Don’t you wish that just once....

[Ohfan67]

40 minutes ago, Redskins Rick said:

Of course, we have gone off the subject of drafting guys as TOR and developing them.

 

OMG! A thread on an Internet forum includes off topic posts!  It’s a first!!  but seriously, I agree and almost deleted post right after I posted. My bad. 

[LookitsPuck]

Well, you can't draft TOR guys if you don't have the draft picks. 

[tntoriole]

12 minutes ago, LookitsPuck said:

Well, yeah. But look at the Indians club. 

• Kluber - $7.7m
• Carrasco - $6.5m
• Bauer - $3.5m 
• Tomlin - $2.5m
• Clevinger - League minimum?

...I mean they have one of the (if not the) best rotations in baseball. Their combined salary from 2017 was less than Sabathia's by nearly $5m.

And even with where we are now...suppose Harvey adds as much in 2019 as Bundy and Gausman and then one more from the system by 2019, say a rejuvenated Sedlock or Akins  moves up enough to be a solid 4 or 5 starting contributor...well that is the way to build a controllable rotation.  Got to find them from your draft picks. 

[Redskins Rick]

8 minutes ago, LookitsPuck said:

Well, you can't draft TOR guys if you don't have the draft picks. 

TORs are typically drafted in the 1st round, and the Orioles have done that. Bundy, Gausman, Harvey, Sedlock.

They didnt have a 1st round pick in 2014.

[twinedenter]

1 hour ago, LookitsPuck said:

Yes, but I also think the way that the O's handle player acquisitions feeds into this issue, too.

If Duquette doesn't trade picks along with players for salary relief or an overpay, maybe we have more chances to get a potential TOR starter. Examples: the Bud Norris trade, Ryan Webb trade, Brian Matusz trade, etc.

And then there's Duquette's recent inability to sign free agent starting pitchers. We lost a 1st rounder for Ubaldo f'ing Jimenez. We lost a 1st rounder for an injured Yovani Gallardo. 

And there are a number of trades that were ill advised at the least...and idiotic at the most. One of the big ones that sticks out is trading Davies for Parra when the team had no business of "going for it" especially if they thought "going for it" was acquiring a guy ripe for regression like Parra.

...and then there's how the Orioles overpay/hold on to the wrong players instead of letting them walk for draft picks. The Chris Davis signing was an absolute blunder. Maybe signing him for nearly half of what he got would have been fine, but $160m+? Jesus. Resigning Mark Trumbo was a blunder. 

I don't care what anybody says, but not flipping Jim Johnson after 2012 when he was still 29 and relatively affordable (he made $2.7m) was irresponsible. Instead Duquette held on to him and then traded him to the Athletics for nothing when he was at a $10m salary.

It's not like Duquette *can't* be effective when making trades/acquiring starters. Examples: Miguel Gonzalez, Wei-Yin Chen and Jason Hammel.  But he hasn't been effective in quite a long time.

We've shot ourself in the foot quite a few times outside of the above, too. The way this club handled Arrieta and the merry-go-round of pitching coaches didn't help. Not allowing him to use his cutter didn't help. Having an insane infatuation with time to plate didn't help. And guess what? A lot of that is on Showalter, although the cutter nonsense is 100% on Duquette and his disciples that he hired that pushed it.

Allow me to add a few things:

-Coming out of 14, where we had a legitimate shot, they let Cruz go, ok I get, 4 years whatever. HOWEVER, Duquette's attempt to replace Cruz's stats, was guys like Snider/DeAza. Relying on HOPE to get back there. The result, the worst OF in baseball, a pitching regression, which EVERYONE predicted, and a missed playoff opportunity. 

-Coming out of 15', a season where the roster was allowed to get worse on paper, Duquette releases Miggy and added Gallardo. I guess Gallardo's over 6 ERA the second half of 15' wasn't enough to deter Duquette from offering him a 3 year deal. What happens? Miggy has a WAR higher than Ubaldo AND Gallardo combined. We back into the playoffs, with the 25th ranked rotation in baseball, despite having signed 2 FA starters = 25 mil

-Coming out of 2016, 25th ranked rotation gets NO upgrade. Again, there is that Hope as a strategy we see from Duquette. What happens, the WORST rotation in O's HISTORY is the result and he has the audacity to say that the players need to pitch better? Really? I love the "He couldn't have predicted the decline". 

-Miley; Undependable to say theleast

-Ubaldo; Undependable to say the least

Tilly: Coming back off of an injury

Knowing these 3 issues with the pitchers and having the 25th ranked rotation, doesn't tell you that you need to upgrade? That's incompetence, period. If its money, someone gets traded for pitching or money to get it. 

Duquette has made a few good moves, maybe even more than a few, but for the most part, he has failed.

-His mistakes have been big ones. 15 and 17 were a joke from a roster management perspective. 

-6 years of drafting and we have had 2 guys make ANY impact on the big league roster

-8th highest payroll - 7 games under .500 and the last 3 years record: 4 over, with this inherited core? Sad...

[hoosiers]

1 hour ago, Redskins Rick said:

Who was the first round pick turn out to be?

