Plenty remains on plate for O’s

Team’s offseason shopping list still full after holidays as minicamp approaches

In a baseball offseason marked by a lack of activity around the game, the Orioles arrive at their latest checkpoint in the winter calendar with their focus exactly where it’s been at each previous one.

After being outbid on some of their starting pitching targets ahead of the winter meetings, they looked to use franchise cornerstone Manny Machado to rebuild their rotation. By the holiday shutdown, they’d moved on to other priorities after the widespread interest in the three-time AllStar didn’t yield a sufficient offer.

Now, with the club’s three-day pitching minicamp beginning Monday and ending Wednesday — barely a month before spring training commences — the Orioles’ offseason haul hasn’t made much of an impact on their list of needs.

“We’ve got to go out and staff our 2018 club,” executive vice president Dan Duquette said. “It’s past the holidays, and it’s a new year. Our focus is going to be on staffing our club to be competitive in 2018 . ...

“We’re still looking to add some pitchers here to our club, and we haven’t completed our shopping list and checked off the boxes for some of the other things we’d like to add to our ballclub before we get going. We’re still looking around at a couple different things we think we need to get going.”

At present, the items on that shopping list will join a team that does include Machado, who is entering his final year of club control ahead of what’s expected to be a historic free-agent payday.

While clubs have maintained interest in Machado past the Orioles’ soft late-December deadline, and offers have come in since, those offers still haven’t come close to the expectation the Orioles set of two young, major league starting pitchers. And as seen with the 11th-hour drama surrounding the See ORIOLES, page 6