Time for the lean years
The Orioles have a highly-rated farm system, but it's a top-heavy one and we're at the bottom.
I figured the league All-Star break was a good time to assess my local minor league baseball team, the Delmarva Shorebirds. I’ve been a fan of theirs ever since I moved down here prior to the 2005 season, so I endured the 14-year break between playoff appearances between that aforementioned 2005 season that ended in first-round heartbreak and the 2019 season where a Shorebirds team that flat-out dominated the old-school South Atlantic League with a 90-48 record was swept out of the playoffs in a gutting 1-0 home loss to the Hickory Crawdads, losing the three-game series 2-0. And yes, we’ve had some awful teams leavened by the occasional prospect or diamond in the rough who may have been here a month or two: Manny Machado, Jonathan Schoop, Trey Mancini, and Dylan Bundy come first to mind in that category, while John Means and Cedric Mullins, among others, spent a full season here.
To be sure, that 2019 Shorebird squad was an excellent team but it didn’t have many grade A hitting prospects on it. There was a brief appearance by 1-1 Adley Rutschman at the end of the season, but many of the better players were guys now considered fringe prospects or less: Adam Hall led the team with 122 games played while Cadyn Grenier played 82, but the other five who played in more than half the 138 games are now either out of baseball or toiling in the independent leagues hoping for one more shot. On the other hand, their pitching was outstanding, anchored by Grayson Rodriguez and supplemented by 2022 Orioles Felix Bautista and Nick Vespi as well as other highly-touted hurlers like Drew Rom and Grey Fenter, who was good enough to be a Rule 5 pick by the Cubs a season ago. (He was returned during spring training and now pitches in the Giants’ organization.)
That 2019 season was preceded by the last draft under the tutelage of former Oriole GM Dan Duquette, whose failure to sustain the successful run of 2012-16 at the big league level led to his contract not being renewed after the 2018 campaign. Too late he also realized that a barren international presence needed to be addressed - between Eduardo Rodriguez in 2010 and the aforementioned Bautista in 2016-17 the Orioles’ Dominican League teams did not produce a single major league player, nor have they since. (Remarkably, they only signed Bautista as a roster-filler for one of their two DSL squads, since he was previously released after two seasons pitching for the Marlins’ DSL entry and sat out a season between. But, in a tribute to the Orioles’ player development, Felix learned how to harness his overpowering stuff.)
While the Shorebirds were having their success in 2019, their 2022 pipeline was being built in the Dominican Summer League - and now the leaks and lack of attention from Duquette pre-2018 is showing. Of course, we had no way of knowing that the 2020 minor league season would be scrubbed and the minor leagues as we knew them were coming to an end: instead of having two stateside teams below Delmarva to filter out the chaff, we now get them here.
From what I understand, recruitment of international players is a lot different than the stateside process of scouting. Back then, teams drafted 40 players domestically, which meant they probably followed hundreds of players around the country, players for whom they had reasonably good records between scouts, cross-checkers, and other talent evaluators. You have to follow a lot of players because there are 29 other teams with the same shot at getting your guy. A shortstop your team may peg as a tenth-round talent could be the same player your rival sees as a seventh-rounder, and they’ll get him.
Internationally, though, where there is no draft (yet), player recruitment depends much more on relationships. The Orioles’ problem with entering markets like the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and other Caribbean nations is that they had few points of contact, and the fact they were filling rosters with other teams’ castoffs meant they were several steps behind the competition. This is the point they were at back in 2018-19, when they were signing the players now on the Shorebirds.
Several players on the Opening Day roster for the Shorebirds were signed during or before that early era: Davis Tavarez (2/22/17), Josue Cruz (8/4/17), Isaac Bellony (7/27/18), Kelvin LaRoche (8/15/18), Moises Ramirez (8/28/18), Hector Lopez (12/7/18), Juan De Los Santos (3/7/19), Eduard Monroy (3/12/19), Michael Mantecon (3/26/19), Angel Vargas (4/11/19), Luis Valdez (5/20/19), Alejandro Mendez (7/1/19), Moises Chace (7/2/19), Raul Rangel (7/2/19), and Brayan Hernandez (2/14/20). That’s 15 players, with only a few being meaningful contributors this season - in fact, Lopez was released by the Shorebirds in April and Cruz in May, while LaRoche is on the 60-day injured list. Along with the catchers Mantecon and Hernandez, Davis Tavarez has become an organization player, bouncing around to temporarily fill holes until better players come along. (Out of that group, Bellony and Valdez have turned out to be the best talents, with De Los Santos also showing good potential on the mound.)
