With spring training underway there is no shortage of cliche quotes floating around the baseball atmosphere. There are dozens of guys in the best shape of their lives, every pitcher in the league is experimenting with a new pitch or arm slot and all of the worst teams in the league are planning on surprising some people this year.
What’s fun about these quotes is that even though you know they are coming they can still get you excited, for example when reports came out a few weeks ago that Adley Rutschman had showed up to camp in incredible shape and that Jackson Holliday had spent the offseason eating nothing but ground beef I was pumped.
Every now and then in a sea of cliches and media trained answers someone says something super real and that is what Justin Turner did a few days ago when he was asked about the Seattle Mariners.
Justin Turner has never been afraid to speak his mind. I remember when everyone was freaking out about Masyn Winn throwing the ball 105 mph at the rising stars game and Turner did an interview and said he didn’t like it. Which was pretty much an actualized version of this meme:
Anyway at 40 years old and near the end of his career Turner is in a unique position where he can speak his mind about an organization and not worry much about how it will impact him. So when Bob Nightengale asked him about the Mariners he didn’t hold back. Turner gave Nightengale several quotes that appeared in the piece here are the most interesting to me:
“The fact that they missed the playoffs by one game and didn’t go out and add an impact bat or two when you have the best rotation in baseball is just absurd to me.”
“Honestly as much as I wanted to be back there, if I was the only piece they brought back in I would be saying the same thing: What the hell are we doing? Are you trying?”
“There’s not going to be a better time to go for it so I don’t know what they are doing. I’m very confused. It’s a head scratcher for me.”
Turner had more to say than just this and if there is audio of every word he said to Nightengale I’d love to hear it but for today these three quotes are what I am focused on because what Turner is expressing is almost exactly what it has felt like to be an Orioles fan over the last couple seasons.
The Orioles and the Mariners are basically 2 spidermen pointing at each other in the parking lot. They both have had incredibly sad playoff records since the turn of the century. I don’t mean records like wins and losses, I mean that both of these teams have set records for playoff ineptitude in the last 25 years. The Mariners had their famous 21 year streak of missing the playoffs that they finally broke in 2022 and the Orioles currently boast the longest active playoff losing streak with 10 straight playoff losses. (think about how rare it is to look at the standings and see an L10 in the streak column and that’s what the Orioles have managed to do in the playoffs)
In the late 2010s both teams turned their teams over to 2 smart analytically minded General Managers and gave them a long leash to turn their franchises around and both of those GMs have steadily built up strong teams and both have a war chest of assets on one side of the ball. Jerry Dipoto and the Mariners have more ace level starting pitchers than can fit in a rotation and Mike Elias and the Orioles have more position players than can fit on an active roster.
Even their most recent trade deadlines were similar. Both GMs’ highlight move of the deadline was to trade with the Tampa Bay Rays to address the glaring weakness on the roster. The Orioles traded for Zach Eflin and the Mariners traded for Randy Arozarena both of whom had 1 and half years of control left on their deals. Both of those moves were undeniably good moves!
Both teams had disappointing ends to their season, the Mariners missed the playoffs by one game after the Tigers surged past them in the standings and the Orioles were swept out of the playoffs by the Royals in a series where they scored 1 run.
Both teams are going to be in tight division races against a team that was better than them last season but lost major pieces this offseason in the Yankees and the Astros and they’ll both have to fend off a team that was worse than them last year but made several additions to try to get back to contention in the Rangers and Red Sox.
Finally the most relevant similarity of all, both teams after disappointing seasons had the opportunity to make serious additions to their roster to shore up their weaknesses and go all in to win their division and compete for the World Series and they both chose to play it safe and make small moves of the periphery of the roster and cross their fingers that the guys they have in house are enough to get the job done.
The Mariners are making a huge mistake wasting the years that they have multiple elite pitchers on extremely cost controlled contracts. This year they will pay their rotation the follow amounts
Luis Castillo: 24.15 Million Dollars
Logan Gilbert: 7.65 Million Dollars
George Kirby: 4.3 Million Dollars
Bryce Miller: ~ 800k
Bryan Woo: ~ 800k
In total they will pay their entire rotation 37.7 million dollars which is 4.3 million less than what the Phillies will pay Zach Wheeler this season.
Perhaps because the Mariners are a smaller market and are overshadowed in their division by the Astros and the Rangers both winning the World Series recently and the A’s and Angels always getting headlines for being total disasters but I feel like there should be an amber alert message sent to everyone’s phone that the Mariners have 5 top 30ish pitchers in baseball and they’re paying them less than 40 million dollars total.
Last season Bryce Miller pitched 180 innings at a sub 3 ERA and his name barely comes up when people talk about the Mariners. If my team had a pitcher throw 180+ innings at a sub 3 ERA I’d lose my mind if the team ever let them walk in free agency without making a real offer and for the Mariners that’s starting pitcher number 4 in the rotation.
That 37.7 number is really only that high because of Luis Castillo’s contract and he’s probably the worst of the 5 and with all of the pitching talent the Mariners have they actually don’t need him anymore.