Hoes has a -.4 WAR with Houston

Hader did a 1.9 WAR with the Brewers

Bud was 1.9 and then -1.5 and -.3 with the team. He was very solid in 2014, and helped them win the division.

So far not a huge overpay, but could be depending on the pick and Hader.

Hoes never really flip the meter for me one way or another.

 

We paid Norris $15M for .1 WAR.

Hader is 1.9 WAR at the league minimum and will be spending his first full year in the majors in 2018 and will be under team control for years.  

Then there's that first round pick.  

End of day, this could look like 10 WAR at less than $10M plus a high draft pick for them; .1 WAR for $15M for us.

Gotta love the "so far".  It makes the deal look less worse because what we gave us is long since gone, and the benefits the other team is enjoying is just starting.  Classic.

[LookitsPuck]

46 minutes ago, tntoriole said:

And even with where we are now...suppose Harvey adds as much in 2019 as Bundy and Gausman and then one more from the system by 2019, say a rejuvenated Sedlock or Akins  moves up enough to be a solid 4 or 5 starting contributor...well that is the way to build a controllable rotation.  Got to find them from your draft picks. 

Yeah, but we desperately need impact depth. 2017 was an embarrassment in that Duquette pushed (and wanted to push further) Bundy far past what most industry experts thought was acceptable. Luckily for Bundy the O's fell apart in the last 2 months, so he was spared another 20-30 innings.

2017 was also a major problem because the cupboards were barren. Nobody that came up was effective. All of the supposed "depth" for starters was largely ineffective and honestly doesn't look impactful in the future (examples: Chris Lee).

I hope you're right about Sedlock and/or Akins. But if we're completely banking on Harvey, Bundy, Gausman, Sedlock and/or Akins, we're going to be in for a long 2018. There needs to be impact depth in the minors because how often does a rotation really stay healthy? We've seen Gausman with his stints over the years. Bundy w/ Tommy John. Harvey with Tommy John. There's no saying that Sedlock or Akins will remain healthy let alone be effective.

[tntoriole]

7 minutes ago, hoosiers said:

We paid Norris $15M for .1 WAR.

Hader is 1.9 WAR at the league minimum and will be spending his first full year in the majors in 2018 and will be under team control for years.  

Then there's that first round pick.  

End of day, this could look like 10 WAR at less than $10M plus a high draft pick for them; .1 WAR for $15M for us.

Gotta love the "so far".  It makes the deal look less worse because what we gave us is long since gone, and the benefits the other team is enjoying is just starting.  Classic.

Exactly...and here is the kind of flawed "analysis" that went on at the time of the deal.....Oh yes, when oh when are those Houston Astros going to win anything?   lol. 

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1723222-winners-losers-of-bud-norris-trade-involving-houston-astros-baltimore-orioles

 

[Redskins Rick]

7 minutes ago, hoosiers said:

We paid Norris $15M for .1 WAR.

Hader is 1.9 WAR at the league minimum and will be spending his first full year in the majors in 2018 and will be under team control for years.  

Then there's that first round pick.  

End of day, this could look like 10 WAR at less than $10M plus a high draft pick for them; .1 WAR for $15M for us.

Gotta love the "so far".  It makes the deal look less worse because what we gave us is long since gone, and the benefits the other team is enjoying is just starting.  Classic.

I love how you selectively pick your metrics.

Bud was paid 5.3 million and had a 1.9 WAR, which is under value and was a vital clog in that 2014 WS run.

Bud was then paid 8.8m and didnt do as well.

If Bud had stayed healthy and stayed in that 1.9 range, all would be good now.

Did you not enjoy the 2014 WS run?

 

[tntoriole]

1 minute ago, LookitsPuck said:

Yeah, but we desperately need impact depth. 2017 was an embarrassment in that Duquette pushed (and wanted to push further) Bundy far past what most industry experts thought was acceptable. Luckily for Bundy the O's fell apart in the last 2 months, so he was spared another 20-30 innings.

2017 was also a major problem because the cupboards were barren. Nobody that came up was effective. All of the supposed "depth" for starters was largely ineffective and honestly doesn't look impactful in the future (examples: Chris Lee).

I hope you're right about Sedlock and/or Akins. But if we're completely banking on Harvey, Bundy, Gausman, Sedlock and/or Akins, we're going to be in for a long 2018. There needs to be impact depth in the minors because how often does a rotation really stay healthy? We've seen Gausman with his stints over the years. Bundy w/ Tommy John. Harvey with Tommy John. There's no saying that Sedlock or Akins will remain healthy let alone be effective.

I agree.... still there are plenty of pitchers who do stay healthy for years and perform effectively even after TJ surgery.    It could collapse with injury and for sure we definitely need to hoard and stockpile true minor league pitching depth.  The problem is as soon as we had someone who was marginally effective at AAA, our needs at the big league level would bring them up where they would then fail... Mike Wright, Tyler Wilson, Gabriel Ynoa, etc.   

That is why I got more aggravated than any move DD made when they cut Miggy Gonzalez...not for the immediate effects though they were bad enough, but that he was a guy that would enable you to get and keep some pitching depth at the minor league level for a few years because he filled a 4/5 slot perfectly adequately.  

