SI.com: O's had one of the worst offseasons of any team

[BaltimoreTerp]

You guys expect him and every other writer to have this small write-ups and lists for each team and then when he gets to the Orioles, write a book about everything.

That's a negatory on the price of that mo-chine there, Red Rider.

"Orioles: For a team that needs to add talent wherever they can, the Orioles did so in acquiring Rich Hill and Felix Pie from the Cubs. Cesar Izturis is a major upgrade at shortstop, and Koji Uehara had a lot of success in Japan. However, the moves made were generally towards the future at the expense of the present, and the 2009 team will likely end up in a similar place in the standings to the 2008 team."

Doesn't need to much research, is accurate, and only 77 words; similar in length to the Phillies, Giants and Rangers among others, and much shorter than the Angels, the Cubs and ESPECIALLY the Mets.

[BaltimoreTerp]

The Sporting News gave the Orioles an off-season grade of B-

That was better than 18 other teams

But what to they know? They aren't Scott Boras' *****...

[Rex Thunder]

I find it funny how you all continue to hammer on these guys every offseason when they come out with lists like this and every year, they end up being right.

You all need to grow some thicker skin and pay attention to what has actually happened.

What Heyman said isn't actually false EXCEPT he should have acknowledged a few things:

1) We acquired a couple of low risk/high reward targets that could really pay long term dividends.

2) The Orioles have placed an emphasis on defense and feel that it is undervalued.

Those 2 things should have been mentioned.

Wow. Okay, so you're saying that you AGREE with his take that the FO hasn't done anything to allow us to see "the light at the end of the tunnel?"

The fact that he threw that in there just tells me that he really doesn't track, or care about researching facts about the Orioles.

Just because teams may end up in a similar place in the standings THIS YEAR, means nothing towards how our off season was based on where we are coming form and where "the light is" at the end of the tunnel.

[TheOtherRipken]

John Heyman is a walking joke.

If I could find a way to contact him I'd start by saying:

Dear John Heyman,

It is amazing you have a job doing anything, let alone being a sports writer. Even more surprising you write about baseball, a sport you know nothing about . . .

Then I may go on and try to explain to him how in baseball 'batters' take turns swinging bats at pitches thrown by 'pitchers.'

By that point I'd probably lose him.

[Bradysburns]

Totally agree with you about people giving the O's way too much credit over the years but this article is pure BS.

He credits the Giants who were worse than the O's and in last place for getting Renteria, Johnson, Affeldt, etc. Those moves would have been terrible for us.

He credits the Braves for overpaying for Lowe, Kawakami, and trading for Vasquez.

He credits the Dbacks for giving Garland a deal. We were all begging the O's not to sign him.

Every move the O's have made this year have made complete sense within our plan. The only non move that was a mistake IMO was Tex but that is debatable, we all know that.

Agreed here all around. Luckily we finally have a GM with an actual vision and the cajones to follow it through - snarky sports columnists be damned. To put it another way, what if Markakis and Roberts were free agents coming from other teams this year, and we signed them both - I bet that would have put us up on this dork's list.

Yet to me, signing them to extensions is BETTER than signing them as FAs, where you'd pay a lot more for their services, most likely.

That's why I think the O's front office proved smarter - if not richer - than the Yankees this offseason. They made moves to build their organization from the ground up, and took some intelligent risks that make sense within their longterm plan.

Meanwhile, any idiot with a bottomless bank account could go out and sign the top 2-3 marquee FAs every year. A monkey with an ATM could do Cashman's job IMO.

Go O's.

[BaltimoreTerp]

A monkey with an ATM could do Cashman's job IMO.

With the added advantage of the occasional mauling of a player or a Steinbrenner.

(Too soon?)

[Mackus]

I don't think that's quite accurate. Teams like the Red Sox could have done literally nothing this offseason and they still would have been considered a 2009 contender. So according to the logic you're attributing to Heyman, they had a good offseason.

That seems kind of silly to me.

I agree its not a good way to look at it, but it is a way it can be viewed. I never said I thought it was a rational way to view things, just that this was how he was looking at it.

Heyman is essentially saying:

The offseason is the time when you set up your team to contend for the next season. He's then giving out a grade based on which team is most ready to contend for next season. He's ignoring the distance a team has to climb to be able to contend next season and also how many resources that team has to attempt to climb that mountain. Its a strictly results based system.

Look at it this way. There are 30 guys in November and each of them wants to be able to bench 300 lbs by April. Each of these guys start at different levels, and are differently sized guys. For the 285 lb guy who can already bench 350, even if he doesn't do any work over the offseason, he's set up pretty well to bench 300 lbs come April. For the 165 lb guy who can put up 225, no matter how much work he does, he's not gonna be lifting 300 lbs by April.

Heyman is assigning his grades based on how much each guy can lift in April, not in how much work each did between November and April. He doesn't care how big you are or how much you could lift in November, just what you lift come April.

Its an almost useless analysis, and I'd definitely agree that it is unfair to give "offseason" grades based on how ready you are to compete the next year, baseball is far more complicated than that. But that is how he chose to approach it.

[Why Not?]

Heyman's real sin here is trying to wrap up every team's offseason in one article. That just can't be done. It was going to be a disaster from the start. His editor(s) should have quashed this straight away.