No team really needs to have 5 ace level pitchers, hell the Orioles front office doesn’t seem to think they need 1 so if the Mariners were to trade Castillo and either give his starts to Emerson Hancock or sign someone like Kyle Gibson off the street how much worse would they be?
Without Castillo’s contract the Mariners are paying Gilbert, Kirby, Woo and Miller a total of 13.55 million dollars. So for slightly less than what the Tigers will pay Alex Cobb this year the Mariners get 4 of the best starters in baseball.
If any one of those 4 guys were able to hit the free agent market today at their current ages any one of them would get over 30 million dollars a year and the Mariners have all 4 of them for less than 14 million dollars.
This should be one of the greatest competitive advantages a front office has ever operated with and yet the Mariners have managed to miss the playoffs in back to back seasons despite their awesome rotation costing less than what the Rockies are paying Kyle Freeland.
Why is that?
It’s because their front office is not trying to win the World Series or even make the playoffs, they are trying to win 54% of the games and then see what happens from there. You’ve heard of “Shoot for the moon, even if you miss you’ll land among the stars.” well the Mariners are doing “Shoot for 54%, even if you miss you can watch the playoffs at home knowing you didn’t jeopardize the future.”
In that same Nightengale article Justin Turner said that the Mariners felt if they could have made the playoffs they would have had a chance to make a deep run and I have to agree if they had made the playoffs they would have been really hard to beat in a 3 or a 5 or a 7 game series with the level of pitching they could put on the mound. The Mariners didn’t get a chance to prove that because they only won 52% of their games which is so so so close to their GM’s stated goal that I can only assume that in the Seattle front office they view the 2024 season as a pretty good season rather than a catastrophic failure to have missed the playoffs when they were paying so little for their rotation (in 2024 they were paying the previously mentioned starters less than 31 million combined).
You might think that’s a nasty assumption on my part but look at the evidence, if they had thought last year was a failure they would have done something about it this offseason. Their team’s flaw could not be more obvious, THEY NEED OFFENSE and this offseason they had the payroll flexibility to go and get a good hitter in free agency or as I mentioned earlier when talking about Luis Castillo they could have moved one of their starters and brought in an impact bat. Anthony Santander signed for 5 years 92 million dollars in CANADA, that’s nothing! Pete Alonso had to return to the Mets with his tail between his legs for an contract with less than half of what he was looking for, you couldn’t have won the bidding against a team that didn’t even want to make an offer?? If those 2 deals were too rich for your blood, why not test the waters on Joc Pederson or Randal Grichuk or even just bring back Justin Turner who was good for you last year. Instead their biggest offseason acquisition was Donovan Solano which is the saddest thing I’ve ever typed and they followed that up by bringing back Jorge Polanco.
The Polanco signing especially baffles me because I understand being worried about signing someone like Gleyber Torres or Jurickson Profar because you don’t know if they’ll be able to hit in Seattle but I can tell you with 100 percent certainty that Jorge Polanco cannot hit in Seattle. To quote Justin Turner, it’s a head scratcher for me.
On the flip side the Orioles are making the same mistakes.
This year they are going to pay their young core the following amounts
Adley Rutschman: 5.5 Million
Gunnar Henderson: ~800k (I feel like I remember reading that he was going to get more from a pre arb bonus pool but I googled around and can’t find the figure so we’ll stick with his pre arb base for now)
Jordan Westburg: ~800k
Colton Cowser: ~800k
Jackson Holliday: ~800k
That’s 3 all stars, an MVP candidate, the runner up for rookie of the year last year and one of the most talented prospects in the history of the Orioles for the price of 8.7 million dollars.
Not to mention Heston Kjerstad, Coby Mayo and Samuel Basallo will all be a part of this Orioles team at some point and those three will make less than 3 million dollars combined.
That is an incredibly talented young core of players that the Orioles will have this season for less than what the Angels will be paying Jorge Soler. This should give the Orioles a serious competitive advantage for team building. With so many good young bats under contract for less than 15 million dollars combined the Orioles should be able to use the rest of their resources to put together a strong pitching staff and make themselves prohibitive favorites in the American league but instead they have the worst rotation in their division.
The Orioles are wasting a unique window to contend because instead of saying “Look at how good all our young position players are! We should invest in the rotation to try to win the World Series.” They are saying “Look at how good our young position players are! We can still make the playoffs even if we don’t invest in the rotation.”
Having Gunnar Henderson on a rookie deal makes wasting this window especially disappointing. If Gunnar had hit free agency this past offseason he would have gotten a bigger deal than what Juan Soto got from the Mets. I’m serious if a 22 year old shortstop with a 9 WAR season under his belt hit the open market the total contract value would be over 1 billion. In 2025 he will play for the Orioles for about 1 million dollars and the Orioles will have him on cost controlled contracts through the 2028 season. Knowing you have a player as rare and talented as Gunnar Henderson should give the Orioles front office a mandate to aggressively try to win a championship in the next 4 seasons.
