Olney on O’s losing

[Pickles]

1 minute ago, Can_of_corn said:

The O's could easily improve the talent of the ML are are choosing not to.

 

Beyond promoting Rutchsman, what are those easy fixes?

[Can_of_corn]

Just now, Pickles said:

Beyond promoting Rutchsman, what are those easy fixes?

Promoting Grayson. 

You don't think he'd improve the pitching staff?

They could have easily added affordable free agent talent (or not dumped ML talent) during the offseason.

 

[RZNJ]

I don't care if we are tanking or just stink or if we signed a bunch of middle of the road free agents and managed a 75 win season.   I'm happy to have a GM who has been allowed to jump into the Latin amateur market, draft the players he wants to draft, and do things his way.   Time will tell if Elias is good or not.    Duquette never had the free reign to do the things Elias is doing.      I would think you'd want the best years you can get from each player at the cheapest salaries possible.   So yeah, gaming the service time clock, or just getting guys up here when they as fully baked as possible makes sense to me from an economic standpoint but also having their best years be as Oriole players.    

Of course, you are going to have posters who could do it better or have the hindsight of the Monday morning quarterback or are great at pointing out when they were right about something but conveniently leave out all of other times they were wrong.   

Or let's cherry pick the most extreme examples and use them as the standard.   Same old.  Same old.

[Pickles]

2 minutes ago, Can_of_corn said:

Promoting Grayson. 

You don't think he'd improve the pitching staff?

They could have easily added affordable free agent talent (or not dumped ML talent) during the offseason.

 

If Grayson had been in the OD rotation he'd have been shut down by the all-star break?  I concede you'd probably get an extra win or two out of it.

So what was stopping the Rays from signing "affordable free agent talent" when they were so bad, but not tanking, because they were just bad?

 

[Frobby]

1 hour ago, TonySoprano said:

 Big difference between not improving the product and not crashing the product (tanking). 

How do you crash a product that won 47 games and had traded almost all its useful major league players before you arrived?    I’d say the wreckage was already smoldering!

[Pickles]

1 minute ago, Frobby said:

How do you crash a product that won 47 games and had traded almost all its useful major league players before you arrived?    I’d say the wreckage was already smoldering!

I'd like multiple people in this thread to answer that question.

[Sports Guy]

I don’t get why Elias can’t improve the system, play the Intl game, draft and develop well and put a better ML Product on the field?

Why does it have to be either/or?  Why is it so many teams can accomplish both and yet it’s a big deal if he does only part of the job?

[Explosivo]

Exactly, the cupboard was bare. Takes time, but history is on our side. Baseball rewards those who suck. It’s up to our scouts to get us to unsuck. We are on the track of unsuckage. We have more talent waiting in the wings than most O’s fans realize. Two years time, we will be fun to watch again and in the thick of it to compete. Guys like Buster and Ken will likely be gone from the world of baseball by then as well.

[Explosivo]

3 minutes ago, Sports Guy said:

I don’t get why Elias can’t improve the system, play the Intl game, draft and develop well and put a better ML Product on the field?

Why does it have to be either/or?  Why is it so many teams can accomplish both and yet it’s a big deal if he does only part of the job?

Because baseball rewards the teams at the bottom. You can’t be middle of the road and rebuild when you are near last in talent at all levels both major and minor leagues.

[RZNJ]

2 minutes ago, Sports Guy said:

I don’t get why Elias can’t improve the system, play the Intl game, draft and develop well and put a better ML Product on the field?

Why does it have to be either/or?  Why is it so many teams can accomplish both and yet it’s a big deal if he does only part of the job?

Would you be happy if the Orioles had some plug in guys for 1-2 years and were a 75 win team?   You wouldn't complain about something else?   

[Ripken]

5 minutes ago, Sports Guy said:

I don’t get why Elias can’t improve the system, play the Intl game, draft and develop well and put a better ML Product on the field?

Why does it have to be either/or?  Why is it so many teams can accomplish both and yet it’s a big deal if he does only part of the job?

While I sincerely (almost desperately) hope he's doing the draft and develop part well... we don't know yet.

[Sports Guy]

1 minute ago, Explosivo said:

Because baseball rewards the teams at the bottom. You can’t be middle of the road and rebuild when you are near last in talent at all levels both major and minor leagues.

Baseball doesn’t really award the bottom teams.  They give them one unique thing…a higher pick.  That’s about it.  Everything else is pretty equal and the draft is a complete crapshoot anyway.

Tanking in the NBA or NFL is far more important and a far better strategy.

In MLB, you can still spend as much as you want on player development, you can still get all the picks And you can spend internationally.  Plenty of teams do all of all of this and do it well And win on a regular basis.  
 

The idea that you have to suck for several years to be able to Accomplish all of this is factually wrong.

Tanking is smart in the first year or 2 because you dump short term Talent for a long term gain, you get rid of future salary issues(thus giving you long term payroll flexibility) And it allows you to play younger players in a lower pressure environment.  Of course, you can do all of those things whether you are winning or not but still, it does provide value to poorly built teams early on.

But once you get past the initial year or 2, there is no legit excuse to continue to put a garbage product on the field and have a team that is not only non competitive but full of AAAA type guys with no long term future for the organization.

[Sports Guy]

4 minutes ago, RZNJ said:

Would you be happy if the Orioles had some plug in guys for 1-2 years and were a 75 win team?   You wouldn't complain about something else?   

It would depend on a lot of factors but I do believe that having a product on the field that is competitive (not a contender but one that competes) has value to the fans.

I am envisioning a team like that next year but one that has several of our top prospects up.  The growing pains of many of those guys will keep us down and that’s ok…but they should add better players in the offseason this year, mainly through trades, to help make the product better and show people that there is a long term future with this team.

Those who don’t follow the team hardcore like most of us don’t know and don’t care about the system being ranked 5th by BA.  That’s completely meaningless. You don’t get awards for that.  Fans needs to see progress, especially from an organization that has basically been the worst in the sport for going on 25 years.

[Sports Guy]

12 minutes ago, Explosivo said:

Exactly, the cupboard was bare. Takes time, but history is on our side. Baseball rewards those who suck. It’s up to our scouts to get us to unsuck. We are on the track of unsuckage. We have more talent waiting in the wings than most O’s fans realize. Two years time, we will be fun to watch again and in the thick of it to compete. Guys like Buster and Ken will likely be gone from the world of baseball by then as well.

The cupboard wasn’t bare.  Baumann, GRod, Mountcastle, Mullins, Means, Mancini and Hall are just examples of guys who were here.   A lot of the guys that have our system ranked high were here before Elias signed and Adley was delivered to him on a silver platter.  

It’s a complete fallacy that the cupboard was bare.

[RZNJ]

1 minute ago, Sports Guy said:

It would depend on a lot of factors but I do believe that having a product on the field that is competitive (not a contender but one that competes) has value to the fans.

I am envisioning a team like that next year but one that has several of our top prospects up.  The growing pains of many of those guys will keep us down and that’s ok…but they should add better players in the offseason this year, mainly through trades, to help make the product better and show people that there is a long term future with this team.

Those who don’t follow the team hardcore like most of us don’t know and don’t care about the system being ranked 5th by BA.  That’s completely meaningless. You don’t get awards for that.  Fans needs to see progress, especially from an organization that has basically been the worst in the sport for going on 25 years.

 

You sound like you are working for the Orioles ticket department.   They've stunk for 5 years and as you said, most of the last 25 years, yet you act as if one more year is going to be the death knell to the team's future in Baltimore.