For Orioles affiliates in Aberdeen (and maybe Bowie), development goals and the chance to win in playoffs are a delicate balance
Colton Cowser, Connor Norby and company helped at least one and maybe two clubs reach the postseason on the Orioles farm, where development goals often supersede the chance for a championship.
Roberto Mercado estimates he’s managed three different teams this season at Aberdeen, one that continues this week with the South Atlantic League championship series against Brooklyn with a chance for the first minor league title of this Orioles rebuild.
To join them in the playoffs, Bowie manager Kyle Moore enters the final week of the season tied for the second-half division title with what he counts as the fifth different Baysox team this year.
Neither club is competing at this stage with the team that helped it get to this point, but in an environment that’s more about developing than winning games and in an organization that will promote a player as soon as a level no longer challenges him, this time of year is one where success is measured in much different ways than first-half or second-half records or the winner of a three-game September series.
“When I got interviewed, they asked me, ‘What’s more important to you, winning or development?’ ” Mercado, who is in his first season in professional baseball, told me at Ripken Stadium during Aberdeen’s last homestand. “I said development will lead to winning, you don’t really have to worry about the winning part.”
Where one group of Orioles prospects has been concerned, that’s certainly the case.
Mercado is on his third team of the season, but it was the first that qualified for the playoffs. The Ironbirds began the season with a lineup featuring Colton Cowser, Connor Norby, Coby Mayo, and Cesar Prieto. That group, plus an under-the-radar pitching staff, went 43-23 in the first half to win their division on the trot before Cowser, Norby, and Mayo went to Bowie and joined Prieto, who was promoted in May.
While the reinforcements coming to Aberdeen from Delmarva didn’t match that group’s star potential, the pitching staff kept the next version of the team competitive and in the hunt for a second-half title as well until a group of high-performing Delmarva players and recent draftees including Frederick Bencosme, Dylan Beavers, Max Wagner, and Jud Fabian joined for the playoffs over the last few weeks.
That group of Cowser, Norby, and Mayo signified the beginning of Bowie’s third team of the season, in Moore’s estimation. The first, featuring Gunnar Henderson and Jordan Westburg plus a talented (and healthy) pitching staff came with “a giant amount of expectations,” he said.
That lasted for a month, before COVID and injuries decimated the pitching staff and forced a period where the team was changed dramatically. That was the second team to Moore, with the third team coming after that period (and Henderson and Westburg’s promotions) when in his view they had the toughest part of their year and “were really just kind of holding it together at the seams.”
Then came Cowser and company for the fourth Bowie team. They helped the lineup on their own, but Joey Ortiz — who Moore called their MVP this season — took off offensively to create an imposing lineup to go along with a pitching staff that over the course of two months added organizational pitcher of the year candidate Justin Armbruester, plus new trade acquisitions Cade Povich and Chayce McDermott, and enjoyed a resurgence from right-hander Garrett Stallings.
“That’s where we kind of made our run and got ourselves into position to potentially go for the playoffs,” Moore said.
Bowie started the second half, which coincided with the Cowser, Norby, and Mayo’s arrival, by going 33-17 before Cowser and Ortiz were promoted to Norfolk to finish the season at Triple-A. Their ascent to Norfolk leaves Bowie with a mix of its second-half core players and some newcomers who are still light on full-season experience to try and clinch a playoff spot and win a title.
“I’ve always just been a strong believer in meaningful baseball in September should always be a part of your development,” Moore said. “I think this staff, first of all, this staff here has done a phenomenal job with all the players they’ve given us. … We never lost sight of that.”
Even so, he allows for the natural disappointment that comes with knowing his team could look different on a nightly basis were the players who got them so close still with the Baysox.
The organization’s promotion philosophy hasn’t always aligned with guaranteeing success come minor league playoff time, though the player-specific nature of that means there are cases in both directions.
Moore managed at Delmarva in 2019 and won an astonishing 90 games there — MILB named it the Team of the Year. His roster was reinforced down the stretch with 2019 draftees like Adley Rutschman and Toby Welk, plus a handful of relievers. Short-season Aberdeen, which provided those players, missed the playoffs by one game.
Bowie was also a playoff team in 2019, and lost Dean Kremer from its rotation a few weeks before the season ended. Last year, Bowie was in the playoffs, too, but lost Rutschman in August and Kyle Stowers just a few weeks before the playoffs.
In each case, the players’ developmental needs came first. The Orioles’ focus on doing what’s right by each player doesn’t care for the possibility of championship success at the minor league level. Other organizations, the Tampa Bay Rays and Seattle Mariners in recent years, have been able to churn out big leaguers while still winning in the minors.
Here, there are pockets within the front office that believe that if a team has enough players good enough to win a championship, they are too good to be at the level in the first place and thus should be a level up.
There’s an interesting quote from Mike Elias in this week’s Orioles reset at the Sun, via my pal Nathan Ruiz, that adds a strike against finishing players with their playoff clubs.
“I am a big believer in getting a little taste of a level, kind of getting your nose punched, and then going home for the winter and working on the things that you would need to do to get back to that level, and then going back and repeating it and having a little bit of what I would call, like, sophomore swagger to you.”
That was in reference to Gunnar Henderson, who was briefly in Double-A last year for the playoffs only to return and dominate. Those late-season promotions last year worked for him and Stowers, both of whom made the big leagues this year. There’s a chance the Orioles hope the same for Cowser and Ortiz, as well as Darrel Hernaiz at Double-A, to say nothing of the Aberdeen group that will begin their first full professional seasons there as well.
A few wins this week in Akron coupled with some losses by Erie will allow the Bowie players to experience what Aberdeen will — an atmosphere as close to the big leagues as they’ll get.
“I just believe, and I don’t think there’s anybody that can talk me off of it, the circus of an atmosphere that a playoff push or a playoff minor league game creates is the closest you can get to the big leagues because you’re never going to get close to the big leagues as far as simulating it,” Moore said. “There’s no circus with a tent that big, but the playoffs are pretty close to it as far as minor league goes.”