Vet players: who would be a mistake to move on from this season?

[wildcard]

3 minutes ago, RZNJ said:

Right.  You said they’d only keep him as a starter.   I’m saying that’s looking very iffy at the moment.

Then we agree.  Which is something to be noted.

[Orioles West]

A bit of a dilemma for me, since I don’t have any idea what our future potential payroll will look like. The lovable new owner and his happy crew of new owners are currently visible, but not a lot of promises about roster building and keeping O’s around.

My first take on the question, I don’t know that any of our vets are players the Orioles couldn’t move on without. But if I was the boss and had money to spend, I voted to keep Monty and Tony Taters.

If I were DR, I would be looking at adding another front end starter and then finding ways to sign as many of our “kids” as allowed by law.

[e16bball]

I think folks are a bit cavalier in their willingness to dump players like Santander, Mountcastle, and O’Hearn and feel as though it will be no big loss. 

Since the beginning of 2023, so the last 1.5 seasons, all 3 of them are top 50 bats in all of baseball by OPS+. O’Hearn is at 127 (34th), Santander is at 125 (40th), and Mountcastle is at 122 (49th). A lot of hitters at their positions, but O’Hearn and Mountcastle are 14th and 18th, respectively, among the 1B/DH types, and Santander is 9th among the corner OF types.

The Orioles have 6 guys in that top 50, which in my view is what makes the offense special. It is also what made the Texas offense special when they beat the brakes off of us and everyone else last October  — you just couldn’t get away from guys who could hit. Seager was the centerpiece (as Gunnar is for us), but then you also had to deal with Semien, Garcia, Garver, Jung, Lowe, Heim, etc. A lineup with very few safe harbors, and a lot of buffer against individual slumps (or bad days, when we’re talking about postseason compressed schedule).

There is a lot of faith that Mayo will come up and hit. That Holliday will come up and hit. That one of Kjerstad/Stowers will finally hit at the ML level. But how many kids from straight from AAA and post anything close to a 120 OPS+ over extended at-bats? I have to think it’s not very many, which is a big reason the notion of just jettisoning one or more 120 OPS+ bats in the middle of a pennant race is beyond unorthodox. 
 

At the bottom of it, I think the path forward involves allowing your favorite COF prospect an opportunity to bust up the Hays/Cowser platoon in LF. And I think it involves moving Urias for a prospect return and allowing your favorite IF prospect to take over the reps that Urias/Mateo have been splitting. At the moment, it looks like that approach would mean Kjerstad and Mayo up, Stowers and Holliday down. 

Anything beyond that, and you’re starting to replace good/proven MLB players. At that point, I think you’d be forcing kids into the fold not because it likely makes the team better, but just because you want to force the kids into the fold.