Olney on O’s losing

[Frobby]

1 hour ago, Sports Guy said:

The system for all teams to compete is obvious in place, as evidenced by the fact that Tampa and Oak are good almost every year, the Royals winning a WS not long ago, Milwaukee beating out the Cubs on a relatively regular basis, etc…

Thanks for this.  Playing in the AL East and with budget constraints some teams don’t have makes our job more difficult, but not impossible.   There’s certainly no reason the team should ever need to be terrible, once they’re rebuilt in the proper manner.  Are we going to win the division title 20%+ of the time or make the wild card more often than not?   Probably not, in the long term.   But we should be able to do those things some years and keep it interesting most years, if we are run in a good way.  

[Tony-OH]

3 hours ago, wildcard said:

Penalizing  teams for losing is not addressing the real problem.  The great disparity between the rich team's resources compared to the smaller market teams is the issue.     The tanking to get high draft choices is just a symptom of the real problem.

100% correct. Unless this is taken into consideration in the next CBA, baseball will continue to be the haves and have nots. Sure there's a Tampa in there running two steps ahead of everyone just to try and stay competitive in the AL East, but it's really ridiculous.

They need to change the system of the Divisioning each season into something that resembles equal market shares.

[Tony-OH]

3 hours ago, Sports Guy said:

This is completely wrong and such a cop out answer.  One player does not change the fortunes of a baseball team.

The real disparity isn’t money…it’s ownership and intelligence.  The Os seemingly have intelligence now although that isn’t shown at the ML level yet but they still have the ownership issue.

People want to point to salary caps and bs like that.  It’s meaningless.  There are a few teams that spend like crazy and they have shown, over the last several years, that it doesn’t matter..they still suck.

The Dodgers don’t win because they spend more than everyone.  They win because they draft and develop so well and they are able to spend.  Boston and NY have struggled a lot in the last 8-10 years because their farm systems have been sh**.   So while they have spent, all they have done is bring in older talent that will eventually break  down or decline.  

This is a flawed concept as well. The Dodges do draft and develop well, but they also bring in high paid super stars to augment those inhouse players which allows them to compete year in and year out. The Red sox and Yankees can retool every once in a while but get right back in the game because again they can afford those high priced players and if they screw up, it doesn't matter, they just get rid of the guy, eat the contract, and move on to the next superstar. Tampa drafts and develops as good as anyone and how many World Series have they been in and won?

If you don't think having almost unlimited payroll to develop a team does not give them an advantage, I just don't know what to tell you other then I wholeheartily disagree.

Does it make it impossible to win without all that cash, no, but it's a lot harder.

[Frobby]

1 hour ago, wildcard said:

Guthrie would have been fine for his first three seasons but a tanking Elias would have traded a  31 year old, arbitration  eligible Guthrie the same way he traded Bundy.   Same go for Rodrigo.

Depends how good the team and the player are at the time.   Both those players did get traded, probably too late to get maximum value.   But Guthrie brought us two good contributors to our 2012 team, Hammel and Lindstrom (who pitched well in relief and then was traded for Saunders in late August).  Lopez really didn’t bring back any lasting value.

[Sports Guy]

1 minute ago, Tony-OH said:

This is a flawed concept as well. The Dodges do draft and develop well, but they also bring in high paid super stars to augment those inhouse players which allows them to compete year in and year out. The Red sox and Yankees can retool every once in a while but get right back in the game because again they can afford those high priced players and if they screw up, it doesn't matter, they just get rid of the guy, eat the contract, and move on to the next superstar. Tampa drafts and develops as good as anyone and how many World Series have they been in and won?

If you don't think having almost unlimited payroll to develop a team does not give them an advantage, I just don't know what to tell you other then I wholeheartily disagree.

It’s an advantage but it’s an overrated advantage and a crutch people use.

Doing things intelligently and having a good ownership is far more important.

[Gurgi]

2 minutes ago, Tony-OH said:

This is a flawed concept as well. The Dodges do draft and develop well, but they also bring in high paid super stars to augment those inhouse players which allows them to compete year in and year out. The Red sox and Yankees can retool every once in a while but get right back in the game because again they can afford those high priced players and if they screw up, it doesn't matter, they just get rid of the guy, eat the contract, and move on to the next superstar. Tampa drafts and develops as good as anyone and how many World Series have they been in and won?

If you don't think having almost unlimited payroll to develop a team does not give them an advantage, I just don't know what to tell you other then I wholeheartily disagree.

Does it make it impossible to win without all that cash, no, but it's a lot harder.

Has Billy Beane ever won a World Series game?  Oakland is proof how hard it is to win it all with no money.  

