Raise your hand if you think Watkins was a better choice than Bradish?

[Moose Milligan]

3 hours ago, Frobby said:

Could be Ellis, who pitched very well for Norfolk tonight.   Or maybe they tell Grayson he’s not pitching for Norfolk tomorrow because he’s pitching for the O’s next week.  I bet you wouldn’t throw poop if that happened.  

I would. Out of joy. 

[Can_of_corn]

7 hours ago, Bmorebirds24 said:

Are you kidding me? We had the worst farm system in the league, we were non existent in the international market, we were a 100 loss team, we were one of the teams furthest behind in analytical department. Then you name 7 guys 2 of which are on the 100 loss team everyone is mad about. Mullins finally blossomed last year. Means can’t stay healthy, Hays played his most last year and hopefully continues. 
 

It was Bad Bad Bad before Elias arrived. Let’s talk about the return for Machado. People want to talk about Elias and his ML product let’s talk about the prior crew. 

It wasn't the worst, that's what I'm talking about.

Yes it was depleted.  But it wasn't worse than say what the Mariners had at the time.

Just like folks act like they didn't have an analytics team when they did.  The lady in charge managed to get hired by the Astros so maybe she had some idea what she was about.

 

I'm not trying to say the franchise was in good shape, obviously it wasn't but he didn't walk into quite the disaster folks like to suggest.

[Sports Guy]

4 hours ago, DrinkinWithFermi said:

Nice edit lol.

Yea, the edit that i did immediately.  
 

Here’s the thing.  You may not like what I said but it’s true.  You are one of those fans that just goes along with what the Os do.  You are content with their way of doing things right now.  If the Orioles did something different, you would be ok with that too.  
 

Basically, you don’t allow yourself to have a different opinion on the overall picture.  Sure you may not like a certain move here or there but basically, you allow the Os to dictate your thinking.  That’s fine.  You trust them and feel they deserve the benefit of the doubt but what you are crying about, ie my post, is true.  This is what many of y’all wanted.  You were content with no additions in the offseason.   You were fine with with waiting another year and see where we stand.

So, when that is the case, this is exactly what you get.  You get a team with no depth.  A team with very little talent once you get past the top players on the team.  You get a team with Watkins taking the ball already or Chris Owings getting key at bats.  That’s reality.  
 

You can fight back on this all you want but it’s still what you and many others were perfectly fine with seeing.  And yes, there were many more people that fit into that category than the one I’m in.  That has nothing to do with ego or whatever other stupidity you want to discuss to distract from the actual baseball conversation that you don’t seem capable of having.  It’s just a fact.  I was definitely in the minority of people who wanted to see the team improve and wanted them to try and win more games this year while also looking long term.  Again, these two things have never been mutually exclusive.

Now, some people, like say Tony, agree with you but for different reasons.  IE, Tony doesn’t believe this is the right path just because the Orioles believe it.  He has his own reasons.  Many of you don’t fall into that category though.  Many of you are just followers of the Os and are good with what they say the plan is because you think it’s well thought out or whatever.  Many of you said you didn’t see value in winning 75ish games.  Many of you don’t care that product on the field sucks for the time being.  These aren’t words I’m making up.  These were said by many on here.

You may not like that I’m saying it but me saying it doesn’t mean it’s less true.

[Sports Guy]

8 hours ago, Can_of_corn said:

It's like people exaggerate how bad things were.

Hall, Mountcastle, Means, Mullins, Mancini, Grayson, Hays.

These aren't Elias guys.

We've had an expansion team win a world series in less time than it will take this rebuild to finish a season at .500.

Yep.  The concept of the “cupboard was bare” is a joke.  He certainly didn’t walk into a great situation and ownership is no picnic but there was talent to work with, the #1 pick was given to him(and a high draft pool) and he had very little in the way of bad contracts to sift through.  The long term payroll flexibility was always there even if he never dealt Cobb or Davis retired, etc…

[Going Underground]

30 minutes ago, Can_of_corn said:

It wasn't the worst, that's what I'm talking about.

Yes it was depleted.  But it wasn't worse than say what the Mariners had at the time.

Just like folks act like they didn't have an analytics team when they did.  The lady in charge managed to get hired by the Astros so maybe she had some idea what she was about.

 

I'm not trying to say the franchise was in good shape, obviously it wasn't but he didn't walk into quite the disaster folks like to suggest.