Part of why these teams like the Orioles are so cautious is because they are bought into the “organizations win championships” approach where they value their scouting and development and they believe that they will be able to keep pushing good players through their system making it unnecessary to extend good players or pursue expensive free agents. So there is no reason to go “all in” as long as they make sure that their system is in place, in their minds the only thing that can stop them from being pretty good indefinitely is paying someone too much money and bogging down their books with a bad contract.
To a degree this is true, with the system Mike Elias and company have set up in Baltimore they will continue to produce good major league ball players. As good as Adley Rutschman is the Orioles already have another top catching prospect making his way through the system, as good as Jordan Westburg is the Orioles have another top third base prospect chomping at the bit to get to the majors but Gunnar Henderson is the kind of player that does not come up through the farm system every couple years. Franchises can go decades without a player as good as Gunnar Henderson on their team.
Here is the last time each major league team had a position player put up a 9.1+ WAR season:
BAL: 2024
NYY: 2024
KCR: 2024
LAD: 2024
LAA: 2018
BOS: 2018
WAS: 2015
STL: 2009
SFG: 2004
SEA: 2004
CHC: 2001
OAK: 2001
COL: 1997
HOU: 1997
PIT: 1990
MIL: 1982
MIN: 1977
CIN: 1976
PHI: 1974
DET: 1961
ATL: 1961
CLE: 1953
CHW: 1915
TBR: Never
TOR: Never
TEX: Never
NYM: Never
MIA: Never
SDP: Never
ARI: Never
Imagine being the White Sox GM in 1915 and saying don’t worry about taking advantage of Eddie Collins’ prime because surely we’ll get another 9 WAR player in a few years. Everyone would have said “what is WAR”? And “If that’s what you think then why did we just trade for Shoeless Joe Jackson?” because WAR didn’t exist back then and the 1915 White Sox DID take advantage of Eddie Collins’ prime by surrounding him with as much talent as possible and they were rewarded by winning the World Series in 1917 and then nothing bad happened after that I’m sure.
Anyway no matter how good your farm system is or how smart your front office is players like Gunnar Henderson don’t just happen, look at all the teams that have never had a player do what Henderson did in 2024. So just having a player like Gunnar Henderson is rare but having a player like Gunnar Henderson at the same time that you have Rutschman, Westburg, Cowser, Holliday etc. is even more rare and these guys will start hitting free agency in 2028 and even if you believe that the Orioles are going to extend some of these guys there’s no world where they are going to be able to extend all of them unless some of them get a lot worse over the next few years so the Orioles have the next three seasons before their star players either start leaving in free agency or getting a lot more expensive.
Just as a thought exercise, let’s say that the Orioles manage to extend Adley and Gunnar (which would be incredible, I’d literally shut up forever). We’ll say Adley signs for 8 years 200 million and Gunnar signs for 10 years 400 million that means in the 2029 season the Orioles would be paying 65 million dollars for just those two players compared to just under 7 million in 2025. You can imagine how building a team around Adley and Gunnar when they make a combined 65 million dollars would be harder than building a team around them when they make a combined 7 million dollars.
If in 2029 the Orioles are paying Adley and Gunnar north of 60 million dollars it would be reasonable to say “we have to be smart with how we spend our money” and “we can’t trade our prospects because we need cost controlled players” but now while Adley and Gunnar are under team control for less than what the Pirates will be paying Isiah Kiner-Falefa is the time to take a risk and trade Coby Mayo for Sandy Alcantara or offer a free agent pitcher a crazy high AAV number to get them on a short term deal.
Ever since Mike Elias took over in 2018 Orioles fans have told themselves that they were going to follow in the Astros footsteps. They tanked like the Astros did, they developed a bunch of young talent like the Astros did, the next phase of the Astros plan was they made aggressive trades for pitchers they knew could help the team. They traded their #3, #9 and #11 prospects for 34 year old Justin Verlander, they traded 5 players for Gerrit Cole, they traded 3 of their top 5 prospects for Zack Grienke and took on the bulk of his very large contract. These are the kinds of moves that Orioles fans are waiting for and that the team is in position to make, it’s just a matter of does Mike Elias have what it takes to push the chips in and by “the chips” I don’t mean spare chips that you didn’t have room to play anyway I mean actual valuable chips that you know you’ll miss later.
As I have been writing this blog I keep thinking about that scene from Paul Blart: Mall Cop where Paul sneaks through the vents and drops into the bank to take on Vek Sims. He whips out a bottle of devils crotch hot sauce and squirts a drop of it into Vek’s eye causing him to keel over in pain. As Vek struggles to wipe the hot sauce from his eye the bank hostages urge Blart to rush in and take him down but Blart just stands there fist pumping until Vek recovers and aims his gun at him again leaving Blart standing unarmed looking down the barrel of a gun where all he can say is “Probably should have capitalized on that.” before Vek unloads a clip into him.
Similar to Paul Blart the underdog Orioles went from being a joke to having a chance to save the day and get the girl. Having Gunnar, Adley and crew on rookie contracts is a drop of hot sauce in the eye of the league and the Orioles have 3 seasons before that advantage is gone and they’re left wishing they’d capitalized on that.
The Dishwasher 
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