Spring Training is the very definition of “too early to panic.” That’s good, because if it was time to panic, the Orioles would be pretty screwed.
(Discuss this post on the BSL boards here.)
New Oriole outfielder Hyun-soo Kim is having a bad spring so far. Including his at-bats during today’s 3-0 loss to the Minnesota Twins, Kim is 0-for-18 to start the spring, sporting a pristine .000/.000/.000 batting line. Now, observably better players have had demonstrably worse beginnings to their time in camp, but what’s important to remember about Kim is that he’s a truly unknown quantity vis a vis MLB-level baseball. He’s never played here before; it’s possible that his game simply doesn’t translate to an acceptable degree, even with the adjustments he’s undoubtedly making. So it goes. It would not be the first time that an Orioles scouting resource in the South Korean market vastly overestimated the talent and worthiness of a player from that region.
Kim will probably be fine, for certain realistic and limited definitions of fine (100 OPS+ hopefully shouldn’t be too much to ask for), but let us assume for the sake of argument that he is not. Where does that leave the Orioles?
It essentially leaves them out $7 million over the next two years, which is by no stretch of the imagination a good thing but is hardly a disaster. And it’s unlikely Kim would ever see the minor leagues for any reason but injury rehab, as he has language in his deal that allows him to return to South Korea rather than accept a minor-league assignment. The real problem, of course, is in the roster construction: with the current players the Orioles have signed, no Kim means LF Mark Trumbo, CF Adam Jones, and RF Chris Davis in the outfield, with either Christian Walker or Mike Carp at 1B. The team is already playing with fire by allowing Trumbo to do anything but DH; him and Davis in the outfield corners on anything resembling a regular basis could go very poorly for Baltimore. Jones is a solid centerfielder, but leaving him alone on an island like that night in and night out will likely make him look worse than he is.
To a certain extent the Orioles have to lie in this bed they’ve made: with the bungled Fowler situation and Austin Jackson signing elsewhere for less money because he didn’t want to play in a corner, Baltimore has run out of viable, attractive FA options to address the issue. Who are we really looking at, here on March 7th? Corey Hart hasn’t signed anywhere, I guess. Marlon Byrd? Alex Rios? Rios is the clear best of the bunch on track record, but he was both injured and ineffective last year and is 35 years old. And he’s only one guy, for a team with two potential holes.
Trading for a corner outfielder remains unlikely, because trades require you to have something that both other teams want and that you are willing to part with. For instance, the best viable Orioles trade chips are Zach Britton, Kevin Gausman, and Dylan Bundy — all of whom either are currently or may at some point this year become full-time relief pitchers. The Orioles are in a position where under no circumstances can they afford to thin out an already-weak MLB staff even further, and they have no talent surplus in the minors to use as trading chips.
The best outcome is still that the Kim signing works out: we’re very early in Spring Training, and 0-for-20 streaks are not terribly uncommon in this sport. At the very least, Baltimore has to give Kim all of camp and the first month-and-a-half of the regular season to try to make this work — probably a bit longer, unless it’s very clear Kim’s game simply isn’t compatible with MLB.
But the Orioles have a hole in RF now, and while signing, for instance, Alex Rios might not address that hole in a very satisfactory way, some sort of move has to be made to find a better option than Mark Trumbo to play to Adam Jones’s left — because very soon, it might become clear that they’ve got a hole to his right as well.
Jonathan is a contributing writer for VICE Sports. His work has previously appeared in Sports on Earth, Baseball Prospectus, The Classical, and ESPN’s SweetSpot Network. Born in central Maryland, Bernhardt currently lives in the New York metropolitan area.