Trying to figure out AM

[The Rick]

I am not saying AM is above reproach, but there sure is a lot of criticism here about potentially missed moves large and small from an executive that I see nothing but praise for in the national media.

AM's first priority appears to be a player for Tex and AJ. It is unlikely he can do this without Sherrill and BRob. AM still has the option to deal both Os if he can't sign Tex and AJ - so what's with the criticism? I do not believe we've seen the best deal for BRob and I certainly would not have dealt him for the Cubs offer last year or the rumored Indian's deal. We need a player/prospect who is a difference maker for BRob and no prospect in any rumored deal fits that bill, IMO.

I am not sure how people reconcile AM's eagerness to move a quality reliever like Bradford to save $3M or so, but people think our GM missed the boat in saving double that or more in failing to move Ramon.

It's a long offseason and contrary to the criticisms here, I do not feel like AM has missed the boat on a quality opportunity yet.

I don't know if you're referring to this off-season only, but I feel like it's very possible that he's missed some quality opportunities. Roberts, Serrill & Huff, just to name a few. Regardless of if other teams met his standards, we probably still could have gotten some value for them. If we suck the next couple of years, we will have gotten no value for them. Time will tell.

[24fps]

Reading Roch's latest comments have me scratching my head trying to figure McPhail out. If in fact we have no intentions of signing Tex, Burnett or any other premier free agent it leaves me thinking one of two things:

1) He really missed the boat the last year by not dealing Roberts, Huff, Sherrill, Hernandez.

or

2) He's unsure of the direction he wants to head in.

What other reason can there be??? Roberts could have been traded to either the Cubs or Indians, Hernandez was pursued by the Mets, and there were Sherrill and Huff offers at the deadline. If in fact he wanted to go forward with the rebuilding mode these players should have been traded. No ifs, ands , or butts about it.

Another thought is after our 2008 start AM thought we were closer than we actually are and wanted to give the team a chance. Wrong choice. Keeping the above mentioned players and not pursuing premier free agent talent just puts up behind even further. I sit and wonder why we didn't go after an Anthony Reyes, claim 23 yo LHP Eric O'Flaherty from Seattle, or sign upper level international talents. Why did we do nothing for almost 9 months???

My conclusion is that AM is all in this off season to sign premier free agent talents. If he's not he's made a Thrift like mistake that has once again stalled this organization.

Maybe there's a third scenario. Maybe MacPhail has budget parameters he's required to work within. Maybe they're tied to revenue generated from the direct baseball revenue stream.

And if that wasn't enough, maybe he's also obligated to field as "competetive" a team as possible every year, thus significantly narrowing his opportunities to effect the radical rebuild that is one of the two sensible current options for this team.

I have no idea if any of this is actually true or not, but I do suspect that there are budget limitations that make this question more than merely one of philosophy.

[adamwolff11]

I personally feel bad somewhat for AM now. We've all been waiting now for awhile, which doesn't set up with his slow, methodical way of making decisions. We've all overanalyzed every thing he's done (or hasn't done) to this point, and he's really going to have to pull out some good things in this offseason to avoid having many lose faith in him.

[RHall31]

Reading Roch's latest comments have me scratching my head trying to figure McPhail out. If in fact we have no intentions of signing Tex, Burnett or any other premier free agent it leaves me thinking one of two things:

1) He really missed the boat the last year by not dealing Roberts, Huff, Sherrill, Hernandez.or

2) He's unsure of the direction he wants to head in.

What other reason can there be??? Roberts could have been traded to either the Cubs or Indians, Hernandez was pursued by the Mets, and there were Sherrill and Huff offers at the deadline. If in fact he wanted to go forward with the rebuilding mode these players should have been traded. No ifs, ands , or butts about it.

Another thought is after our 2008 start AM thought we were closer than we actually are and wanted to give the team a chance. Wrong choice. Keeping the above mentioned players and not pursuing premier free agent talent just puts up behind even further. I sit and wonder why we didn't go after an Anthony Reyes, claim 23 yo LHP Eric O'Flaherty from Seattle, or sign upper level international talents. Why did we do nothing for almost 9 months???

My conclusion is that AM is all in this off season to sign premier free agent talents. If he's not he's made a Thrift like mistake that has once again stalled this organization.

Roberts maybe. But Sherrill, Huff and Hernandez??? All the reports I read said

Huff was available and there was no(zero) interest. How is that AM's fault.

How can he be faulted for wanting a high value return for Sherrill?

If your going to say AM blew it, then state the offers he turned down.

[BaltimoreFan]

Roberts maybe. But Sherrill, Huff and Hernandez??? All the reports I read said

Huff was available and there was no(zero) interest. How is that AM's fault.

How can he be faulted for wanting a high value return for Sherrill?

If your going to say AM blew it, then state the offers he turned down.

While I agree that Andy shouldn't have settled for little to nothing for Sherrill, we all saw his inevitable decline in value/performance coming and hoped that we could sell high.

[Anonymous]

Roberts maybe. But Sherrill, Huff and Hernandez??? All the reports I read said

Huff was available and there was no(zero) interest. How is that AM's fault.

How can he be faulted for wanting a high value return for Sherrill?

If your going to say AM blew it, then state the offers he turned down.

Thanks for the sanity check, RHall.

[Dipper9]

This might be a stupid question but who is this Belkast guy?

He's like Santy Clause, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy all wrapped into one. He creeps onto the OH under the cover of nightfall, leaves little morsels of information, and then is gone before you knew he was there. Some wish to believe he is the all knowing one, others choose to look at facts. Either way, he adds to the threads and makes one pagers become immortal! Who is this masked man you ask? His name is Belkast!

[nadecir]

Andy MacPhail's mantra is "Don't do anything stupid".

