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Trouble in Birdland

June 9, 2010 BY Alex Eisenberg 2 Comments

I recently wrote a piece for the Hardball Times that looks deeply into the organizational problems of the Baltimore Orioles. Here is an excerpt:

Luck can have a lot to do with the quality of one’s draft. However, one thing teams can control is the amount of talent they draft. Because they are big-market teams, the Red Sox and Yankees can and do spend more money than your average team on players that drop because of signability issues. But it’s not a huge disparity. What amounts to a large sum of money spent on player signing bonuses for a team’s draft choices is around $10 million. That’s roughly half of the one-year salaries for the highest paid players in baseball. Or to put it another way, that’s a little under half of the one-year salary for Houston’s Carlos Lee.

So the Astros theoretically could have had Wil Myers (Round 3, $2 million), Max Stassi (Round 4, $1.5 million), Zack Von Rosenberg (Round 6, $1.2 million), Ian Krol (Round 7, $925,000), Madison Younginer (Round 7, $975,000), Jonathan Singleton (Round 8, $200,000), and Kendal Volz (Round 9, $550,000) for $7.35 million. Would you make that trade, Carlos Lee for all those players I just listed from the 2009 draft and $11.65 million? At the time each team made their selection last year, you can make the case for each player I just listed, that they were the best player on the board at the time they were selected.

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2 Comments »

  • Holgash said:

    Alex,

    Arrieta has looked pretty good since the O’s brought him up. I remember reading from you and lots of other scouts that his upside was a number 2/3 starter, and he seemed to be considered the worst out of the Matusz/Tillma/Arrieta group. I never got a chance to see him actually pitch, but I’ve watched his first two games and all I can say is WOW.

    I know he’s given up a lot of flyballs (although he was improving on that in Triple-A this year) and walks a lot of batters, but I am in love with his fastball. It sits in the mid-90s with movement and he can dial it up when he wants. Couple it with a nice curve, slider, and changeup and I’m starting to think he’s going to be the best out of the “Big Three”.

    It won’t come easy, he has a lot he still needs to improve on, but it seems like if he can learn to improve his command, especially on his fastball he will get a lot better. When I’ve seen him throw his slider and curve they seem to start in the middle of the plate and break down and outside (from a righty perspective). If he can learn to start that pitch on this inside, almost as if it’s going to hit the batter, then have it break in to the inside-low part of the strikezone it can be a real “out-pitch”.

    I feel like the command on his fastball, and probably other pitches as well, could really be improved if he could learn to shorten his stride by a few inches so his heel doesn’t hit the ground before the front part of his foot. This is something he probably won’t be able to focus on until the offseason, but I think if he can fix that and improve on the other things listed, he can be a possible future Ace for the O’s. It’s probably somewhat of a long-shot, but I like him the best of the young O’s pitchers (who I have seen), and I love his attitude. It’s really nice to see a O’s starting pitcher with a mid-90s fastball, I wish there were more like him (but with better command).

    # 17 June 2010 at 9:09 PM
  • Alex Eisenberg (author) said:

    I like Arrieta, but wouldn’t give him good odds of being a better pitching that Matusz in the long run. There are many pitchers you can rate as being better than Tillman at the moment because his mechanics are much different now than they were last year. Not only is command still off, but his stuff is now fringy. I’ll have an article on him later, but I digress.

    Arrieta has the best fastball of the trio. I actually think he has pretty solid command of it, but there are stretches he just loses feel for it. If you combine the secondary offerings of Arrieta and Matusz together, I’d rate Arrieta’s slider as the third best pitch, rating behind Matusz’ change-up and curveball. Plus, Matusz has the better command of the two.

    He’s made mechanical adjustments before to his delivery, so maybe he can do it again. Not sure I would count it though just because it doesn’t happen often.

    I do agree it’s nice to have a power arm in the organization come up as a starter. And I also like his presence on the mound and the confidence he exudes.

    # 18 June 2010 at 4:25 AM