And that team still didn't win anything, and neither did any other team except Texas. Must be nice to hang your hat on something that has 29 out of 30 possibility of happening
You don’t he adds anyone?
This pen is not as bad as Texas was last year. They pitched well in playoffs.
You would think the team ERA is 12th in the AL. The playoffs start in a little over 3 months. It’s about getting there. Who is healthy and throwing well 3 months from now is what matters.
By no small margin, the chances of a drafted player making the majors for more than a cup of coffee are significantly better with a position player (and particularly a skill position player) than with a pitcher. And the higher the draft position, the greater the differential. So if one were to craft a strategy around this observation, it might be to load up on skill position players that seem to have big bat potential, and use them not only to stock your own club, but to acquire pitching later via trade (after other teams have assumed the risk of vetting the pitching for you). This startegy also affords you the ability of "selling high" on the better seasons of your MLB position players, in later arb.
To some extent this appears to be what Elias is doing (although he doesn't seem to have mastered the "selling high" part..
I would also suggest that he would be better served by attempting to acquire a larger portion of promising AAA arms for his stockpile of position players, than trying to acquire MLB arms.
That said, the strategy only works if you actually TRADE the talent proactively, rather than waiting for logjams to occur, and for your MLB talent to reach FA
They are too good a team for this to continue. Right now it is something different every night. They hit and the pitching sucks. Pitching is good and the bats are cold. Throw-in some occasional bad defense, 4 unearned runs last night and you get a losing streak.
The 83 O's had 2 seven game losing streaks to keep things in perspective.
The good thing about the current playoff setup is that you do not have to panic. Back when only the division winners made the playoffs, you could not fall too far behind. After losing 5 games in a row, the O's are still only 2 games out of first for the division and are 7 games up in the wildcard.
Elias has to wait over the next month to see exactly what the team needs. If you try to make a trade at this time, you are going to overpay because the other teams are waiting for the deadline to hope a team becomes desperate. You also have the issue of a most of the NL teams being in contention for the wildcard, not many sellers out there. In another month, hopefully a few more NL teams realize they need to sell and that widens the trade market hopefully driving the price down for what has to be given up.
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