[Can_of_corn]

1 minute ago, Redskins Rick said:

I love how you selectively pick your metrics.

Bud was paid 5.3 million and had a 1.9 WAR, which is under value and was a vital clog in that 2014 WS run.

Bud was then paid 8.8m and didnt do as well.

If Bud had stayed healthy and stayed in that 1.9 range, all would be good now.

Did you not enjoy the 2014 WS run?

 

So you are blaming it on health eh?

I call 2014 a career year. 

[Redskins Rick]

1 minute ago, Can_of_corn said:

So you are blaming it on health eh?

I call 2014 a career year. 

a 1.4 and 1.8 WAR with the Astros and a very poor team.

Nobody would ever mistake him for a TOR, but he looked like a solid MOR arm.

[Ohfan67]

Back to the thread topic: I'm curious just how relatively bad the Orioles have been at drafting and developing a TOR starter. We are sometimes to quick to dump on the Orioles and exaggerate just how bad things are. I'm sure Frobby or someone else on the board has dug into this before, so there must be an old OH thread comparing WAR or something like that for relevant pitchers from the Orioles versus other teams? After not finding a good study

 

Quick factoids: 

Following this guy's lead, a TOR is a pitcher with WAR > 4 for the season. http://www.espn.com/blog/sweetspot/post/_/id/47883/defining-rotation-slots-in-terms-of-war

Easy to argue the merit of that standard, but roughly speaking it seems like a "good enough" threshold. According to fan graphs, there were 14 of these guys in 2017. Just a quick glance at leaderboards over a ten year period or so suggests that there's often 15 - 18 or so of these guys with some outlier years (e.g., I think there were more than 20 in 2012). I went through league leaders in WAR for pitchers for about 12 - 15 years looking for an Oriole pitcher with a season WAR over 4. It's a very disheartening exercise. I think Erik Bedard's 2006 and 2007 seasons were the last > 4 WAR seasons for an Orioles pitcher. I could be wrong because after a while the computer screen was hard to read through my tears, but I think you have to go back ten years to just find a SEASON that would qualify as TOR (and Bedard only had two of those, so it's arguable that Bedard wasn't a true TOR starter). Tillman didn't come close. I didn't look at all of the Orioles pitchers over the last ten years, but there's a chance that Britton's 2.5 WAR 2016 season is the highest WAR of any Orioles pitcher since Bedard left (Tillman's career best was 2.4 in 2016). Sad, so, so sad. 

[Ohfan67]

p.s. Baseball Ref and Fangraph calculates WAR differently and it seems that Fangraphs WAR values are lower than BR's. So, if you use BR's WAR you have to move the cutoff a little higher. For example, Tillman's 2016 Baseball Ref WAR was 4.1 in 2016. A lot of you probably know that the two sites use different WAR calculations, but I did not until today.

[Redskins Rick]

3 minutes ago, Ohfan67 said:

Back to the thread topic: I'm curious just how relatively bad the Orioles have been at drafting and developing a TOR starter. We are sometimes to quick to dump on the Orioles and exaggerate just how bad things are. I'm sure Frobby or someone else on the board has dug into this before, so there must be an old OH thread comparing WAR or something like that for relevant pitchers from the Orioles versus other teams? After not finding a good study

 

Quick factoids: 

Following this guy's lead, a TOR is a pitcher with WAR > 4 for the season. http://www.espn.com/blog/sweetspot/post/_/id/47883/defining-rotation-slots-in-terms-of-war

Easy to argue the merit of that standard, but roughly speaking it seems like a "good enough" threshold. According to fan graphs, there were 14 of these guys in 2017. Just a quick glance at leaderboards over a ten year period or so suggests that there's often 15 - 18 or so of these guys with some outlier years (e.g., I think there were more than 20 in 2012). I went through league leaders in WAR for pitchers for about 12 - 15 years looking for an Oriole pitcher with a season WAR over 4. It's a very disheartening exercise. I think Erik Bedard's 2006 and 2007 seasons were the last > 4 WAR seasons for an Orioles pitcher. I could be wrong because after a while the computer screen was hard to read through my tears, but I think you have to go back ten years to just find a SEASON that would qualify as TOR (and Bedard only had two of those, so it's arguable that Bedard wasn't a true TOR starter). Tillman didn't come close. I didn't look at all of the Orioles pitchers over the last ten years, but there's a chance that Britton's 2.5 WAR 2016 season is the highest WAR of any Orioles pitcher since Bedard left (Tillman's career best was 2.4 in 2016). Sad, so, so sad. 

Bedard in 2007 with a 5.7 WAR of course was worthy of being a TOR.

He had some of the best stuff of any active pitcher in that era. Piss poor team, and he still went 13-5, a WHIP of 1.08, also consider he was a 6th round pick playing at a community college, is pretty significant.

You go all the way back to Mussina, drafted 1st round, 7 years of WAR over 4, 1 year 3.6, and his high was 8.2.

His bad year was a 1.6

You got to go all the way back to 1990 for that gem.

Matusz came close, with a 3.0 WAR, but he wasn't close to being a TOR

I do think Bundy still has the making of being a true ace.