O’s take stock of offseason priorities

ORIOLES,

Dan O’Dowd, a former general manager with the Colorado Rockies and assistant GM with the Cleveland Indians who now serves as an analyst for MLB Network, said “your model has to be one of adaptability.”

“You do go into the offseason and do have Plan A, but I can tell you very rarely, all those years in Cleveland and all those years in Colorado, you really did get down to Plan E, F, G, H, I, J, K at some point in time in the winter, because stuff just happens,” O’Dowd said. “You do have to be really creatively adaptable to whatever the market is going to tell you, via trade market or free-agent market. It’s really not surprising to me.”

The Orioles’ initial tact seemed to be to fill out the rotation early by finding value in what’s been a slow-developing pitching market.

Both right-hander Miles Mikolas, who was returning from three sterling years in Japan, and right-hander Mike Fiers, who was nontendered by the world champion Houston Astros, spurned the Orioles’ offers for competing ones. Other early darlings of the market who could have been had without massive long-term commitments, including Doug Fister and Tyler Chatwood, signed early with the Texas Rangers and Chicago Cubs, respectively.

That meant that by the winter meetings, all that remained were the veterans seeking short-term deals and the most expensive pitchers on the market. The Orioles’ method of attempting to add pitching last week in Florida centered around dealing Machado, who is entering his final year of club control, for the asking price of two young rotation pieces.

By Thursday, with the offers deemed unsatisfactory, it became unlikely that the Orioles would trade Machado. Duquette said the club had to turn its focus elsewhere in terms of improving the 2018 club.

“We got some other priorities on our ballclub, including looking to add some pitching,” he said. “So we’re going to focus on some of those opportunities.”

O’Dowd said from a value perspective, one of the hardest things a club can do is trade a generational-type talent, as the return is so rarely the same as what having that player in your uniform can provide. The mounting pressure to get some value as opposed to just a draft pick when Machado — or even Britton — leaves in free agency also plays into it.

“It’s hard,” O’Dowd said. “Everybody’s a human being, but it becomes easier when you assign a price tag at what you feel you have to get back to justify doing anything and other clubs simply just don’t meet that price tag. Then the decision becomes easy, even with all the white noise around you. If you’re not going to feel good about making a deal, you just don’t make it. At the end of the day, you’re going to live with these decisions one way or another. The worst thing you can do is make a deal for something that’s less than the value you feel this player has to your organization and then live with that deal.”

While trades can still be made and are likely to continue to be discussed once business fully resumes in January, both Machado’s depressed market and the Orioles bullpen, by virtue of Britton’s injury, mean a trade might not be the club’s best avenue for improvement. The Orioles’ major business the past few offseasons has been done in January and February, with contracts for Chris Davis and Mark Trumbo coming in the past two Januarys and free agents Nelson Cruz, Ubaldo Jiménez and Yovani Gallardo all signing after spring training began.

The Orioles will have company in waiting out the market this offseason, and might still find their targets financially prohibitive. But to avoid shopping in their own closet and entering the season with a cast of young pitchers who collectively failed to secure a rotation spot last season aiming to do so again, they’ll need better results from those late-winter signings than they’ve had before.

If it’s a familiar position for the Orioles to enter the holidays, the manner in which they got there certainly wasn’t. And a man who believes building a baseball team is a year-round endeavor strikes an ever-familiar tune.

“The club still has needs to be addressed,” Duquette said.