While nothing is officially done yet, it seems reasonable to assume the Orioles are going to sign Yovani Gallardo, with reports that a deal just needs some tweaks before it is finalized. The Orioles are reportedly giving Gallardo a three year deal, but more significantly, they’re sacrificing their first round pick (#14 overall) since he rejected the Rangers qualifying offer at the beginning of the off-season. After losing Wei-Yin Chen, the Orioles certainly had a hole in their rotation, and so after months of talking about replacing him internally, they’ve apparently decided that Gallardo’s price has come down enough to justify surrendering the draft choice in order to sign him.

Given the Orioles position as a bottom-tier AL club, in a league where all 15 teams are trying to win in 2016, giving up the 14th pick to sign an average pitcher in decline is a questionable move. Currently, our forecasts have the Orioles as a 78 win team, and while adding Gallardo will help, he realistically can’t be expected to push them much past 79 or 80 wins. This is still a team with some significant flaws, and while they’re good enough to contend if things break their way, Gallardo isn’t really a put-them-over-the-top kind of acquisition.

But signing Gallardo does present a potential opportunity. By surrendering the 14th pick to upgrade their rotation, they’ve also lowered their acquisition cost of making a second move, and Gallardo isn’t the only free agent on the market still tied to draft pick compensation. In fact, there’s one more free agent out there who makes a ton of sense for the Orioles. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s check in on the latest in Yovani Gallardo rumors:

• Jan. 22, @ChrisCotillo: Source: Barring the late entry of a mystery team, Yovani Gallardo will decide between Astros, Orioles, Rockies.
• Jan. 23, @harding_at_mlb: #Rockies GM downplays Gallardo talks
• Jan. 28, @ChrisCotillo: Fister to Astros means one less suitor for Gallardo. Orioles still thought to be involved, with Rockies on outskirts. No clear favorite.
• Feb. 4, @JonHeyman: orioles continue to have interest in Gallardo, and remain in contact
• Feb. 7, @Buster_ESPN: The Orioles are taking another look at Yovani Gallardo, writes Roch Kubatko

It took a while for any Gallardo talks to surface, but when they did, it was the Orioles, Rockies, and Astros at the forefront. Everyone agreed: those three were the lead suitors.

But the thought of a non-contending Rockies team forfeiting a draft pick for a pitcher entering his age-30 season seemed a bit peculiar, and then GM Jeff Bridich came out and said the talks were “overblown,” so people scratched the Rockies off the list. The Astros went and signed Doug Fister, and people scratched the Astros off the list. So on January 28, just the Orioles were left. On February 4, just the Orioles were left. And on February 7… just the Orioles were left.

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In the offseason, teams are frequently characterized as “winners” and “losers” based on the players they’ve acquired relative to the players who have left. Often, the so-called winners are simply the clubs who’ve been most active, bringing in the most players — regardless of cost — while the losers often are those clubs which have been more idle, making smaller moves to improve their rosters. These characterizations do not always translate to the field, as the case of the San Diego Padres illustrates. The Padres followed an active 2014-15 offseason with a poor 2015 campaign.

With that caveat having been made, many have declared the Washington Nationals losers this offseason not simply because Ian Desmond, Drew Storen, and Jordan Zimmermann are gone — replaced by a relatively modest group including Shawn Kelley, Daniel Murphy, Ben Revere — but mainly because they failed to land Yoenis Cespedes, Jason Heyward, or Ben Zobrist in free agency. While the team might be hidden winners of the winter, the Nationals are claiming their failure is due to a tightened budget caused by the Baltimore Orioles’ refusal to pay market value for their television rights.

For those who might not be aware, the Orioles — principally Peter Angelos, through regional sports networks MASN and MASN2 — air the Nationals broadcasts. The Orioles control the Nationals broadcasts as a result of negotiations with the team when the Nationals moved to Washington, D.C., thus encroaching on the Orioles’ television territory. Nathaniel Grow characterized the situation like this after the last major decision in the legal dispute between the teams:

In order to alleviate the Orioles’ concerns, MLB structured a deal in which Baltimore would initially own 87 percent of the newly created Mid-Atlantic Sports Network (MASN), the regional sports network that would air both the Orioles’ and Nationals’ games. In exchange, the Nationals were scheduled to receive an initial broadcast rights fee of $20 million per year from MASN, an amount that would be recalculated every five years.

Jump forward to 2012, when Washington requested that its rights fee be increased to $120 million per year. MASN and the Orioles refused, and as a result the dispute ended up in arbitration, with a panel of MLB team executives – the Mets’ Jeff Wilpon, the Rays’ Stuart Sternberg, and the Pirates’ Frank Coonelly – ultimately awarding the Nationals roughly $60 million per year in broadcast fees.

