The new year is a time for reflection and self-assessment, as well as generally the time when the silly, hectic signing period for the MLB offseason draws to a close — there always are big, late signings and trades, like the Orioles proved last year when they swooped in to become big players on Nelson Cruz, Ubaldo Jimenez, and Ervin Santana in the last few weeks before spring training, and even this year Max Scherzer has yet to find himself a home. At the very least, however, I can evaluate how Baltimore’s done in 2014 and the years leading up to it — and I can evaluate how I’ve done reacting to them.
I was not a fan of the Dan Duquette hiring when it happened, to put it mildly. My unease with it grew to outright distaste when the Seong-min Kim debacle derailed that young man’s career and made Baltimore look not just like villains, but outright fools. I don’t recant or repudiate either of the central tenets of those pieces — the post-2011 hiring process was hideously embarrassing, with multiple candidates publically signalling they wanted nothing to do with the team, and it’s almost unfathomable that the Kim situation didn’t end with someone in the organization very publically losing their job. That said, none of that actually matters to Orioles fans right now: the team is coming off two playoff appearances in three years and just went to the ALCS for the first time since 1997. Fans can quibble the minor moves to death — and have, and will — but there is no real argument with the overall results from the last two years.
But there is the question of who deserves the credit — there is always a question of who deserves the credit — and the story of the 2012-2014 Baltimore Orioles front office involves the strong influence of a departed actor: former Orioles Executive Vice President of Baseball Operations Andy MacPhail.
Discuss this article further here.
Loosely defined, the Orioles’ core players over the last three years — the guys who have been at the heart of their lineup and their pitching staff — have been, in no specific order: Adam Jones, J.J. Hardy, Matt Wieters, Manny Machado, Chris Davis, Nick Markakis, Chris Tillman, Darren O’Day, and Wei-Yin Chen. (Nelson Cruz is excluded here because he was only on the club for one year.) Markakis was drafted, signed, and extended by the pre-MacPhail regime, and we’ll get to Chen in a moment, but every other guy was acquired by Andy MacPhail.
You don’t get style points for winning trades, but half of them (Jones, Tillman, Davis, Hardy) came to Baltimore in woefully lopsided deals — MacPhail turned Erik Bedard, Koji Uehara, and a couple of minor league relievers into a franchise CF, franchise SS, breakout 1B (we’ll see how Davis does now that he’s back on Adderall with the league’s permission), and very solid starting pitcher. Machado and Wieters were top-5 first round picks, and O’Day was a waiver claim from Texas at the end of the MacPhail era — he was actually selected on November 2nd, less than a week before Duquette was hired, so credit for him should properly go to Buck Showalter.
MacPhail doesn’t get much credit for building the current successful Baltimore teams much in the way that Dan Duquette himself doesn’t get credit for laying the groundwork in Boston for Theo Epstein: they weren’t winners while MacPhail was in town. There was a good reason for that, too; one that highlights a key difference between Duquette and MacPhail: Duquette can identify and acquire league-average starting pitching for relatively cheap. Wei-Yin Chen, his most impressive signing, has only really been so from a value-maximization perspective — he’s a consistently just-above league average starting pitcher finishing up the last year of a deal that paid him about a third of what his skillset will be worth on the open market (at minimum). But fill a rotation with guys eking out 100-110 ERA+ performances year in and year out and you’ve got a much more consistent staff top to bottom than a lot of clubs in the league, even without an ace. Sure, it’s harder to shorten up your staff in the playoffs for really a crucial short series, but “how is this rotation going to perform in the playoffs” is a ‘problem’ that every team would love to have, because it presupposes a successful regular season.
From Chen to Hammel, Norris, and Gonzalez, Duquette did what MacPhail never could: salvaged the pitching to the point where the team’s real strength — its lineup, both at the plate and in the field — was able to carry it, instead of being dragged down by it. Duquette may not have put the team’s core together, but he properly identified its key parts and accentuated them instead of blowing the whole mess up to start another self-flagellant three-to-five year rebuilding nightmare. That’s good stewardship.
He’s made his mistakes, too — mistakes of action, like the Ubaldo Jimenez contract and the embarrassing Balfour situation, and mistakes of inaction, like the silent offseason after 2012 that presaged the O’s regression in 2013. The Orioles still spend about $10-15 million less per season than they probably should be given their market, TV deal, and current success, but the the budget is hardly Duquette’s fault. His obsession with marginal roster moves and the Rule 5 draft ranges from amusing (the legend of Ryan Flaherty continues to grow) to aggravating (his prioritizing roster flexibility over a stable environment for Kevin Gausman to work on his command) but on the whole, the Orioles have been better for having him than not, and that’s something I was mistaken about. That’s the pleasant part of being a pessimist: it usually feels good to be proven wrong.
But that won’t stop me from thinking that 2015 is the year this unlikely pitching staff finally implodes, and that the Orioles are foolish for not cutting it off at the pass by getting involved in what appears to be a hideously depressed trade market for Cole Hamels. After all, we can only be who we are.
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.