the form of "blowing the team up" and acquiring as many prospects as possible for the blue chips the team already possesses.

Being realistic here, it is hard to conceive this team succeeding in the near term. Most objective people would agree with that. We can hope for success, but the chances are we are not going to have short term success. Anything could happen, but I still wouldn't change my mind about blowing it up.

Now maybe I'm wrong in how I perceive the overall state of the O's fan base posting in this forum -- and by extension, the rest of Orioles nation -- but I think the 10 losing seasons have cultured an attitude of despair where fans have become blinded to what should be realistic expectations for the team. That defeatist attitude can permeate the environment, conditioning team executives and players to expect to lose because that's all the fan base believes they're capable of. I think that you see it demonstrated where fans like Sports Guy are already getting ready to plaster the "failure label on McPhail even before the first warm up pitch is thrown in spring training.

I'm not labeling anybody a failure. SG comes off as brash and may jump the gun sometimes, but his overall view of the direction this franchise needs to go is absolutely correct. Yes, there is a losing environment here. There is a negative culture. A lot of that negative culture is still in the Oriole clubhouse. This team has trotted out old, underachieving, and overpaid players for years now. I'm tired of watching that. If we are going to lose, lets lose with young players that play with energy and have the upside to get better.

Earlier in this thread, I gave several examples of teams which turned their fortunes around within a year or two and the typical response is "yes, but this organization is different. It's so bad that it can't turn around or "we're in such a competitive division". Sorry, but I'm not buying those excuses. There are a lot of good players in the Orioles organization who can be developed into winners and the turn around can be remarkable if the organization can borrow the philosophy of Tug McGraw, "Ya gotta believe!"

The difference of talent in the NL Central and West is absolutely a legit reason why some of those teams did as well as they did.

Another difference: most of these teams had farm systems rated in the top-10 overall for 3 or more consecutive years before finally competing. Most of these teams had much more upside than we do, much more talent.

You're going to have to take my word for it. This is a bad team. It wouldn't be so bad if this team had some upside to it, but sadly they don't. This is an old, bad team. We have some nice pieces, but there isn't nearly enough here and there is much less than what the other teams you site had.

I can see the Roberts trade being desirable (and I'd love the Cardinals to get him, though I'm not willing to give up Rasmus for him), but it's very, very difficult for me to see a team trading off the likes of Bedard. To me, given how difficult it is to develop an "ace" and how long teams go between having legitimate "aces", any team with a prospect of competing within the next five is stupid to trade off an ace for prospects unless the other team is willing to grossly overpay for said ace. It would be like the Cardinals trading off Albert Pujols because they fell below .500 last season and the outlook for 2008 is pretty bleak right now.

Here is the thing...I've gone through what Bedard's value is in the short term and I don't think we will be competitive while Bedard is pitching at his current level, so I'm not going to rehash that.

But to turn this around, how difficult is it to find a gold glove CF with a star level bat? The Orioles haven't developed one of those since Brady Anderson. There are not many gold glove and excellent hitting CFs out there. That is what Adam Jones represents. Yes, there is some risk to prospects, but the risk is significantly reduced when you are dealing with:

1. A hitter

2. A hitter that scouts feel has the tools to be a star in this league

3. A hitter that has already destroyed AAA at age 21 in an extreme pitchers park.

And Pujols, as a hitter, is much more likely to be great for the next 8 years than Bedard is, though it wouldn't be the worst idea in the world to see what Pujols could fetch you.

Now, to counter:

any team with a prospect of competing within the next five is stupid to trade off an ace for prospects unless the other team is willing to grossly overpay for said ace.

Oakland traded two aces and managed to compete the next two years.

The Indians traded their ace in the middle of 2002 and competed 2 years later.

The Mariners traded their ace 99 and had 4 straight incredible seasons starting in 2001.

The Phillies traded their ace in 2000 and actually won 85 or more games in 6 of the next 7 years, though they only made the playoffs once.

As for you Cardinals team, yes you guys bounced back from a bad year. But you were also just three years removed from an 88-win season. You did have a phenom in Rick Ankiel, an all-star CF in Edmonds, a solid LF in Lankford, and a player similar to Markakis in Drew in RF. McGwire may have had bad knees, but he gave you an extremely productive 300 ABs and Tatis did as well.

In any case, why count on something that we can't actually expect on happening? And I'm not talking about this from a fan's point of view....I'm talking about realistically looking at how good this team is. If you are building a ball club, the last thing you want to do is rely on things that you are sure aren't going to happen unless you get a very fortunate string of good luck.