The Orioles believed they should pay the Nationals roughly half the amount the arbitrators awarded and appealed, getting the decision thrown out due to conflicts with the Nationals’ counsel. (For more on the decision, read Grow’s full piece linked above.) The case is still ongoing without a resolution and the Nationals are pushing the Orioles to head back to arbitration. The Nationals retained new counsel, and have filed a motion to compel the parties to arbitrate the case and set a value for the television rights. In their recent motion, the Nationals indicated that the Orioles’ failure to pay fair-market value for television rights has hamstrung the team in signing free agents to multi-year contracts.

“MASN’s underpayment of rights fees has already required the Nationals to fund payroll and other expenses from its own reserves, and further delay could require the Nationals to seek new financing,” says the team’s memorandum. “This is not only burdensome in its own right, but it places the Nationals at a competitive disadvantage to other baseball clubs, which typically receive fair market value from their regional sports networks for their telecast rights. Without this added income, the Nationals are handicapped in their ability to invest in efforts to improve the team. For instance, without this added and steady income, the Nationals cannot bring full economic confidence to investments in multi-year player contracts to keep up with the fierce competition for top players — especially when such control over finances is in the hands of a neighboring club.”

This might sound a bit like whining coming from a billionaire owner who just one year ago signed Max Scherzer to a seven year, $210 million contract, and reportedly made offers to Jason Heyward for roughly $200 million and Yoenis Cespedes $100 million, but those claims do have some merit.

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In 2015, there were fewer pitchers (74) qualifying for the AL and NL ERA titles than in any season going back to 1995 (70). In any given season, the number of first-time ERA qualifiers is about a quarter of that population. This last year was no exception, as 18 pitchers qualified for the ERA title for the first time.

What was unique about 2015 was the high quality of those first-time ERA qualifiers. AL first-timers included Carlos Carrasco, Danny Salazar, Taijuan Walker, Collin McHugh, Trevor Bauer and Marco Estrada. Their NL counterparts included Jake Arrieta, Jacob deGrom, Gerrit Cole, Kyle Hendricks, Carlos Martinez and Michael Wacha. There are some heavy hitters on those two lists; you might have to go back to the Class of 1984, which boasted Dwight Gooden, Orel Hershiser, Mark Langston, Mike Moore and Oil Can Boyd among its members, to find a comparable group at the top.

This week and next, I’m going to attempt to reach into the large population of zero-time ERA qualifiers to identify the top breakthrough candidates for 2016 in both leagues. Today, it’s the American League, and the Orioles’ Kevin Gausman.

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At the kind of money he wanted, Chris Davis basically had a one-team market. Other big-spending teams didn’t have openings at first base, and other big-spending teams weren’t buying Scott Boras’ pitch of Davis as a versatile could-be outfielder. The Orioles sensed even a month ago they would be bidding against themselves, and they attempted a couple leverage plays to try to force Boras’ hand. Yet Boras won, as he almost always does. Here’s what’s being reported: Davis re-signed with Baltimore for a seven-year deal worth $161 million. Somehow, the commitment got bigger from what was reported weeks back. The Orioles were the only team around $150 million, and Scott Boras got them to add on more.

That makes it kind of a bad look for Baltimore. The easy takeaway is that Peter Angelos just got played. And at the end of the day, it’s highly unlikely another team would’ve been willing to come close to this, had the Orioles walked away. But for one thing — however much this is worth — this does send a good message that the Orioles will spend to keep good players around. People have doubted that in the past, and now Davis joins Darren O’Day as a returning key player. And there are other factors, as well, in support of the idea this isn’t a certain catastrophe. This isn’t quite a straight-up $161-million commitment. There are, let’s say, special considerations.

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This morning, after a long and protracted negotiation that finally resulted in the team threatening to pursue alternative free agents, the Orioles reportedly agreed to re-sign their slugging first baseman Chris Davis. The price? $161 million over seven years, giving Davis the same annual average value as Jason Heyward, the winter’s best available position player. And Davis was able to land this contract despite the fact this contract is probably going to be a disaster and that the market for hitters has been quite frigid this winter.

Given the limited suitors looking for a first baseman, the remaining crop of quality outfielders, and the risks surrounding Davis’ skillset, this might be Scott Boras’ most impressive victory over reason yet. As an agent, he has perfected the ability to go around the baseball operations department, dealing directly with owners who simply don’t have the same level of knowledge as the people they employ to run their team on a daily basis. Except in this case, even Peter Angelos had to know he was bidding against himself.

