The Baltimore Orioles are 3.5 games out of first place in the American League East going into the second half of the season, well within the hunt for one of the two Wild Card spots, and a generally strong team with some key performers that can hope to get a bit better in the second half. The Orioles should not be a team that sells at the trade deadline on July 31st. But what this article presupposes is: what if they are?
(Discuss this on the BSL boards here.)
There are, after all, very few full-blown sellers in the current market — and of those who are clearly selling, only a couple of them (the Philadelphia Phillies, the Cincinnati Reds, and the Miami Marlins) have even one or two players that they are both likely to move and that other clubs are likely to covet. The market is so weak that pundits are salivating over the prospect of the San Diego Padres holding a firesale, too (though there’s also an element of ideology to this: the Padres didn’t put their fans through 3 to 5 years of suffering like the Cubs and Astros did, and thus there’s a lot of vested interest in seeing them fail from proponents of that model of team management).
A team like the Orioles, therefore, could dominate the returns by selling off pieces to get better next year — even if doing so would, and should, mean fans crying bloody murder. The first and most obvious piece to go would be Matt Wieters. Wieters is a free agent after this season, and the Orioles have a lot more team control over Caleb Joseph, whose salary they can continue to depress for the next half-decade — he’s not even arbitration eligible until 2018. He’s also 29 years old and will probably be in decline by the time he does hit free agency, meaning Joseph will never actually get a big MLB payday no matter how well he plays, but hey, we’re not imagining ourselves as labor here.
Next to go would be Wei-Yin Chen, because everyone desires reliable left-handed pitching, and the Orioles have already made it quite clear they’re not going to do much more than slap a qualifying offer on Chen and bid him farewell — no team planning on re-signing a guy publically humiliates him the way Baltimore did when they made him pitch a game in A Ball this season just to indulge in roster manipulation. Chen would arguably become the third most attractive pitcher on the market after Hamels and Cueto, and a return on him could help bolster the O’s system in the mid to high minors.
There’s an argument to be made that both players should just be kept until the end of the season and let walk with a QO attached — something that appears to be the front office’s current strategy. But there is value to be had in a deadline trade over a couple draft picks: Wieters is going to get a massive deal on the free agent market, and teams might be willing to pay more for a half-season of him if they think it’ll give them a better chance of getting him to accept a long-term deal in the exclusive negotiating window this winter (good luck with that, but hope springs eternal). If the Orioles can get back an advanced, near-MLB ready starting pitching prospect for him in addition to some other guys, it might be worth more to Baltimore than the pick they’d get when he turns down the qualifying offer.
Really, though, this is a more general distrust of the Baltimore system’s ability to develop prospects — especially starting pitching prospects — into useful contributors than it is a blanket preference of deadline deals to draft picks. Just about every great, key member of the current O’s MLB roster was either acquired by trade or in free agency — and the notable exceptions, Wieters and Manny Machado, were can’t miss top-3 picks who people were dropping in-his-prime Joe Mauer and Alex Rodriguez comps on when they were still amateurs. Zach Britton, closer extraordinaire, was himself a failed starting pitching prospect — and if all you get out of a bumper crop of top-flight starting pitching prospects is a great closer and a good LOOGY (Matusz), well, it’s not something you should be out there bragging about.
Jones, Hardy, Davis, Jimenez, Chen, Tillman — all these guys came to Baltimore from other orgs or were signed in free agency. Even Miguel Gonzalez was a finished product that the O’s tweaked a little bit. We could point to Caleb Joseph, but let’s also remember the reason Joseph stayed so long in the minors was because Baltimore’s developmental staff swore up and down that Joseph’s defense was so bad he had no business being behind the plate — until he came up to the majors and it turned out that was just factually incorrect, pretty much from day one.
Chris Davis isn’t having a great year by 2013 Chris Davis standards, but he’d still be one of the better bats in a market that is starved for good bats — see if the Mets are interested. He can even play a little bit of outfield. Plug Jimmy Paredes in his spot full-time instead. Brian Matusz is entering his arbitration years and the team clearly wants to have T.J. McFarland in the majors, so deal him too. Travis Snider is…well, you’re probably not going to find many buyers for Travis Snider. But it never hurts to ask, since you should be non-tendering him at the end of the season anyway.
I, of course, do not actually think the Orioles should sell, because I am an Orioles fan as well as a sportswriter, and I want to see them succeed and do well at the major league level rather than view their operation as an exercise in input/output efficiency optimization. I think that view of baseball — the one where we all pretend to be general managers — is both boring and lionizes front office personnel in a way that has little relation to the on-field product. I do not actually show up to cheer for Dan Duquette saving Peter Angelos’s money, and I find it suspicious when people talk as if they do.
That said, however: I do believe this trade deadline presents a somewhat unique opportunity for some competing (or quasi-competing) team that’s willing to risk the ire of its fans to blow everything up. I thought this deadline was going to be more active than most, but mainly focused on marginal moves — it turns out so far that I’ve been wrong. But if a team like the Orioles, or the Detroit Tigers, or the Atlanta Braves, or yes, even the Padres — if they were to fill the niche of a talented, expensive team reloading on young, inexpensive talent, they could probably get a pretty worthwhile return for their efforts.
They would lose fans in the process, but as the Cubs and Astros have shown, MLB teams really have very little respect for fans. In a couple years, when the team is winning again, they — or consumer dollars belonging to people like them — will be back.
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.