The Orioles May Have a Good Reason for Not Pursuing Ohtani

The Baltimore Orioles were unlikely to sign Shohei Ohtani. He seems to have had little interest in teams east of the Mississippi — the Chicago Cubs represented the lone exception in that respect — and there was probably little that Peter Angelos, Dan Duquette, and Co. could have done to change that. Still, they had to try, right? That was the opinion held by 27 of the league’s 30 teams, at least. The Orioles weren’t one of them, though.

What was the Orioles’ logic for not pursuing the two-way star? Perhaps not what you’d think.

Huh. That is certainly interesting. While an organization might have (justifiably) felt as though they had little chance with Ohtani, this doesn’t appear to be Baltimore’s main reason for having abstained from courting him. The team’s objections appear to be founded on a greater underlying issue.

This certainly isn’t the first time the Orioles have taken a stance that ran counter to what the baseball industry felt as a whole. Consider this impassioned account from the Wikipedia page of team owner Peter Angelos:

The team was performing like a legitimate pennant contender when the baseball strike began in August 1994. As one of the newest members of the elite group of baseball owners, Angelos was expected to abide by the owners’ decisions quietly without offering any alternatives or using his experience with labor law to negotiate with the players’ union. Angelos did not like that arrangement and he did not particularly care if the world found out.

Angelos’ stance became known almost immediately. When the other owners signed a document cancelling the rest of the 1994 baseball season, including the World Series, Angelos refused to sign it because it blamed the players for the impasse. When the owners formed a committee to negotiate the strike, they did not include Angelos, despite his vast experience as a labor-management negotiator. When talks between the players and the owners stalled in December 1994, and the owners voted to impose a salary cap, Angelos was one of three dissenters to the arrangement. What brought him into the public eye, however, was his refusal to field replacement players should the strike last into the 1995 major league baseball season.

Angelos announced his decision about replacement players early in 1995 and was immediately hailed in blue-collar Baltimore as a champion of the worker. For his part, the maverick owner saw his choice as nothing more than sound business. As his fellow owners mulled what action to take against Angelos—everything from a $250,000 fine for each game missed to forcing the sale of the Orioles—the strike was finally settled in time for regular season play with major leaguers. Angelos had made a statement with his stance, however, and a nation of baseball fans responded. He was deluged with mail from all over the country and treated with near-reverence by Orioles fans.

While the author of this entry appears intent to test the boundaries of Wikipedia’s neutrality requirements, the point still remains: under Angelos, the Orioles have sometimes taken principled stands. Perhaps that’s what was at play here with respect to Ohtani, as well. One is tempted to write off their objections to the posting system as a convenient excuse for not being able to lure the player. In this case, though, there was little risk or expense in doing so.

Of course, that wasn’t necessarily the case in the past. And the Orioles haven’t signed any international players who were posted before:

Perhaps in his capacity as a labor lawyer — Angelos has tried (or was on a legal team that tried) some fairly heavy-duty cases, representing steel and shipyard workers in certain instances, and the state of Maryland against Phillip Morris in another — he is simply morally opposed to the process. Other than doubting they’d have any chance of signing Ohtani, that’s one of the few plausible reasons for not bidding on his services. After all, nearly every team had — or had the opportunity to have — a level playing field in terms of their international bonus pools.

Those international bonus pools don’t make things any less curious. Take a look at how many players were signed by each team on each of the past two July 2nds — the first day that teams are allowed to sign international free agents.

Zero and zero. Now, it could just be that the Orioles are cheap. To my knowledge, that has been the prevailing theory. But perhaps the Orioles have just soured on the whole process of signing international players? Looking back before 2016, Badler and the Baseball America team seem to have only publicly cataloged the notable players. In 2015, the Orioles didn’t sign a notable player, where “notable” appears to include any a player who has signed for more than $100,000. In 2014, they signed one, Miguel Gonzalez — though not the Miguel Gonzalez you’re thinking of (he was born in Mexico but was attended high school in the US). In 2013, the top-30 international prospects, according to Badler/BA, were signed by 20 different teams. The Orioles were not one of those teams. Their bonus pool ranked 23rd out of the 30 teams that year.

This doesn’t mean the organization has been totally absent from the international market. A non-exhaustive search reveals that the club signed Hyun-Soo Kim as a free agent in Dec. 2015 and Henry Urrutia in March of 2013. So that’s, at the very least, three players (Gonzalez included) whom the Duquette regime has signed internationally.

One certainly couldn’t blame the Orioles for their stance that the international posting system is an amoral process. The only truly fair process for the players is for every potential professional player to be a true free agent — no draft, no posting system. MLB has taken steps to ensure a process like that never sees the light of the day. And while the Orioles’ stance is particularly interesting, that they are willing to make this stance public is even more so.

But it also strikes me that we may have collectively underestimated the Orioles all along. Generally speaking, it seems as though Peter Angelos is written off as difficult, eccentric, and cheap. His actions are often dismissed out of hand. Perhaps it is true that he is difficult, eccentric, and cheap. But it also may be possible that he’s covered in this dismissive fashion because he doesn’t fit the mold that the other owners want him to fit, and that viewpoint filters down to fans and the media. Perhaps Angelos deserves more benefit of the doubt than he’s been extended in the past. I’m not necessarily convinced of that myself, but I’m certainly willing to keep an open mind about it.