[Tony-OH]

1 minute ago, Sports Guy said:

It’s an advantage but it’s an overrated advantage and a crutch people use.

Doing things intelligently and having a good ownership makes things far more easier.

Fixed that for ya. 

Trust me, I agree with those that think tanking is not good for the game, particularly over a long stretch of time like Elias is putting us through. This is why I believe things have to change next year. The Orioles have to start trying to win. We can't go into the 2022 season with another embarrassment of a team.

[Tony-OH]

3 minutes ago, Gurgi said:

Has Billy Beane ever won a World Series game?  Oakland is proof how hard it is to win it all with no money.  

Exactly. Beane is very good at what he does yet he's hamstrung by the economics of his situation. He does a great job of keeping the A's fairly competitive year in and year out, but there are no World Series appearances. He's also not competing in the AL East every year.

Again, I'm not saying a well run team can't find ways to compete, but the fact that baseball allows or haves and have nots is part of the reason baseballs popularity has been falling. Most team's fans know their teams have very little chance year in and year out. 
 

[Sports Guy]

10 minutes ago, Tony-OH said:

Fixed that for ya. 

Trust me, I agree with those that think tanking is not good for the game, particularly over a long stretch of time like Elias is putting us through. This is why I believe things have to change next year. The Orioles have to start trying to win. We can't go into the 2022 season with another embarrassment of a team.

No you didn’t fix anything.  

 

Tampa, a team in our division fighting those big bad teams with so much advantage have found a way to do it.  It can be done.

Oakland, competing with teams with much larger revenue streams has found a way.  
 

It can be done through intelligence and doing things the right way. 

The Orioles can do what those teams do and spend a lot more money, ala St Louis.  They just haven’t been able to accomplish it.

Obviously being able to spend is an advantage but again, it’s the advantage people make it out to be and quite frankly, spending big almost always leads to failure.

[Moshagge3]

16 minutes ago, Sports Guy said:

I don’t think there is anything wrong with not wanting to pay 300M+ for a player over 10-15 years.  

Maybe time will vindicate those moves, maybe not, but if were looking at what complaints the union will be bringing to the table, number one will obviously be service time manipulation, but number two will be the rumors of collusion behind the slow FA markets for guys like Harper and Machado. This is all about mid-level teams not willing to pony up the $ to push them past 85-90 wins, and it should be worrying to the union that MLB wants to set the playoff bar there.

The stuff we tend to argue about, like why can't Elias find more guys like Urias or why hasn't Elias fixed Dean Kremer or moved on from Maikel Franco doesn't make a difference to the union.

[Gentile4]

2 hours ago, crowmst3k! said:

 

Davis has a stupid contract, dead money, etc...

Exactly, and the rich teams can afford these kind of bad signings in ways the other teams can't. Fine, the Orioles have money to spend on FA, but they don't have the luxury of making mistakes the way the Yankees, Red Sox, Angels, Dodgers, White Sox (who am I forgetting?) can. 

[Moshagge3]

It's pretty simple: the Orioles are spending $65 mm to be garbage, and the Tampa Bay Rays are spending $74 mm to lead the division. The union wants to maximize player salaries, so which situation should be more troubling to them? 

Answer: Obviously the latter. The Orioles know they will eventually have to move to a higher payroll, the Rays feel like they can sustain their cheap payroll forever.

[Sports Guy]

38 minutes ago, Gentile4 said:

Exactly, and the rich teams can afford these kind of bad signings in ways the other teams can't. Fine, the Orioles have money to spend on FA, but they don't have the luxury of making mistakes the way the Yankees, Red Sox, Angels, Dodgers, White Sox (who am I forgetting?) can. 

The Os can make mistakes and overcome them.  That’s a fallacy that they can’t.  It’s harder for them (and most teams) but it doesn’t mean they can’t do it.

[wildcard]

1 hour ago, Frobby said:

Depends how good the team and the player are at the time.   Both those players did get traded, probably too late to get maximum value.   But Guthrie brought us two good contributors to our 2012 team, Hammel and Lindstrom (who pitched well in relief and then was traded for Saunders in late August).  Lopez really didn’t bring back any lasting value.

Did you forget what we were talking about?    We were talking about if Guthrie and Lopez were on the O's when Elias was tanking.   They would have been traded has they hit arbitration like Bundy was and for a tanking team there is nothing wrong with that.

[Sports Guy]

4 minutes ago, wildcard said:

Did you forget what we were talking about?    We were talking about if Guthrie and Lopez were on the O's when Elias was tanking.   They would have been traded has they hit arbitration like Bundy was and for a tanking team there is nothing wrong with that.

Well, we are talking about that Elias needs to find those guys now and he has failed miserably at doing it so far.