The disaster is and was the Angelos family.They are like the meddling kids from Scooby Doo.Reason why the Orioles could not get a GM to take over and ended up with Dan Duquette, a guy who was out of baseball for many years. 

[Can_of_corn]

13 minutes ago, Going Underground said:

The disaster is and was the Angelos family.They are like the meddling kids from Scooby Doo.Reason why the Orioles could not get a GM to take over and ended up with Dan Duquette, a guy who was out of baseball for many years. 

I'm not arguing that.

I will say however that plenty of posters bought into the idea that Elias had "total control".  I remember getting a lot of blowback when I doubted if that was actually going to be the case.

[Aristotelian]

54 minutes ago, Sports Guy said:

Yep.  The concept of the “cupboard was bare” is a joke.  He certainly didn’t walk into a great situation and ownership is no picnic but there was talent to work with, the #1 pick was given to him(and a high draft pool) and he had very little in the way of bad contracts to sift through.  The long term payroll flexibility was always there even if he never dealt Cobb or Davis retired, etc…

He did not have a large number of bad contracts but he had what was regarded as perhaps the single worst contract in the history of baseball. Kinda hard to compete when you are at a 23M disadvantage. Along with Cobb that is a major chunk of our discretionary payroll even when we are in competitive mode. I agree I would have liked to see some spending this year and pretty much everyone here proposed some ideas in that direction. The difference is some of us are willing to give Elias the benefit of the doubt of one more year and see what happens now that we have our elite prospects ready. That doesn't mean they accept everything the Orioles say. That is massively unfair and alienated people from anything good you have to say.

[Can_of_corn]

2 minutes ago, Aristotelian said:

He did not have a large number of bad contracts but he had what was regarded as perhaps the single worst contract in the history of baseball. Kinda hard to compete when you are at a 23M disadvantage. Along with Cobb that is a major chunk of our discretionary payroll even when we are in competitive mode. I agree I would have liked to see some spending this year and pretty much everyone here proposed some ideas in that direction. The difference is some of us are willing to give Elias the benefit of the doubt of one more year and see what happens now that we have our elite prospects ready. That doesn't mean they accept everything the Orioles say. That is massively unfair and alienated people from anything good you have to say.

Perhaps?

I mean it fits in on this list but is it the worst?

Got some 10 year deals on this list.

https://www.yardbarker.com/mlb/articles/the_worst_contracts_in_mlb_history/s1__28002203#slide_28

[Sports Guy]

9 minutes ago, Aristotelian said:

He did not have a large number of bad contracts but he had what was regarded as perhaps the single worst contract in the history of baseball. Kinda hard to compete when you are at a 23M disadvantage. Along with Cobb that is a major chunk of our discretionary payroll even when we are in competitive mode. I agree I would have liked to see some spending this year and pretty much everyone here proposed some ideas in that direction. The difference is some of us are willing to give Elias the benefit of the doubt of one more year and see what happens now that we have our elite prospects ready. That doesn't mean they accept everything the Orioles say. That is massively unfair and alienated people from anything good you have to say.

First of all, it’s not a 23M disadvantage because 6M a year was deferred and is being paid out for the next 100 years.

Secondly, that contract was going to be done 4 years into then job.(ie after this year).  Seeing as he wasn’t even going to attempt to contend for at least 4 years anyway, the contract means nothing there.

Also, he knew he wasn’t going to spend for a while and that money wasn’t stopping him doing anything.

On top of that, they ended up paying a small fraction of that contract in 2020 and with his retirement, they are paying out the last year for 3 years.  So, it wasn’t much of a hindrance, based on the plan going in, and it ended up being less of an issue because of events that occurred later.

And you guys just don’t get it.  THIS ISNT AN INDICTMENT OF ELIAS!  Why can’t people get this through their heads?  While I disagree with some of the moves he has made and I question whether he can develop pitching, the issue is with ownership, not Elias, at least for me. Everyone keeps thinking in bashing Elias which is idiotic because I keep stressing that I’m not.

And I disagree.  People definitely just let the Os think for them. They go along with whatever strategy the Orioles do.  If the Os had signed a bunch of people this year and kept the long term path, those saying it’s not time to sign players would have been ecstatic they did it.  

