Orioles full of long-term promise as Blue Jays struggle to fulfil their window

BALTIMORE – The Toronto Blue Jays emerged from their 2019 rebuild positioned similarly to the way the Baltimore Orioles are set up now. Promising young core in place experiencing big-league success. Deep farm system loaded with assets to help turn over the roster as needed, with surplus for use in trades. Incredible financial flexibility to augment. A pathway to sustainable competition, rather than rotating through cyclic waves.

Three wild-card berths and zero post-season wins later, the Blue Jays are hurtling toward a dramatic decision-point with their core. Their best team was the 2021 group that should have been tripled-down on but missed the playoffs by one game, undone by bullpen issues that weren’t addressed quickly or effectively enough. The nearly as talented 2022 club was felled by spotty defence and not enough pitching, and then the Blue Jays over-corrected in 2023, sacrificing too much offence to build out elite run-prevention.

So far this season, they haven’t done either consistently well enough, leading to a 19-23 start and 23.8-per-cent playoff odds, per FanGraphs projections. Those chances can shift fast with a strong run and the time is nigh, as after a three-game series versus the Tampa Bay Rays beginning Friday at Rogers Centre, the Blue Jays have a 13-game stretch against the Chicago White Sox, Detroit Tigers and Pittsburgh Pirates.

No matter what happens, with 17 players, or 65 per cent of the roster, eligible for free agency over the next two off-seasons and a thin farm system, the Blue Jays will need deft and creative management to avoid a major downturn.

In that way, they offer a cautionary tale for the Orioles, the defending American League East champions who have a remarkably enviable opportunity all in front of them.

“The nirvana would be a world without, quote-unquote, windows,” Orioles general manager Mike Elias, emphasizing that he’s speaking in generalities and not to specific teams, says in an interview. “There are organizations that have achieved that around the league over a 20-something year period, or at least if they fall out of competition, it only lasts for like a year or two. In our division, the competition is always so stiff and it’s also unpredictably stiff. …

“We know there are going to be other really good teams every year in the division, but we don’t know which ones are going to really have it all clicking, for sure.

“So, we try not to sit around and think about, ‘oh, our window’s closing at some future date.’ We hope that we’re able to remain competitive. But once you get into the moment where you start seeing evidence that your hopes aren’t strong for that season or the next season – I hope we don’t get to that point, but we might – the part of the job comes in where you start to break that into your strategy.”

While that certainly needs to be the case for the Blue Jays, it’s quite the opposite for the Orioles, who can continue building out their team any way they deem fit.

From a payroll-commitment perspective, Elias is essentially working with a blank slate, with $1 million to closer Felix Bautista in 2025 the only guaranteed money on the books beyond this year. There are also four club options for next year – on Craig Kimbrel, Ryan O’Hearn, Danny Coulombe and Cionel Perez – while 13 players are on track to be eligible for arbitration, with four pending free agents in Corbin Burnes, Anthony Santander, John Means and James McCann.

With a slate of elite talent pushing up to the majors, led of course by the game’s No.1 prospect in Jackson Holliday, the Orioles can largely maintain where they are from within and be very selective about who or what they target outside the organization.

To an extent, they’re in the enviable position of having to efficiently manage their excess, the way they did during spring training when they acquired Cy Young Award winner Burnes from the Milwaukee Brewers for infielder Joey Ortiz and lefty D.L. Hall.

Ortiz has already produced 1.2 fWAR and counting while Hall made four big-league starts before spraining his knee, a strong return for one year of Burnes given that Milwaukee could still have another five years beyond this one of each player.

But the deal is representative of the Orioles’ calculus in that their “chances in the American League East haven’t been as good as they looked going into 2024 and so we wanted to seize on that,” Elias explains, while adding in a way that “we don’t necessarily feel like we mortgaged, so to speak.”