[DrLev]

Although it is a sloppy article and I disagree that the Orioles were 25th worst....I don't think O's fans should be very happy with this offseason. Yes, AM added some low risk/high reward guys....but we missed out on:

1) Signing Tex

2) Making our Pitching Staff singnificantly better

3) Figuring out a way to connect with the community and getting more O's fans in the seats!

To me, #2 was the most important and besides the 34 yr old Japanese guy, we did not address this issue.

Alright, smart guy. I shouldn't even reply to this but here goes.

1. Tex was not coming here. Get over it. I repeat: TEX WAS NOT COMING HERE, NOR WAS HE EVER GOING TO COME HERE.

2. OK, care to make any suggestions? Rather we spend $250 million on two free agents? Forgot about the pitchers we've got coming up the pipe right now who are almost major league ready, and some of whom are pretty darn likely to pan out?

3. The economy sucks. Attendance will be down league-wide with the exception of Boston and the New York teams (whose attendance will be "down" only on account of having smaller new stadiums). Yeah, the O's could and should offer some more promos, but they've made strides in the past couple of years with reaching out to the community, with the OriolesReach program or bringing inner-city kids to games courtesy of the players.

[RShack]

Heyman's real sin here is trying to wrap up every team's offseason in one article. That just can't be done. It was going to be a disaster from the start. His editor(s) should have quashed this straight away.

I don't see why it can't be done in one article. You could say what needs to be said about each team in just a couple paragraphs. You couldn't go into lotsa details, but you could say what's important and give the gist of it. I don't think the problem is how many paragraphs you have, it's whether you say the right stuff in those paragraphs.

[Palmoripken]

I am not gonna say we had the best or a top ten but we were far from the bottom tier and this is why Heyman is being called out for being an idiot.

[JTrea81]

More from FJM about Heyman:

And how do we determine these things? Simple. Jon Heyman's brain matter. It's a little-known fact, but Jon Heyman's brain matter has been scientifically determined to be the most infallible substance on the planet Earth. Jon Heyman's brain matter has retained every scrap of information it has ever received through Jon Heyman's sensory organs. Jon Heyman's brain matter can tell you the number of hairs on the skin of a Lhasa Apso Jon Heyman's eyes saw in 1974, though of course it would prefer not to, because that would be a number, and numbers are insignificant to Jon Heyman's brain matter. Jon Heyman's brain matter specializes in the recognition of domination, star power, impact and greatness. It does not need numbers to aid it. It simply knows. We must trust it.

:rofl::rofl::rofl:

Man I never knew somebody hated Heyman more than I...

His articles are like the baseball version of the Enquirer. I don't call the guy "Perez" Heyman for nothin'

[Orioles West]

Ultimately, I guess I had been able to avoid Mr. Heyman's career until the most recent Hot Stove season. And, I guess I haven't missed much over my near four decades of following the game.

As to his conclusion about the O's off-season, well, he may be closer here than on a lot of other things I've heard him say this winter. I liked AM's moves a lot, but they are slight modifications that didn't exactly address the team's biggest problem area - pitching. That aside, there is much potential among our 37 arms working out in Florida. Potential being the double-edged sword. We will not know whether it is the good or bad side of potential until late August.

Getting back to Heyman, I learned all I needed to about the man with a handful of appearances on MLBN talking about the Hall of Fame. He noted his vote essentially ignores comparitive stats and based his take more on how "famous" the player is in his era. Really? No wonder he tends to focus his analysis on the bigger name players and the bigger market teams. No one from Minnesota may ever earn a place on his HoF ballot, based on his shaky 'logic'.

The other line I heard about Heyman was from XM/Sirius Home Plate radio when they wouldn't confirm a story from him until they had a second source "because he is wrong so often" on breaking "news".

-Don

[cmcgarvey]

Heyman writes to make money; not to write accurate depictions of teams' moves.

How else could the Phillies' over-spending of Raul Ibanez take them to the top?

His reporting is on par with the pro American publications during the Spanish-American War where we robbed Cuba of it's rights in the name of freedom.

I miss Twain and Menckin...

[amateurfan]

Here is what I know...If he said we had one of the top 10 offseasons and were moving in the right direction, people would be saying how great this article is.

This is not true entirely.

Yes, as O's fans, we want to see nice things written about our team.

Nevertheless, many of us are capable of looking at the team within a context. Many of us are able to read baseball articles and columns and view them as fans of baseball, not just fans of the Orioles.

The column is garbage no matter what team you're a fan of. If Heyman had stated that the O's had one of the top 10 off-seasons, some might have thought the article great. Others would have to read the rest of the article to find if it had any unity in its assessment.

On a side note: there's rampant generalizing about O's fans on here lately. There seems to be a large number of people who think other posters can't view baseball outside of being an O's fan. SG, you are not particularly known on here for humility, so the view that others can't get outside of their O's fandomness is, at least, expected. I don't think pointing that out will bother you. The point of view that many can't get see baseball beyond the Orioles, though, is an arrogant view to cast on others, and there are lots of people doing it here. I don't get it. Sure, some maybe can't, some don't follow baseball so closely, but arrogance is just irritatingly everywhere here lately.

Edit: You were a little careful by being vague. Yes, some people would say it was a great article. When you post such a generality, however, without quoting anyone, it comes across as a maxim, and it's impossible to know whom you're suggesting. Furthermore, I'm not sure it does the discussion itself any good. It's so general as not to be wrong, but also so general as to be confusing and not correct, yet defendable. All it does is incite others.