The connection between the Orioles' Camden Yards wall call and another international haul

Even three years into this project, it's worth asking whether some would rather everything stay the way they remember it than the Orioles be good again.

The first big test of this new vehicle for Orioles coverage came this weekend with the Orioles’ Friday media sessions on the dimension-changes at Camden Yards and another Saturday to coincide with the opening of a new international signing window for amateur players.

By only watching and reading after the fact, I suppose I passed. There are plenty of outlets for that content, and this won’t be one of them when it comes to daily coverage. But the reaction to it all was inescapable, and perhaps without the granular to focus on, there was more time to consider the week as a whole. 

It was refreshing that, for the most part, spending the entire international bonus pool on deadline day and breaking the club record for a Latin American amateur player signing bonus in the reported $1.7 million for outfielder Braylin Tavera was handled as a regular piece of business. 

For context, when the 2018 signing period opened, the Orioles’ lack of activity in the market made it noteworthy that they were thinking of changing their philosophy and engaging in that avenue of talent acquisition to begin with. 

Which, and I swear this makes sense, brings us to the dimensions at Camden Yards. I wasn’t alone in being fascinated by how it would work, and though my execution was poor, the Orioles’ explanation that the home run/fly ball rate in left field was the issue seemed to have last week’s post on the right track.

This Orioles rebuild, though, is where curiosity and convention meet at loggerheads. Those unwilling to see how anything other than the way things work have a hard time even wondering what good change could do.

There was a decision in the highest levels of the Orioles’ organization to re-examine how they did everything over the last few years, and one of the consequences was full participation in the international market.

So, too, have been their embrace of data-driven decision making, progressive player development methods, and so much more. All are being carried out with the intention of making the Orioles good again, and on a basic level, even as executive vice president and general manager Mike Elias said it wasn’t to gain an advantage, the change in ballpark dimensions is part of that.

And yet, the backlash has been vocal against it for aesthetic reasons. It’s nice to care about such things, even if it ignores the fact that the B&O Warehouse is where the eye is drawn at Camden Yards anyway.

It took this ordeal to distill what surrounds every aspect of this Orioles rebuild to one simple choice, though: would you like everything to be the way it always has been, or would you like the Orioles to win at some point soon?

It’s fine if the answer is the former, but three-plus years into the Elias era, there’s a better chance of a Chris Davis comeback than that mindset winning out. The casualty list below the headline of “How we’ve always done things” is a long one. Perhaps some of it was drastic, but the areas the Orioles have seen the most change are also the areas they’ve seen the most improvement.

The lack of investment in international scouting was an easy one to change. Just because the market didn’t exactly pay dividends in years past was not a reason to ignore it entirely, and in joining it, the Orioles have diversified and remade the ranks of their top prospect lists in the last few years.

On the domestic amateur side, the longstanding notion that the only way to improve the historic starting pitching deficiencies was through the draft. The two top-five picks they spent on pitchers last decade – Dylan Bundy and Kevin Gausman – produced talented enigmas here who needed to move on to be their best. 

The draft-and-develop philosophy continued on through the last decade and produced little at the major league level with hope that Grayson Rodriguez and DL Hall can change that narrative, but the philosophy has flipped entirely in the meantime.

Now, the Orioles take college hitters with strong measurables from a batted-ball data standpoint and who don’t swing and miss often. Yet every draft year, there’s a corner of the media and fanbase who believe they should be taking pitchers with these top picks to rectify the fact that it hasn’t worked before. What would that truly accomplish? 

Pushing back the wall seems to be a high-level continuation of their overall change in philosophy on the draft front as well. It’s become clear with three years of hitter-heavy drafts that even though they’ve been successful in targeting and developing those players at the minor league level, it’s left the system uneven behind Rodriguez and Hall when it comes to possible impact major league arms.

The Orioles know this, and know they’ll have to come from the outside. One part of that was always going to be through trades for established major league starters. Having a fully-stocked farm system with productive hitters and projectable international players is a big part of making those trades. 

Free agency is the other way to do this, and generations of evidence has shown that the way the Orioles sign free agent pitchers is usually if there are no other options for said pitcher. That hasn’t worked out very well. It will be incumbent on Elias and ownership to make the Orioles a destination when the time comes to bring a difference-making pitcher to Baltimore by paying market price for such an arm, but in the interim, they’ve put money into making the ballpark less an obstacle to that.

Of course it will look weird, at least the first time anyone sees it. By midseason, it will feel normal, and if it’s benefiting the Orioles, no one will care that much. Yet now, some do. I feel bad for them. But at least they don’t have my Baltimore Sun email anymore.