MLB.com: O’s farm system is the 4th-most improved

[DrungoHazewood]

2 hours ago, Sports Guy said:

Every team spends that money in other areas of the organization, whether they are winning or not.

Every team signs their picks.  Every team has player development, scouting, etc...I believe every team participates in intl FA.

The only real advantage to rebuilding is getting 1 high pick.  Everything else is the same for everyone. The draft pool is the only exception there but most of that money is put into the one higher pick.

I guess you don't believe that there is any overlap or interaction whatsoever between the scouting/development/infrastructure budgets and the player payroll budgets?

[Just Regular]

3 hours ago, DrungoHazewood said:

To me it's pretty clear that the 1994-2017 Orioles were willing to spend some decent amount on MLB payroll and very little on all the infrastructure necessary for a self-sustaining organization. 

Maybe it has always been there, but Cot's has highlighted recently a franchise list of Free Agent Signings 1991-2020

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zTdfmqV5StGaum1yFmPvsvNKdC5__QQW-7h4bPTEWUA/edit#gid=165240331

There's a worksheet sorted by $$$ and one by year - the yearly one is a blast to peruse.   Frank Wren famously bolted after one year, but he also did give a 4-year contract to Age 33 Mike Timlin.

Across the 30 years we've spent a touch over $1B on MLB free agents, 12th among all MLB clubs.

[Sports Guy]

5 minutes ago, DrungoHazewood said:

I guess you don't believe that there is any overlap or interaction whatsoever between the scouting/development/infrastructure budgets and the player payroll budgets?

No I don’t..that money is very minimal and again, every team puts money into those things.  There isn’t a team that doesn’t have scouting, player development, etc...

Now, some put more money into that others but even if the barren days of the 2000s, the Os put money into these things.

And it’s not like the PD guys, scouts, etc...are getting paid millions of dollars to do their job.

Can you name a team who doesn’t do these things?  Can you name me a team that doesn’t sign their picks?  Who doesn’t spend internationally?

 

[DrungoHazewood]

12 minutes ago, Can_of_corn said:

Most teams are trying to juggle winning games at the ML level and developing players in the minors.  I'm guessing that's harder than just doing one or the other.

Most GMs didn't inherit a 47-win team with a farm system that hadn't been consistently productive since the late 1970s and an ownership group that pretty explicitly told previous management to stay away from most avenues of talent acquisition.

[DrungoHazewood]

2 minutes ago, Sports Guy said:

Can you name a team who... doesn’t spend internationally?

The 1954-2018 Baltimore Orioles.

[Sports Guy]

3 minutes ago, DrungoHazewood said:

The 1954-2018 Baltimore Orioles.

They still spent, albeit not enough.

So, you are actually arguing my bigger picture point that ALL of this comes back to ownership.  
 

This isn’t about some need to suck for 4-5 years to win long term.  It’s all about ownership being terrible and screwing the fan base.

[Can_of_corn]

5 minutes ago, DrungoHazewood said:

Most GMs didn't inherit a 47-win team with a farm system that hadn't been consistently productive since the late 1970s and an ownership group that pretty explicitly told previous management to stay away from most avenues of talent acquisition.

Gosh that should mean that improving it would be easy.  As opposed to the Rays who finished higher on this list despite already have a top ranked farm system.

[DrungoHazewood]

6 minutes ago, Sports Guy said:

No I don’t..that money is very minimal and again, every team puts money into those things.  There isn’t a team that doesn’t have scouting, player development, etc...

Now, some put more money into that others but even if the barren days of the 2000s, the Os put money into these things.

And it’s not like the PD guys, scouts, etc...are getting paid millions of dollars to do their job.

I don't know how you can possibly look at the performance of the 1980-2018 Orioles' development system and think that they put as much emphasis on that or resources towards that as even an average MLB team.  To me it's been clear for several decades that they had a threadbare development program that wasn't remotely on par with most other MLB teams.  There have been points where they made improvements, but I think that brought them from decades behind the cutting edge to only many years behind. 

It's a situation where (and I'm making up the numbers here) the Orioles were on par with everyone else in 1977 and they got better at 1% a year, while the Yanks and Sox and Dodgers and Cardinals and eventually Rays were getting better at 3% a year.  So in 2010 they were basically where the Sox were in 1995.

[DrungoHazewood]

4 minutes ago, Sports Guy said:

They still spent, albeit not enough.

So, you are actually arguing my bigger picture point that ALL of this comes back to ownership.  
 

This isn’t about some need to suck for 4-5 years to win long term.  It’s all about ownership being terrible and screwing the fan base.

Blaming ownership is like howling at the moon.  Sure, that has been a major impediment, and may continue to be.  But there's nothing at all any of us, including Mike Elias, can do about it.  After 25 years it's become tiresome to repeat the "Angleos is never going to let the team be any good" mantra as a response to all conversations.