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Let’s face it — there’s no way not to feel uncomfortable about the Chris Davis sweepstakes.

I’m not just referring to how the Orioles and Davis seem to be at something of an impasse. I’m not just referring to how Davis has to this point been unable to drum up much of a market. It’s just, this is going to require a lot of money, and it’s hard to know what Davis is going to be. He’s as much a boom-or-bust player as you can find: Last year, he hit as well as Jose Bautista; the year before, he hit as well as Jed Lowrie. He’s been bad and he’s been an MVP candidate, and there’s a whole lot of space in between.

I don’t think player comps can be much help. For one thing, there just aren’t very many. Davis is an unusual player, historically speaking, given his massive power and his massive strikeout side effect. Maybe the two best comps are Jim Thome and Ryan Howard, and their careers went in completely opposite directions. Those comps are as unhelpful as Davis’ recent track record. He could turn out really amazing. He could be a disaster. This isn’t particularly illuminating.

Davis is 230 pounds of uncertainty. The extent of his success will be determined by what happens with a handful of swings every season, and there’s a lot of room for that to go right or wrong. Basically, there’s no achieving actual comfort. There’s only pursuing artificial comfort. That comes out of just learning more information — more knowledge has to be a good thing, right? — so let’s take a look at something that’s been going on under the hood. Let’s learn more about Davis, even if it might not ultimately help to understand what his future’s going to be.

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There were only four of them. Blown saves, that is. I presume you’ve read the title. Zach Britton blew four saves last year, which actually isn’t a particularly noteworthy fact. Britton blew four saves in 40 tries, which is great, but it certainly wasn’t the best, and Britton blew four saves the year before too, in one more try. It’s great but not spectacular, especially relative to Britton’s season as a whole, which was both great and spectacular and plenty of other adjectives like awesome (in the literal sense of actually inspiring awe) or remarkable or astonishing or breathtaking or historic. Britton struck out nearly a third of all batters he faced and posted the highest ground ball rate in history. That’s spectacular. “History” in this case dates back to just 2002, but Britton stands alone at the top by a comfortable margin, 3.5 standard deviations above the mean and a full standard deviation above the guy in third place. History doesn’t reach back super far in this instance, but given the magnitude of his lead, we can expect Britton’s place in history to continue for some time, given Britton doesn’t go and break his own record.

The save is a mostly silly statistic anyway, which by proxy makes it’s cousin, the blown save, equally frivolous. But what if I told you that simply by watching how Zach Britton blew his four saves in 2015, you’d come away knowing more about Zach Britton, more about the nature of saves and blown saves, and maybe more about other things, too? Well, you’d either continue reading the blog post or you wouldn’t. That’s what would happen if I told you what I just told you. I’d prefer that you continue reading the blog post, but let’s be honest it’s 2016 and you’ve probably got a phone to look at, so really you could just scan the moving pictures and get the gist. I’m not gonna lie to you. Just know that my words would feel left out and sad. 🙁
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With the holiday break coming to an end, Phase II of the 2015-16 free agent and trade markets is about to kick off in earnest. As noted by August Fagerstrom earlier today, player movement is likely to be heavier than in the typical January, with plenty of top free agents, particularly on the position player side, still on the market.

The first wave of free-agent signings was particularly kind to starting pitchers, both at the top and middle of the market. Still, a handful of starters — Wei-Yin Chen, Yovani Gallardo and Ian Kennedy at the forefront — remain available. Does the market have enough suitors and dollars to satisfy those three? Today, we’ll look at the first of those three, who has spent all of his stateside career with the Orioles.

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The week between Christmas and New Year’s is traditionally a quiet one in baseball circles, as most home offices are closed, and many top executives vacation far, far away. This year hasn’t exactly been typical, with one big trade (Aroldis Chapman to the Yanks) and one reasonably significant free agent signing already in the books (Henderson Alvarez to the A’s) and another one pending a physical (Daniel Murphy to the Nationals).

There are still many big name free agents yet to sign on with their new clubs, and most of them are of the position player variety. Outfielders Justin Upton, Yoenis Cespedes and Alex Gordon, to name just three, are still on the board. So is first baseman Chris Davis, whose recent offensive contributions outstrip even those three. The Orioles reportedly offered Davis in the vicinity of $150 million over seven years to remain in the fold, only to be rebuffed. Has that offer clogged up position player free agency? And is an investment of that magnitude in this sort of player a wise one?

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