What does that mean? In negotiating trades, he holds off until he's sure he's getting the better end of it. He got the better end of trades last offseason with the Mariners and the Astros. The Cubs wouldn't give him what he wanted, so he didn't trade Roberts. He didn't trade players like Sherrill or Huff at the trading deadline because he couldn't get a return that was an absolute, slam-bang win for the Orioles. Sometimes you just have to take the best deal you can for players, because the timing is right to move them.

MacPhail hasn't made any long-term signings of players, possibly because no one wants to sign on MacPhail's terms.

It is difficult to rebuild a team quicky without doing a lot of deals. Making a lot of deals means some of them won't work out. MacPhail seems unwilling to take these kinds of risks. Other baseball general managers want to better their teams too. Obvious one-sided deals are not what baseball GMs get paid to do. You have to take some risks of some bad trades or some bad deals with players in order to rebuild a bad team in a short period of time.

MacPhail's insistence on "winning deals" when he trades or when he signs a player really causes him to be slow in any dealings with teams or players. MacPhail doesn't want to be slow, he just wants to win big and not take much risk at all with his deals. It takes a long time to find one-sided deals.

Angelos and MacPhail are alike in one key way. They both have to win big when they negotiate. It's tough to build a contending baseball team with this philosophy.

[Frobby]

It's a long offseason and contrary to the criticisms here, I do not feel like AM has missed the boat on a quality opportunity yet.

I agree with you, but I think what has people concerned is what MacPhail has said this offseason, not what he's done. Last winter, his direction was very clear and he seemed very positive about what he was doing. This winter he seems much more ambivalent.

[geschinger]

I agree with you, but I think what has people concerned is what MacPhail has said this offseason, not what he's done. Last winter, his direction was very clear and he seemed very positive about what he was doing. This winter he seems much more ambivalent.

I might be way off base but I think it may have something to do with him realizing that there is a big gap between what the fans might want (throw the kitchen sink at Teix/Burnett) and what he thinks is the best path for the organization to follow.

[Belkast]

He's like Santy Clause, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy all wrapped into one. He creeps onto the OH under the cover of nightfall, leaves little morsels of information, and then is gone before you knew he was there. Some wish to believe he is the all knowing one, others choose to look at facts. Either way, he adds to the threads and makes one pagers become immortal! Who is this masked man you ask? His name is Belkast!

That was funny!:clap3:

[Hank Scorpio]

Hopefully we will have a good idea in the next month or so. I do think we are going all in. I would like to believe that we will see a significant improvement.

Just a reminder....PGA wants to win NOW!

Doesn't this clash with MacPhail's initial assessment of the organization when he was hired?

If PGA wants to win now, he can kick himself for letting the BS that happened between 1998-2003 go down. We were without question the most dysfunctional organization in baseball. Things began to turn around with the dismissal of DeMacio and the hiring of Jordan, IMO.

Obviously, we'd all like to win now. But even if we add Teixeira, Sheets and Burnett, are we going to "win now??????"

This type of theory/thinking doesn't work in baseball, people. Ask the Yankees. You can't just buy up a bunch of talent and "win now." It doesn't happen.

[Dipper9]

Doesn't this clash with MacPhail's initial assessment of the organization when he was hired?

If PGA wants to win now, he can kick himself for letting the BS that happened between 1998-2003 go down. We were without question the most dysfunctional organization in baseball. Things began to turn around with the dismissal of DeMacio and the hiring of Jordan, IMO.

Obviously, we'd all like to win now. But even if we add Teixeira, Sheets and Burnett, are we going to "win now??????"

This type of theory/thinking doesn't work in baseball, people. Ask the Yankees. You can't just buy up a bunch of talent and "win now." It doesn't happen.

Hooooooooooooooooooold the phone! Baaaaaaaaaaaaaack up the trailer Hank! Just because the Yanks don't win the World Series every year does not mean their philosphy has not been successful. I would take 13 straight playoff appearances any day of the week. Not winning it all does not constitute not winning. The Yanks philosphy has been VERY successful. The key is beuilding your farm system and buying the RIGHT free agents. It can be debated if AJ is the right free agent, but signing a slugginh gold glove first baseman who you can put in the middle of the order and forget about him for the next 10 years IS the RIGHT way to go. MacPhail needs to throw the kitchen sink at Tex, and then go from there with whatever money he's got left.

[osfan83]

Fair enough. I guess my retort is that beauty is obviously in the eye of the beerholder.

Jhonny Peralta just doesn't excite me and as far as I know the rest of that offer was very average. I admit I don't remember all of the players, only that Miller supposedly wasn't involved.

And I don't think McPhail or many other GMs wanted Milledge. I totally understand why you think we should have done that though. Potential may very well have been worth it. Still, I'm not mourning the fact that we didn't do either deal.

What are the odds, that any draft pick we get as compensation for B-Rob walking next year, would end up as successful a major league player as Peralta?

[emmett16]

This whole thing is getting to be ridiculous...AM has made it clear that this team will not hire FA's for a while and that the team has a lot of interior rebuilding to do...it hasn't been 16 months yet since he took over...upon arriving he made it clear that the team needed at least a 3 year overhaul. If it was anyone else on the market besides Tex (who every orioles fans wants - even at the cost of destroying cash flow) there wouldn't be so much clamoring on this site about signing FA's...I can see it now - we won't sign Tex or Burnet and everyone on OH will be calling for McPhails head as if he has done something wrong...The Baltimore Orioles have no attraction for Baseball Players at this point, we are an embarassment. After a few years of winning we can think about signing a high end FA....kudos for Mcphail for staying on track. He saw what Arod did to the rangers and I don't think he's about to let that happen in Baltimore.