But just like in 2005 or 2015 we can talk about what the team can do within the context of reality (i.e. the Angeloses own the team) to get better. 

[DrungoHazewood]

9 minutes ago, Can_of_corn said:

Gosh that should mean that improving it would be easy.  As opposed to the Rays who finished higher on this list despite already have a top ranked farm system.

Yes, with any competence whatsoever the Orioles should have been ranked 20 spots ahead of the Rays, and everyone else for that matter.  Also, we should implicitly trust this one article by some guy as the ground truth on the rankings.

And the Orioles should have traded their TOR ace for a bunch of prospects so they could win this.

[Just Regular]

13 minutes ago, Sports Guy said:

This is nothing but an excuse for the Angelos family to be cheap.  The only hope is that this leads to them selling because this organization will be a train wreck with them at the head of it.

I'm more of an Adley Optimist than an Angelos Pessimist, but we're really a year away from knowing.

I mean I think for like $25M in 2021 cash we could perhaps have like 3B Franco, SS Andrelton and 2B Profar, and if you use Adley and the Best Pitchers almost immediately, I don't think the 2021 Red Sox/Blue Jays are much different than that.

All four of them might have dominated the high minors already, so if they can in April/May, I'll be restless in June wanting them to get their lumps out of the way before '22.   We might have 22 0-to-3 guys on the '22 roster in shouting distance of the Rays regular cohort where a latter day Tejada character bridges the gap.

[Frobby]

2 hours ago, Sports Guy said:

Ehhh, I don’t know about that.  There is value in that you can get who you want easier but teams boards are all over the place.  The difference in career WAR between pick 45 and 70 is probably nothing.

I started doing a little test of this the other day, just using a small sample of picks 40-42 vs. 48-53.  I used those because last year 40-42 would have been the 3-5 picks in the second round while 48-53 would have been 11-16.   What I found was that on average the 48-53 picks actually did a good bit better than 40-42.   That’s kind of a fluky result but it does point out that things get a lot more random once you’re out of the first round.

At picks 3-5, 77% made the majors and there was an average total WAR of 532 (spread over 55 years of the draft) in those three spots.   At picks 11-16, 62% made the majors with an average total of 303 WAR.

At picks 40-42, 40% made the majors with average total WAR of 91.   At 48-53, 40% made the majors with average total WAR of 145.

I still would rather pick early in every round, but it does seem that the difference in the first round is significantly greater.  

[Sports Guy]

4 minutes ago, DrungoHazewood said:

Blaming ownership is like howling at the moon.  Sure, that has been a major impediment, and may continue to be.  But there's nothing at all any of us, including Mike Elias, can do about it.  After 25 years it's become tiresome to repeat the "Angleos is never going to let the team be any good" mantra as a response to all conversations.

But just like in 2005 or 2015 we can talk about what the team can do within the context of reality (i.e. the Angeloses own the team) to get better. 

I’m really missing your point.

If your point is, the Orioles (unlike basically everyone else) have one operating budget for all of this, that’s great...that also means the ownership is the problem.  You can get tired of hearing it but it doesn’t make it less true.

On top of that, you have several people here who think you have to suck for several years to get good again.  That’s a lie.  There is no validity to that.

The Orioles are choosing this path because they want to be cheap.  The question is why do they want to be cheap?  Is it solely because they want to save money and pocket it or do they want to sell the team? Or both?

My guess is they want both.  

[Can_of_corn]

3 minutes ago, DrungoHazewood said:

Yes, with any competence whatsoever the Orioles should have been ranked 20 spots ahead of the Rays, and everyone else for that matter.  Also, we should implicitly trust this one article by some guy as the ground truth on the rankings.

And the Orioles should have traded their TOR ace for a bunch of prospects so they could win this.

I'm just saying McDonalds can open 100 stores and that taco joint down the road can open a second location and only one has 100% growth.

And yes, all of this conversation is based off this one guy's article.  You are bringing this up now why?  You knew that was going to be the case when you clicked on the thread.  You knew that was the case for all of your other comments in this thread.

[Sports Guy]

2 minutes ago, Frobby said:

I started doing a little test of this the other day, just using a small sample of picks 40-42 vs. 48-53.  I used those because last year 40-42 would have been the 3-5 picks in the second round while 48-53 would have been 11-16.   What I found was that on average the 48-53 picks actually did a good bit better than 40-42.   That’s kind of a fluky result but it does point out that things get a lot more random once you’re out of the first round.

At picks 3-5, 77% made the majors and there was an average total WAR of 532 (spread over 55 years of the draft) in those three spots.   At picks 11-16, 62% made the majors with an average total of 303 WAR.

At picks 40-42, 40% made the majors with average total WAR of 91.   At 48-53, 40% made the majors with average total WAR of 145.

I still would rather pick early in every round, but it does seem that the difference in the first round is significantly greater.  

The difference in R1 isn’t significant once you get past the first few picks.  After that, it matters very little especially within the context of losing games on purpose for several years.