“Especially in Joey Ortiz’s case, he’s major-league ready, and he’s playing really well in Milwaukee right now, and it’s just hard to see where he would be playing on our team without displacing somebody who’s also very productive,” says Elias. “That is more an example of, we hope, us monetizing our talent in the best way possible, rather than mortgaging the future. Technically when you trade Joey Ortiz, you are giving up his future possibilities, and there is some degree of that. The fact that we were dealing from a position of strength made it a little easier for us to rationalize that.”

Also working in their favour is that the periods of contractual control on their core players are staggered in the coming years, giving the Orioles a chance to avoid the steep cliff the Blue Jays are facing.

orioles full of long-term promise as blue jays struggle to fulfil their window

Toronto Blue Jays shortstop Bo Bichette (11) celebrates his solo home run against the Detroit Tigers with teammate Vladimir Guerrero Jr. (27)

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Adley Rutschman and Dean Kremer won’t be eligible for free agency until after the 2027 season, Gunnar Henderson, Kyle Bradish and Yennier Cano after 2028, Jordan Westburg, Colton Cowser and Grayson Rodriguez after 2029.

Knocking on the door with Holliday are Heston Kjerstad and Coby Mayo, among others. While prospects don’t all pan out, the Orioles will have a leg up at every major decision-making juncture point since they have the resources to add through free agency or trade.

And the depth of their system makes them a starting point for any team looking to sell.

“People always try to deal from positions of strength if they can, it just gives you a little bit more margin for error if the outcome doesn’t go the way that you want,” says Elias. “Ultimately, these are case-by-case decisions. You’re acquiring a player, you’re sending other players out, your forecast on those guys is going to drive the bus. But when we get to the trade deadline, we have some methods of looking at our team context and our chances and what these trades might do and I expect we’ll be doing the same thing this year.

“There are a lot, of balancing acts,” he continues. “A lot of things are dependent on outcomes that are unpredictable, but we try to play the odds and that involves the player evaluations that we’re making, but also the sort of team and context evaluations that we’re making. This is really the essence of the push and pull of putting chips in and pulling chips out.”

Key to the endeavour, of course, is continuing to amass more chips through the draft, an area where the Blue Jays must improve, and the international market. That will be tougher for the Orioles to do now that they’re not consistently at the top of the draft, the way they were while losing 333 games in three years surrounding the pandemic season of 2020.

Elias – who began his career as a scout with the St. Louis Cardinals and served as manager of amateur scouting before joining the Houston Astros and serving in a number of roles there, including assistant GM, scouting and player development – has a record of identifying players later in the draft, and has seemingly transferred that to Baltimore.

Henderson was a second-round pick in 2019, Westburg was taken 30th overall in 2020 while Mayo was a fourth-rounder in that same draft. And that’s beyond getting a number of other picks right, including Rutchsman with the first overall selection in ’19.

“That tells me that hopefully, it seems like we’ve got a bit of an ability to continue to do that,” says Elias. “The proof’s going to be in the pudding here and assuming we’re picking low for the next couple of years, at least, which is our hope, we’ll have to see how it goes.”

orioles full of long-term promise as blue jays struggle to fulfil their window

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The same applies to their free-agent spending, a presumed looming weapon now that the sale of the club for $1.725 billion from the Angelos family to an ownership group led by Baltimore native David Rubenstein was approved by Major League Baseball last month.

According to RosterResource, the Orioles’ payroll this year currently stands at $97.8 million and where it goes is to be determined, according to Elias.

“There is so much unknown here in Baltimore about what this market looks like exactly with a team this competitive post-ownership change, with stadium renovations on the horizon,” he says. “The good news is we’ve got this really good team, this good group of core guys that are on the front-end of their careers. We’ll have the ability to build on these guys and retain these guys as much as possible and in such a way that if we get payroll feedback along the way that we can increase the ceiling around here, we want to be able to be nimble and respond to that. We do some planning. We have a trajectory. I think we are going to be very open-minded to circumstances as we go along here with this group.”

It all adds up to an incredibly promising opportunity for the Orioles, the type that the Blue Jays once had and are still struggling to fulfill.

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