[Frobby]

1 hour ago, Sports Guy said:

First of all, it’s not a 23M disadvantage because 6M a year was deferred and is being paid out for the next 100 years.

Secondly, that contract was going to be done 4 years into then job.(ie after this year).  Seeing as he wasn’t even going to attempt to contend for at least 4 years anyway, the contract means nothing there.

Also, he knew he wasn’t going to spend for a while and that money wasn’t stopping him doing anything.

On top of that, they ended up paying a small fraction of that contract in 2020 and with his retirement, they are paying out the last year for 3 years.  So, it wasn’t much of a hindrance, based on the plan going in, and it ended up being less of an issue because of events that occurred later.

And you guys just don’t get it.  THIS ISNT AN INDICTMENT OF ELIAS!  Why can’t people get this through their heads?  While I disagree with some of the moves he has made and I question whether he can develop pitching, the issue is with ownership, not Elias, at least for me. Everyone keeps thinking in bashing Elias which is idiotic because I keep stressing that I’m not.

And I disagree.  People definitely just let the Os think for them. They go along with whatever strategy the Orioles do.  If the Os had signed a bunch of people this year and kept the long term path, those saying it’s not time to sign players would have been ecstatic they did it.  

As I’ve pointed out maybe 50 times, even though $6 mm/yr was deferred, most of that had to go into escrow 18 months after it was earned.   So yes, cash flow was affected then.  The good news is, cash flow won’t be affected much when it comes time to make the deferred payments.   

I think you definitely can argue it was the worst contract of all time.   It depends how you want to look at it.   Pujols and Cabrera will have underperformed their contracts by more during the life of their desks.  But, at least they did have positive WAR during those deals.  Davis got paid all that money and was significantly worse than replacement value.   So, you can argue it either way IMO.   What’s not arguable is that Davis’ contract was really terrible and a waste of limited resources.   

Now, did that one contract make it impossible for the O’s to compete?   No.   It just made the job significantly harder than if they had spent that money intelligently, or not spent it at all.

 

[Sports Guy]

19 minutes ago, Frobby said:

As I’ve pointed out maybe 50 times, even though $6 mm/yr was deferred, most of that had to go into escrow 18 months after it was earned.   So yes, cash flow was affected then.  The good news is, cash flow won’t be affected much when it comes time to make the deferred payments.   

I think you definitely can argue it was the worst contract of all time.   It depends how you want to look at it.   Pujols and Cabrera will have underperformed their contracts by more during the life of their desks.  But, at least they did have positive WAR during those deals.  Davis got paid all that money and was significantly worse than replacement value.   So, you can argue it either way IMO.   What’s not arguable is that Davis’ contract was really terrible and a waste of limited resources.   

Now, did that one contract make it impossible for the O’s to compete?   No.   It just made the job significantly harder than if they had spent that money intelligently, or not spent it at all.

 

It didn’t effect anything because they wouldn’t have spent that money anyway.

The Davis contract stopped nothing.  It was just another excuse, like “rebuilding” to help the ownership avoid spending money.  

[Bmorebirds24]

11 hours ago, Sports Guy said:

Building an Intl presence and an analytics dept can be done while winning games.  You don’t need to tank, much less for 4 years, to do it.

You don’t understand the process. I get it. I hope the team wins 70 games this year so you can feel better. 

[Sports Guy]

3 minutes ago, Bmorebirds24 said:

You don’t understand the process. I get it. I hope the team wins 70 games this year so you can feel better. 

Lol..It’s pretty clear you don’t understand the process if you think you need to be a bad team to have an international presence and to build an analytics dept.  

[Bmorebirds24]

4 hours ago, Can_of_corn said:

It wasn't the worst, that's what I'm talking about.

Yes it was depleted.  But it wasn't worse than say what the Mariners had at the time.

Just like folks act like they didn't have an analytics team when they did.  The lady in charge managed to get hired by the Astros so maybe she had some idea what she was about.

 

I'm not trying to say the franchise was in good shape, obviously it wasn't but he didn't walk into quite the disaster folks like to suggest.

Are you more confident with where the organization is as a whole now rather than where they were 4 years ago? 

[Moose Milligan]

13 minutes ago, Bmorebirds24 said:

You don’t understand the process. I get it. I hope the team wins 70 games this year so you can feel better. 

Here we are again.

I mean, how many wins are YOU hoping for this year?