The gears inexorably grind on the Yovani Gallardo and Dexter Fowler deals — the latter requiring the former — but everyone in baseball from Rosenthal on down remains convinced the deals will get done. And when they do, the Baltimore Orioles will have cultivated their newest identity: bargain bin shoppers.
(Discuss this on the BSL boards here.)
This is the second time in three offseasons that the Orioles have waited until February to make their biggest impact on the free agent market. The last time they did it was before the 2014 season, when they pounced on Nelson Cruz and Ubaldo Jimenez for, respectively, a one year make-good deal with a slugger coming off a 50-game PED suspension, and an at- or slightly below-market deal for a guy with a great walk year but very suspect track record who they hoped would be a league-average pitcher, and who so far has not been.
Gallardo has few of the same warning signs as Jimenez; he just is what he is at this point in his career: a #3 starter at best, and probably not a guy you want being your feature pitcher in a short playoff series. Fowler is no Cruz, either, and he’ll probably want a two or three year deal to head off this offseason happening all over again for him next year.
Still, this shows a pattern and a strategy: wait until the market falls out of a couple useful veteran cogs, and then underpay in dollars and years on the deal while overpaying on draft pool cost — signing Fowler and Gallardo will cost the Orioles the 14th and 29th picks and their pool bonuses. It’s a good strategy for a team that’s trying to extend its window at the cost of top-tier talent in the draft (ideally, it’d be employed with a protected first round pick — the Cleveland Indians were the first team to experiment with this idea back in 2012 with a protected first rounder; they signed Nick Swisher and Michael Bourn on the cheap, and then, unfortunately, the bottoms fell out from under both guys). But it can’t be a team’s only strategy.
Obviously, a team that waits and signs like Baltimore is doing gives up a lot of bonus pool money at the top of the draft. That requires one of two things: an extremely good developmental org that can turn second, third, and later round players into contributors — this is MLB’s holy grail, and the only team that’s even come close to doing something like it right now is the St. Louis Cardinals, who have one of the better pipelines in the league despite also being one of the most consistently successful teams in recent baseball history — or a willingness to offset those savings achieved in free agency with a robust international free agency operation.
The Orioles have neither of these things. The problems with the O’s as a developmental org have been gone over in-depth, and you can get a feel for how bleak things are just by looking at the top 100 prospect lists that have come out — Baltimore has two players near the bottom of Baseball Prospectus’s Top 101, both of whom come into the season with injury concerns, and Baseball America has locked the Orioles out of their list entirely. As far as the international scene goes, the Orioles have focused almost exclusively on major-league ready professionals in the Asian pro leagues, with very little interest or activity in the Latin American IFA market. They’re one of the teams that might greatly benefit from an international draft, but that only underscores how lackluster their current efforts in the area are.
What ends up happening, then, is that Baltimore mortgages the top of its draft to buy a little more time for a team whose core formed around 2012 or earlier — while having no answers for what’s going to happen when the bill comes due. The wait-and-sign tactic can be a good one; it’s really a fairly clever use of a qualifying offer system that’s extremely flawed! The team employing just needs some other way of bringing talent into its system besides draft picks in the first round. And the Orioles are not a team that’s had any success with draft picks outside of the first round in a very, very long time.
So the idea is sound. The implementation, even, is sound. But the problem circles back to what the problem has always been for Baltimore, even during the MacPhail years, when much of this team was built by the best trading GM in the game not named “Dombrowski” — there is no major league free agent strategy that can cover for an organization that is constitutionally incapable of developing talent, especially pitching, and especially starting pitching.
No matter what strategies the current Baltimore FO employs to try to cover up that weakness, it will continue to torment the franchise until it’s fixed. And we’ve long since run out of fingers to point anywhere but at the Orioles themselves.
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.