Before the 2011 season, the Baltimore Orioles had a strategy. No, really, hear me out. They wanted to get cheap, veteran bats to support the bevy of young pitchers in the rotation.
Tsuyoshi Wada Needs Tommy John, But Orioles Had The Right Idea
And it worked! Well, part of it did. The proactive part -- actively acquiring hitters -- worked. The Orioles posted a 101 OPS+ and they scored 708 runs. ight around the league average. Considering that they hit primarily against the AL East without the benefit of facing the Orioles’ pitching staff, it was a successful offensive season.
The part of the strategy that doomed them to another 90-loss season was the part where they trusted their young pitchers. They had no choice, really. The pitchers were widely perceived to be major-league ready; it's not like Chris Tillman, Jake Arrietta, Brian Matusz, and Zach Britton were rushed from A-ball. It was a high-risk, high-reward staff. Whoops.
Fast-forward to 2012. Two of the hitters they acquired last year -- Mark Reynolds and J.J. Hardy -- were sticking around, and it wasn't like they couldn't find viable replacements for Derrek Lee and Vladimir Guerrero. So the strategy lived on this season. There was a new wrinkle, though. New GM Dan Duquette was interested in the Asian market. Like, really into the Asian market.
A little too into the Asian market. Dial it back, there, Danny. That’s the equivalent of refreshing the Facebook page for Asian pitchers every few minutes to see if they mentioned you.
But Duquette made two under-the-radar moves that were supposed to a) take some of the pressure off the young pitchers in the organization, and b) help the team win now. And by “win now”, the goals were probably more modest. “Not lose so damned much now”, then. His two-pronged approach:
- Sign Wei-Yin Chen, a left-hander with a strong record of success in Japan
- Sign Tsuyoshi Wada, a left-hander with a strong record of success in Japan
For about the price of a Yu Darvish autograph, Duquette took a low-risk, high-reward gamble. And Chen has looked fantastic in his first four starts. Prong No. 1 paid off.
Prong two? A bust, at least for this year:
Source: #Orioles LHP Tsuyoshi Wada will require Tommy John surgery. Signed two-year, $8.15M deal last off-season with club option for 14.
— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) May 2, 2012
The odds are decent that Wada will pitch for the Orioles next year, but they shouldn't expect a lot from him.
But credit Duquette for trying something different. The cliché police will kneecap me if I use the phrase “thinking outside the box”, so I’ll go for something different. Duquette changed the newspaper under the Orioles’ cage. And it still got messy. But it was a strategy. Doing nothing wasn’t an option.
Worse, doing nothing would have been nihilistic. Say what you want about the tenets of the 2012 Orioles, but at least it’s an ethos. And with Chen showing early success and the Orioles winning a bit, it looks like the short-term strategy has a chance to do just fine, even with Wada on the shelf.
The things that are propping the Orioles up right now -- crazy-hot starts from Matt Wieters, Chris Davis, and Adam Jones, along with five Baltimore relievers combining to allow four earned runs in 55 innings -- might not all be sustainable. But for the second year in a row, I like what the Orioles did in the offseason, even after one of the key components broke down. One of these years, we won't look like such morons. Probably when Dylan Bundy comes up and devours his opponents whole.
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