Knowing this would be an issue, current GM Mike Elias has used the trading block to acquire more international talent and fill in holes in the minor league system. The Shorebirds have had several of those players this year as well: Elio Prado and Noelberth Romero both came from the 2019 Andrew Cashner deal with Boston, Miguel Padilla recently came here as the return from Houston for Hector Velazquez in 2020, Isaac DeLeon was the exchange for Richard Bleier when he was shipped off to the Marlins in 2020, Mishael Deson was the player to be named later in the Mychal Givens deal with the Rockies in 2020, Hugo Beltran was a cash acquisition from the LA Dodgers last season, and Yaqui Rivera (another recent callup) was brought on in the Tanner Scott/Cole Sulser trade with Miami this spring. In all, a whopping 34 of the 58 players used by the Shorebirds so far are international players, whether initially signed by the Orioles or not.
But the reason I titled this post as I did was just looking at the records of the teams under us in the Orioles’ food chain. In 2021 our Dominican League teams combined for a anemic 38-69 record, which ranked at the bottom among MLB teams with more than one DSL franchise. (The A’s, Tigers, and Twins were comparable but only carried one DSL team. We had enough bad players for two.) In 2022, at the All-Star break, the two Oriole teams are a combined 23-38.
Down in the Florida Complex League, it was just about as bad last season as the two Oriole teams combined for a league-worst 29-62 record. This year, the Orioles’ brass has retreated to carrying just one FCL team, but it’s still a nearly league-worst 7-23. (One of the split Astros teams is 6-23.)
I understand that the Orioles are now investing in their own Dominican complex to help them with talent recruitment and building relationships, and that’s good. But there’s an even better way to recruit players.
Kids who play baseball have big league dreams, and a lot of them are just thankful they made it. Players here stateside and in Puerto Rico are basically stuck with the organization that drafted them, which means if they’re destined for perennial losers like the Pirates, Orioles, Rockies, and others their only attainable goal is getting to the majors in the hope they make the team better.
But baseball-crazy international players have their pick of organizations. Let’s compare this to the pre-1964 Yankees: if a kid from Podunk, Iowa had a Yankees scout after him back in the day, what are the chances he would sign with the team and see if he could play with their legends? Yeah, maybe he’d be sent out to the Kansas City Athletics for some finishing - in the 1950’s they functioned as a Yankees’ minor league team of sorts - but sooner or later the Yankees would trade back for him.
If a kid in the Dominican has a choice between signing for a team like the Yankees or Dodgers vs. the Orioles, well, that’s not much of a contest - at least until the parent club gets good. And part of that, to me, is making sure the minor league teams are competitive - there’s nothing to prepare you for a big league pennant race like that sort of experience coming up. Do you think those players who were here in 2019 (or who will be with Aberdeen later this season) will forget the playoff experience? Last month we had the Lynchburg Hillcats clinch the league’s first half title by sweeping a doubleheader from us to close out a tight race - it was do or die for them. You can’t simulate that sort of pressure no matter how much you crunch computer numbers.
If a kid is playing on a 7-23 team, it’s more than likely that the player will turn more inward and focus on improving himself rather than be a team player. This is why we need to start winning at the higher levels in order to recruit guys who don’t just pine to get to the big leagues, but to win a World Series.
Hopefully the crop of guys we’re signing now will get this and the Orioles’ management will turn them loose when they get here. I don’t like seeing a lot of empty seats in the house and the next celebration I want in our park is the one where we win it all.
By the way, I’m thinking of starting another Substack that’s solely baseball related this fall. Are you in?