Of course, but every pitcher that you draft is a real long shot to ever reach the level that Bedard is at. He's there, and he very likely will remain at that level if he's not injured. That's why the O's need to find a way to make Bedard a part of their long term future. It doesn't have to be 12-13 years; 4-5 years would be more than enough to dramatically turn the fortunes of the O's around, if Cabrera suddenly found the key to his mental discipline, if Loewen and Penn evolve the way Bedard has the last 2 seasons, if Guthrie is the real deal. As my post above on the 2000 Cardinals points out, a pitching staff is capable of jelling together pretty quickly (and coming apart just as quickly the following season ).

The link I posted shows that for pitchers just as good as Bedard at the age he is right now, 25% of those pitchers aren't pitching four years later. Of the pitchers that are still pitching, the ERA shows a moderate increase, but the average amount of innings that pitcher throws is cut in half.

Unless I had a team that was ready to compete in the next two or three years, I would probably trade Bedard anyway if the price was right. With the player's involved in a deal for a player like Bedard, the chances that the deal doesn't turn out well is actually fairly low.

We are just going to have to agree to disagree on this. This is a philosophical difference of approach.

Sometimes it's difficult to appreciate the depths of pessimism which 10 years of losing can bring to a fan base.

You will rarely find an objective person outside the Oriole fanbase that disagrees with what I said in that quote.

I'm tired of playing the if game with this team. The team needs a new beginning.

By keeping their best players and developing more through judicious trades of players who are surplus or whom can be more easily replaced than an ace pitcher.

We don't really have a surplus of talent or have many assets to trade. And don't discount how good the talent is that we will get in return for Bedard.

I disagree. It is a risk which the team HAS to take if they are really committed to winning. They're not like the Twins or D-Rays or A's; they can afford to commit a little payroll to sensible multi-year contracts and lock up the kind of players who can form a championship team.

We don't have to take that risk at all. We can be the Twins, Rays and A's while having the resources that they do not. Its the best of both worlds.

Which is precisely the strategy I'm arguing that the O's should be following with Bedard. They control him for 2 more years. They have the upper hand! He has no choice but to accept what he gets in arbitration if the O's won't trade him or offer him an extension, and that represents a considerable degree of risk for Mr. Bedard. He's not going to go broke, but he's made approximately $6M as a ballplayer up to this point and will probably double that (roughly) if he goes to arbitration. By signing a reasonable extension with the O's now, he can triple or quadruple the amount of his contract that will be guaranteed, not at risk to the vagaries of pitching injuries. He signs the extension and transfers the risk to the O's, who can choose to insure part of it and, in any case, can spread the risk around over all their current contracts. (The losses on the arms that fail are offset somewhat by getting bargain prices on the ones that don't break.)

Again, the contract doesn't matter to me. My plan would be to trade Bedard even if he wants to sign an extension. That is my opinion on the best long term solution for the Orioles. If Jones reaches his potential, he alone will be more valuable than Bedard when you consider cost and years under control. The talent we get back shouldn't be discounted.

Erik can gamble on getting a $50M to $100M (or higher) bonanza when he reaches free agency, but he's taking the risk of never getting there with his arm intact. There's a good chance that he will, but it's not particularly wise for a player to assume all that risk. He would be gambling between a $100M payday and having to settle for the $6M or so he could get this year, when he could sign a 3-4 extension with a club option for an additional year for somewhere between $20M and $30M guaranteed, with the assurance that he will have the opportunity for another very rich contract in 2-4 years if he remains healthy and pitching well enough that the O's want to get him signed to another extension.

I don't think players like Bedard worry about getting injured. They are fully confident in themselves to stay healthy and expect to dominate all the way to pay day.

Either way, we simply have a fundamental disagreement here. If history is any guide, we should expect to come out on top or at least have a win-win situation with the team we trade Bedard to. For a team in the Orioles' state, the answer is simple to what we need to do. But we will just have agree to disagree here.

[Sports Guy]

For the love of God man can you just give it a rest, and stop with the baiting posts?

Part of his plan would be to sign Bedard yet he doesn't know for how much.....I am just trying to see what he wants to do. And from there, i want to know what his plan B is, if Bedard wants too much money. That happens all the time on here..If he can't take it, he shouldn't be posting here.

Ignore me then and stop with the trolling.

[Migrant Redbird]

Being realistic here, it is hard to conceive this team succeeding in the near term. Most objective people would agree with that.

Despite reading my "excellent post" (as wildcard called it), your thinking is still trapped inside a box. You're not objective. You're thinking like a loser!

