Lost in the Mookie Betts show and the Red Sox still stunning decision even eight months later to rid themselves of him, is the success of the Tampa Rays. The Rays are the modern day Billy Beane A’s, a team that has vaulted themselves past competitors who routinely spend two or three times their payroll on players with the power of cutting edge analytics. So prepare yourself for a Brad Pitt-as-Matthew-Silverman biopic coming to your nearest theater/COVID hotspot next year! To paraphrase the John Henry character at the end of Moneyball (the movie), any team that isn’t closely studying the Rays and immediately implementing their methods is a dinosaur. That includes the Orioles. 

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The Orioles of course aren’t modeled after the Rays, they are modeled after the Astros. GM Mike Elias came from Houston and so did assistant GM Sig Mejdal. The Orioles organization is steeped, like a fine tea, in the Astros way of doing things. And that’s not bad, necessarily, despite the Astros deserved reputation for cheating their way to a World Series title. That said, Elias and Mejdal could learn something from the Rays, as undoubtedly could the rest of baseball. But the important point here is that while the temptation to copy the Rays methods, as previous teams copied the A’s, will be strong, the Orioles shouldn’t give in to it. Instead, the Orioles should be better.

I admit that’s kind of a dumb statement. Of course every team should aim to be best, the Orioles included. The Rays exist in a space between McKinsey business consultants and an actual baseball team. They see players as commodities, in terms of value and dollars. That’s not exactly wrong. Players provide value to a team, they are tradable, and they cost money. But there is a lack of feeling there, a coldness, a calculated nature that is difficult to get close to. The Rays can get away with acting like that in their market, but it’s debatable whether they could directly transfer those actions to a bigger market with a deeper baseball connection. 

The Red Sox hired Chaim Bloom from Tampa to run their baseball operations department and the first thing Bloom did was trade future Hall-of-Famer Betts to the Dodgers. This isn’t a re-litigation of that trade, but it’s worth noting that, rather than pay top dollar for a face of the franchise player, one who was worth every penny of the long term deal he was to sign (and this isn’t disputed by anyone worth listening to), the Sox under Bloom followed a Rays-like model and opted to move Betts. They did so for fair reasons, avoid paying Betts huge money, avoiding a long term commitment, all in favor of attempting to recreate Betts in the aggregate with a slew of Dodgers prospects. Again, not necessarily wrong, but utterly heartless. This is the approach the Rays would have taken, for certain. Again, in a pure value for value calculation, it might not be the wrong move, but it gutted the Red Sox team and their fans. 

An Orioles version would have been trading Cal Ripken after his age-31 season instead of signing him to a contract extension. Depending on what Ripken would have got in return on the trade market, that might have been a better move, at least from a pure value and WAR perspective (not that the Rays use WAR; just as an example). And yet, it would have robbed the organization and city of perhaps the greatest player in team history. 

There is a middle ground between where the Rays stand and where the Orioles should play. The Rays pour everything into player evaluations, both their own and players around the league. Then they trust those evaluations over everything. An example is the trade of starting pitching prospect Matthew Liberatore to St. Louis for Randy Arozarena and Jose Martinez. The deal was reported at the time as Liberatore for Martinez, but really the Rays wanted Arozarena. They valued Arozarena more highly than Liberatore at a time when Liberatore was considered a top-100 prospect and still had the shine of being a former first round draft pick while Arozarena was coming off an age-24 season he had split between Double-A and Triple-A. It was an unconventional trade and went against the zeitgeist of prospect evaluation at the time. Now though? Arozarena put together over a 1.000 OPS in 23 games with Tampa at the end of the season and his offense almost single-handedly pushed the Rays past the Astros and into the World Series. That’s a heck of a trade. That’s the kind of trade the Orioles need to make. 

That’s not to say it’s not difficult though. Teams don’t frequently trade prospects for prospects, at least in part because they tend to know more about their own prospects than they do others, and what they do know about other team’s prospects isn’t often all that different than the consensus opinion from Baseball America, Keith Law, and the BP and FanGraphs prospect teams. It’s not easy to go against all that in your evaluations, let alone to actually pursue and consummate a trade of a recent first round draft pick based on those evaluations. That takes guts. If it goes wrong, the GM looks like an idiot. You drafted a good player and then turned around and traded him for some other team’s garbage? That’s the danger of a deal like that. It’s a danger the Rays were able to ignore in the quest to make their team better. Deals like this don’t have to be prospect for prospect; value can be acquired in different trade formats. The point is add value where you can, hire the best people, and trust their evaluations, be they analytical or scouting.

The Orioles need to be open to that. Be flexible and not hemmed in by past decisions. Take advantage of misperceptions by other organizations, and don’t be afraid to shake things up or move them around if the end result is a better baseball team. This is all far easier said than done, it’s true, but it should be just a tad bit easier now that we can all see the results. Tampa is in the World Series. That’s a pretty good example to follow. 

Matthew Kory
Matthew Kory

Orioles Analyst

Matthew Kory is a Orioles / MLB Analyst for BSL. He has covered baseball professionally for The Athletic, Vice Sports, Sports On Earth, FanGraphs, and Baseball Prospectus. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife, two boys, and his cats, Mini Squeaks and The President. Co-Host of The Warehouse.

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