The Orioles’ Winter Wasn’t So Bad

So, could you feel the evident disappointment of Baltimore Orioles fans this winter?

Coming off a 96-win year, the O’s did what seemed like a whole lot of nothing this offseason. As Andrew Miller, Nick Markakis and Nelson Cruz all departed for big contracts elsewhere, the only major league players Baltimore added were journeyman lefty reliever Wesley Wright, Padres castoff Everth Cabrera and former first-round bust Travis Snider.

Now compare that haul to the types of players added by Baltimore’s AL East division rivals, names such as (the aforementioned) Miller, Hanley Ramirez,Pablo Sandoval, Cuban prospect Yoan Moncada, Josh Donaldson and Russell Martin. Worse, with O’s GM Dan Duquette spending much of the winter engaged in an awkward — and ultimately fruitless — discussion about taking a job with the Blue Jays, the perception grew that he was more focused on his own career than improving the team.

Whether that’s a fair judgment of Duquette or not, it all added up to a less than impressive winter in Baltimore. Just a month ago, ESPN’s Jayson Stark polled baseball people about the offseason we just completed, and coming in second place for “Most Unimproved American League Team” was none other than those Orioles.

So this was a disaster, right? A big step back for a team on the precipice of making noise in the playoffs, just as the rest of the AL East is dealing with enough holes that this seemed like it may have been the time to strike, right? That’s the narrative, but it’s far too simple. For the Orioles, an appreciation of what was a quietly good winter requires looking a little deeper.

Don’t mind what’s leaving …

Where to start? For most, the unhappiness is over what they lost, and it’s easy to see why. Cruz led the major leagues in home runs. Miller, a midseason acquisition, was dominant after arriving from Boston and untouchable in October. Markakis was a beloved homegrown player who had been in the organization since 2003. That’s a lot to lose in one winter … or so it would seem.

Miller is elite and will be difficult to replace, but the name value of the two outfielders far exceeds their on-field value. In Cruz’s case, Baltimore swooped in last spring to grab him for a mere $8 million for one year, and it was rewarded with a huge 40-homer season. Of course, who knows if he can repeat that. He’ll turn 35 this season, and let’s not forget that after a red-hot start through the first two months (.315/.383/.675 and 20 homers), he hit .249/.308/.451 with 20 homers over the last four months.

Those four months are equivalent to a 110 wRC+, and while that’s still above average, it’s a lot more like his career averages than the elite-looking overall 2014 was. Considering Cruz’s below-average defense and age, his 3.9 WAR in 2014 looks more like the outlier than his 2011-13 seasons (all in the 1.5 WAR range). The Orioles will miss him, but preferring not to commit four years and nearly $60 million to a one-tool player turning 35 in July wasn’t exactly controversial.

As for Markakis, while his departure left hurt feelings on both sides, the beloved longtime Oriole has been one of baseball’s most overrated players for years. Over the past two years, his wRC+ of 97 has not only been slightly below league average, it puts him in a similar range as players such as Salvador Perez, Yunel Escobar,Brandon Crawford and Erick Aybar. That’s fine if you’re a middle infielder or a catcher; it’s much less so when you’re a 31-year-old outfielder dealing with a serious neck injury. That makes Markakis’ four-year deal with Atlanta easily the most criticized of the winter.

While Cruz was never likely to repeat his performance, and Markakis is easily replaceable at a fraction of the price, that’s still a considerable chunk of the Orioles’ 2014 outfield and offense that just walked out the door. So why shouldn’t Orioles fans worry about that? Because what they have coming in is a lot more impressive than it seems.

… and enjoy what’s coming

This has to be qualified a little, but it’s easily done. For starters, what’s almost never considered in an accounting of the Baltimore offseason is that they re-signed shortstop J.J. Hardy to a reasonable three-year deal in October, between the ALDS and ALCS. Does the fact that Hardy signed on Oct. 9 rather than, say, Nov. 9, make a difference for the 2015 Orioles? Not at all, but because he was never technically a true free agent, he’s rarely included.

That’s a bit unfair, because despite Hardy’s surprising power outage in 2014 — only nine homers, after 22 or more the prior three years — he just put up a pair of three-win seasons, making him an above-average shortstop in a market where none existed. (Just look at how down Mets fans are about not being able to get a better shortstop, or realize that the Yankees had to go get Didi Gregorius, who has shown little indication of being a capable big league hitter.) Hardy is not a star, but he’s more than capable, and retaining him before the open market could get its hands on him prevented a hole from opening that the O’s would have had trouble filling.

The Orioles are also in the unique situation of being able to expect improvements over 2014 from three key cogs who aren’t new to the organization. Matt Wieters (elbow), Manny Machado (knee) and Chris Davis(awful) all dealt with issues that curtailed either their availability or their production last year, and there’s reason to expect that all of them will offer more in 2015, as the Steamer projections to the right indicate.

For Wieters and Machado, it’s not just about what they’ll bring, but what they’ll prevent. When Wieters went down a month into the season, the O’s had to scramble to fill the void, and while Caleb Joseph earned rave reviews for his defense, the non-Wieters trio of Joseph, Nick Hundley and Steve Clevenger combined for a mere 72 wRC+, which would have been the fifth worst in baseball. When Machado injured his knee, the majority of that playing time went to Ryan Flaherty, who hit only .185/.265/.261 at third base.

Davis’ case is a little more complicated, because he was just plain awful when he wasn’t nursing an injured oblique or being suspended for failing to get a doctor’s note for Adderall usage, which he now has. He’s not going to repeat that massive 2013 — few hitters are hurt by the shift as much as he is — but that 2014 was so bad that the likely result is somewhere in the middle.

For what it’s worth, Davis claimed he used Adderall (as 112 other big leaguers did in 2013, according to the Baltimore Sun) to help him see the ball better, and his .264 ISO on hard pitches in 2014 wasn’t that far down from the .295 it had been the year before. But on breaking pitches, that fell from .395 to .197. On off-speed pitches, that dropped from .450 to .051. As much as everything went right in 2013, everything went wrong in 2014. It’s only appropriate to project a happy medium.

There’s also reason to be intrigued by the addition of Snider, who spent years trying to live up to his first-round pedigree with the Blue Jays after Toronto rushed him to the bigs at age 20. Thanks in part to a smashing second half of 2014 — his 149 second-half wRC+ was just as good as Miguel Cabrera‘s andAndrew McCutchen’s — and baseball’s best batted-ball distance by a pure lefty, Snider projects to easily replace Markakis (as the table to the right indicates), with much more breakout potential given that this is only his age-27 season.

The Orioles aren’t going to repeat last year’s 96 wins. First of all, it’s rare that any team is projected for that many going into a season. Also, we can reasonably expect Steve Pearce to take a step back, and there are very real questions about the talent on the pitching staff (though young Kevin Gausman is poised for a big year). But there’s winning in the winter and winning in the summer, and the two aren’t always perfectly correlated. We don’t know yet how the 2015 season will play out in Baltimore, but we do know the O’s weren’t “offseason losers,” as they’ve been labeled. The Orioles had a perfectly fine winter, even if few noticed it.