There is less qualitative difference among major league baseball teams than you realize. I don't have time this morning to give examples, but Tom Tango's The Book provides a very good explanation about the normal random deviations in season performance which will occur among healthy players whose skill sets are exactly the same (to the extent that's possible) from season to season. The difference between losing and winning seasons is more often the result of injuries and random deviation than it is the perspicuity of a GM or the savvy of his manager.

Another difference: most of these teams had farm systems rated in the top-10 overall for 3 or more consecutive years before finally competing.

The Cardinals farm system has been rated towards the bottom half of the bottom half by "experts" for more years than I care to remember. I could show you some statistics which appear to indicate that might not have been true, but I've spent too much time with a colleague trying to explain why they don't "prove" the converse -- that the Cards organization was actually superior over that time frame -- to get into that much depth here. Suffice it to say that we're just looking for excuses here for losing, and if one should be be discredited, the pessimists will simply trot out a dozen more.

But to turn this around, how difficult is it to find a gold glove CF with a star level bat? The Orioles haven't developed one of those since Brady Anderson.

It's been longer than that since the Cardinals have.

Uh, let's see. I recall the Edmonds trade very well. There were many of us at the time who didn't like it. The Cardinals traded an 18 game winner and a prize 2nd base prospect for a fragile center fielder who had only played 55 games the previous season.

I also recall another Cardinals fan who was quite happy with the trade when it occurred; he pointed out to me that our "18 game winner" had never put up any season like that before -- that he'd never pitched anywhere near that level of innings before -- that his arm was in shreds before the end of the season -- and that we were lucky to be getting rid of him before he broke down. Turned out my friend was quite astute.

We got incredibly lucky on the Edmonds trade! (Or Walt Jocketty was a lot smarter than I give any GM credit for being.) Kent Bottenfield was a journeyman reliever and swingman starter who had an incredible career year (for him) in 1999. Kent did win 18 games, but 14 of those came before the All Star break and he limped down the stretch with his arm about to fall out as La Russa kept running him out there, start after start, pursuing that elusive 20 win season. Kent's arm was so devastated by that 1999 season that he was out of baseball entirely within 2 years, having won only 10 more games after leaving the Cards, and is now a gospel singer.

As for you Cardinals team, yes you guys bounced back from a bad year. But you were also just three years removed from an 88-win season.

That's completely irrelevant! You see what I mean about trotting out excuse after tired excuse?

There were only 3 common elements of any significance between the 1996 and the 2000 team:

- A HOF manager with a .472 winning percentage over the 3 year gap;

- Ray Lankford, our "All Star center fielder" in 1997, whose defense had deteriorated sufficiently from injuries that he was relegated to left in 1999 and 2000, who only played in 128 games and batted just .253 (116 OPS+, though)

- Andy Benes, who finished 3rd in the CYA in 1996, but was so hobbled by an arthritic knee that he broke down completely in August and was replaced by a rookie so lightly regarded that the Cardinals traded him off that winter as a "throw-in".

You did have a phenom in Rick Ankiel,

A rookie who won 11 games.

an all-star CF in Edmonds,

The "fragile flower" in Anaheim managed to remain relatively healthy in St. Louis for 6 monster seasons in St. Louis. It happens. We got lucky. Who's to say that the O's can't too?

a solid LF in Lankford,...

Solid? LanKKKKford? A broken down center fielder who managed to give us 128 games in left that season, but hardly "solid".

and a player similar to Markakis in Drew in RF.

I would argue that Drew was significantly superior to Markakis in everything except durability and -- possibly -- attitude, but he had a manager who persisted in yanking him from the lineup every time he would begin to get into a groove at the plate.

McGwire may have had bad knees, but he gave you an extremely productive 300 ABs....

Mark was on the DL from July 6th to September 8th and was only used as a pinch hitter the remainder of the season and post season. The salvaging grace was the acquisition of the "washed up" Will Clark from the O's. Will had an incredible swan song over the last 1/3 of the 2000 season with the Cards.

and Tatis did as well.

You might want to look at that "extremely productive 300 at bats" again.

Tatis had an incredible 1999 season and he was off to a fast start in 2000. He came in to field a ground ball on the 29th of April and pulled a groin muscle, and was never a productive major league hitter again. Yes, he came back at the end of June and managed a few lucky hits in July, but he was below the Mendoza line in August and September.

That 2000 lineup was pasted together with strings and sealing wax (and maybe a little Mary Jane). The incredibly fortuitous circumstance which made that particular season was a rotation that somehow managed to make all but 7 starts with the original opening day rotation.

Ankiel was a phenom, but he was throwing too many pitches and not going deeply enough into games because he had some minor control problems.

