Good Week for A Sale?

[mdbdotcom]

The Winter Meetings are here, and the O's are already out of contention. It's hard to see how adding any combination of available starting pitchers (other than maybe both Darvish and Cobb) makes this team a contender.  So, maybe it's time for the owners to make 2018 a transition year.

Starting at the Winter Meetings, let's sell a bunch of players who are 30+ and/or won't be with the team when we next compete for the best prospects we can get. Here's my For Sale list:

• Richard Bleier
• Brad Brach
• Zach Britton
• Darren O’Day
• Manny Machado
• Adam Jones
• Mark Trumbo

Will they find buyers for all those players? Probably not. I didn't include Caleb Joseph because it will probably make the season a little more bearable to have a veteran catcher on hand. He can also serve as a mentor to Sisco/Wynns. And I didn't include Chris Davis because he is worth less than dirt. I left Schoop out for the slim chance that we could extend him.

Ideally we would already have in place the GM who will oversee the rebuild, but that isn't the case. So Duquette's task will have to be clear. Sell for the best prospects you can get.

Then we'll have a whole season to find a new GM who will oversee the rebuild and hire a manager he/she can work with who understands that we are in the 21st century. Once we dump some of those contracts, maybe we can also bring enough modern-thinking baseball people into the front office to have it function more like the really good teams do. We seem to be out-manned in every area from development to advanced scouting to turning analytics into action. Getting rid of one Mark Trumbo contract can make room for a whole lot of really good baseball people throughout the system -- this is not to say that we don't have some really good baseball people on board, we just don't have enough of them functioning as a winning team, seamless from warehouse to clubhouse.

We do have some promising talent that is MLB ready or close to it, and we should get pretty good returns for some of the players we would sell, so maybe the O's won't have to wait four or five yeas before putting a competitive team on the field again. That's my hope, anyway. Am I dreaming?

 

[esmd]

Yeah, with the way things have gone in the last week, it's time.  Move them while they still have value.  Just pray that DD does a helluva better job on the return take than Thrift did in 2000. 

[theobird]

it has been absolutely obvious for well over a year now that the time to sell was yesterday. Yes, its time to sell. The events of the last week have made it where only a clowns crew would continue with this "go for it in 2018" malarkey. That's why I expect the O's to sell nobody, and go for it in 2018.

[clapdiddy]

29 minutes ago, theobird said:

it has been absolutely obvious for well over a year now that the time to sell was yesterday. Yes, its time to sell. The events of the last week have made it where only a clowns crew would continue with this "go for it in 2018" malarkey. That's why I expect the O's to sell nobody, and go for it in 2018.

I'm afraid this is the likely direction.   Last offseason would have been the time to sell on Machado and Britton.