Kile won 20 games pitching with a partially blocked coronary artery which eventually killed him.

Andy Benes was pitching on an arthritic knee with no cartilege.

Garrett Stephenson alternated great months with terrible ones, and was probably just the inheritor of Bottenfield's luck.

And Pat Hentgen was the veteran innings eater, who gave out at the end of the season.

In any case, why count on something that we can't actually expect on happening?

That's exactly what I'm talking about with this delusion that stocking the system with a bunch of prospects is magically going to deliver the O's to the promised land.

If you are building a ball club, the last thing you want to do is rely on things that you are sure aren't going to happen unless you get a very fortunate string of good luck.

I give up!

I'm not sure about anything which will happen with the O's except that they've got a bunch of fans with closed minds who aren't going to open them until after the O's somehow manage to pull off a winning season or two.

[Frobby]

I'm not sure about anything which will happen with the O's except that they've got a bunch of fans with closed minds who aren't going to open them until after the O's somehow manage to pull off a winning season or two.

I'm plenty open-minded. Open-minded enough to argue against going into big-time rebuilding mode for the last 2-1/2 years, and then change my mind after seeing the team get worse and worse. The figures don't lie:

78 wins

74 wins

71 wins

69 wins

Analogies to the Cardinals are not apt. The Cardinals have not had 4 losing seasons in a row since 1910.

[wildcard]

Gillick inherited a team that had finished substantially over .500 in 1992, 1993 and 1994, and finished 2 games under .500 in 1995. That is a little different from inheriting a team that has finished under .500 ten years in a row, has gotten worse three years in a row, and finished 24 games under .500 last year.

P.S. -- That 1995 team that Gillick inherited actually outscored its opponents 704-640. The pythagorean record for that team was 12 games over .500. Poor managing by Phil Regan was the downfall of that team.

Agreed. However, Gillick was very aggressive in putting the O's into contention. Maybe it should take MacPhail a couple of years, but if he is good like Gillick was it should not take him 3-5 years to the O's in contention if he goes about it the right way. MacPhail just has to make better decisions then have been made in the past. He is already shown that to a certain extent.

[ON BASE %]

Excellent post. It was well worth waiting all day to post it in the middle of the night.

The O's (and the O's fan base) need to take a more positive approach to becoming a winner. This pie in the sky, win some day approach is too wispy. Gillick turned the team around in an off season. To think it should take 4 or 5 years is a defeatist approach that may never come to a climate.

MacPhail is supposed to be a veteran club builder. Well let's see some club building in the short term. He's got the positive field manager. Keep the impact players and build around them. It is the fastest path to contention.

It's about sustained success, not the quick and easy path. Build a strong organization from the bottom up. If Bedard and Roberts stay to be a part of it, fine. If not, that's ok too.

[Sports Guy]

Yes, he has shown that to some extent. And he continues to show it by trying to trade Roberts & Bedard. Is there any doubt in your mind, that he wants to trade them?

Not only does he want to trade those 2(and has already traded Miggy), he has shopped Mora, Millar, Payton and Ramon....I am sure he would love to move Gibbons and Huff as well.

Really, the only vets he doesn't seem to be looking to trade are Bradford and Walker.

AM wants to change this roster over in a big way....He wants 5-7 new offensive starters and new rotation and BP arms.

That should be obvious to everyone and it is the obvious correct approach. Now, whether he accomplishes it or not remains to be seen.

[Frobby]

Agreed. However, Gillick was very aggressive in putting the O's into contention. Maybe it should take MacPhail a couple of years, but if he is good like Gillick was it should not take him 3-5 years to the O's in contention if he goes about it the right way. MacPhail just has to make better decisions then have been made in the past. He is already shown that to a certain extend.

Gillick was very aggressive, but he had a much easier job in front of him. And after 2 years the fun was over and the team was ready for the scrap heap.

I don't mean to sound quite as negative as I do. If the young pitching suddenly gelled, I might change my tune very quickly. But frankly, I've been saying that for 4 years now.

[Dipper9]

Not only does he want to trade those 2(and has already traded Miggy), he has shopped Mora, Millar, Payton and Ramon....I am sure he would love to move Gibbons and Huff as well.

Really, the only vets he doesn't seem to be looking to trade are Bradford and Walker.

AM wants to change this roster over in a big way....He wants 5-7 new offensive starters and new rotation and BP arms.

That should be obvious to everyone and it is the obvious correct approach. Now, whether he accomplishes it or not remains to be seen.

Yeah, he wants to do alot. he just hasn't done it yet! Time is running out!