The Orioles are almost exclusively future-focused, and I'm (maybe?) complicit. How does that work?
Last week's Hall of Fame discourse made me realize my own role in propagating the Orioles' rebuild. I had to ask, and write through, an important question: is this weird?
Back at the Baltimore Sun, and at some other papers across the country, it’s forbidden for baseball writers to vote on year-end awards and on the annual Hall of Fame ballot.
The idea is that such influence on something a writer would also be covering creates an ethical dilemma that’s best avoided. It’s hard to argue that.
It’s not the Hall of Fame discourse that’s caused me to think about that lately, though. Instead, it’s the idea of both writing about the Orioles and their farm system on this platform and others, and having some of the work I’ve produced like the Baseball America prospect rankings contribute to the subjective and objective standing of the Orioles’ organizational progress in their rebuild.
My thought process kept going back to the same question: is this weird? What isn’t at this point, would be the rhetorical reply, but I wondered if writing through it would be a productive way to work it out. So, here goes.
The thoughts started pretty innocuously – reading a line in the Orioles’ announcement of their minor league coaches and staff about how farm director Matt Blood would be overseeing one of the top farm systems in all of baseball. It’s true, and there’s no reason not to include it.
For the most part, such observations are subjective, and the Orioles were rated the No. 1 farm system by MLBPipeline.com last time out but were shy of the top spot elsewhere (including Baseball America). But that all has less to do with an individual’s opinion than those of a group of people, and the Orioles would be viewed as having one of the top farm systems in baseball by any measure.
Besides, drafting at or near the top of the draft for three years running and also inheriting two first-round prep pitchers who have only gotten better in recent years helps that cause and makes the overall quality of the organization’s top prospects harder to discount. No real impact from me there.
Next is the question of how the individual rankings of players within the Orioles’ top-10 can influence what comes next, even if doing so is navel-gazing for several reasons. The first is obvious in assuming any kind of influence in the first place, and the second discounts the work done by those at a place like BA to cross-check and do their own research, something I know happens a lot.
But as an example, Coby Mayo has been in a couple of breakout prospect-type lists at BA in the fall and winter, with the possibility of him developing into a top-100 prospect presented as a real one. I agree, and that’s why he took the No. 10 spot on the Orioles’ list: a Gunnar Henderson-type full-season campaign that brings him up to Double-A for his age-20 season is a reasonable outcome.
Had that not overtaken my reasoning, though, would Mayo be on the outside looking in on such national lists? Would there be as many Orioles in consideration for this year’s top-100 as there ultimately were? Would the overall farm system be viewed differently if their No. 10 prospect was instead someone like Connor Norby or Mike Baumann, who have higher floors but lower ceilings?
It’s impossible to know, and a little presumptuous to assume, but it’s fair to consider. There’s irony in the idea that I’ve left newspapers, a bastion of neutrality and ethics, and only really now am trying to grapple with it.
Before I started covering the Orioles’ full-time, I was still in the prospect-focused world and considered the source of the rankings a lot. If I didn’t think the source of rankings were credible, I wouldn’t use them. (We all have our assumptions, but I also recognize with hindsight that I’d have had my biases whether I trusted the source or the work that went in them or not. I have to accept it when my own end-product is questioned by those who ignore what goes into it as a result, so maybe I deserve it now.)
The team back at Baseball Prospectus at that time was getting tremendous in-person insights on the Orioles’ farm system from people I knew well and learned a lot from, so I’d often try and cite them over other outlets when it came to overall rankings.
When BA tapped me for the Orioles’ rankings after the 2016 season, those became what we primarily used for citation at the Sun. In retrospect, those references probably should have all come with an acknowledgement of my role in the organizational prospect rankings. Only some did.
It didn’t matter that the information that contributed to them wasn’t mine, and really only the order was. I talked to dozens of sources over the years from inside and outside the organization, filtered their own biases accordingly, and wrote what the world saw each offseason. The production schedule of early-fall deadlines meant other rankings didn’t often get a chance to influence mine. That influence would only come down to who I spoke with and what they said.
These considerations are ones that probably should have been made years ago, but in thinking about all this recently, it seemed best to at least admit what the biases that went into these rankings that contribute to the public view of the most important aspect of the Orioles’ rebuild are. Some rankings rely more on data and projection. Others seem to try and stir up the discourse and provide a couple outliers to hang one’s hat on should they come true down the line.
Truthfully, I just wanted to gather as much information from as many people as I could, see as many of the players in question as I could, and put together a fair and correct set of information that provided a representative snapshot of the order of players in the system at that time.
That was the case five years ago, and remains the case now. The difference is that people care about it a lot more these days, which is another aspect of this that’s required some grappling with, especially of late.
At the Sun, I was able to justify the enterprise stories about the Orioles’ front office improvements, player development strides, and forward-looking analysis with the knowledge that we also still covered the major league team every single day, and two out of three such nights, there would be a story about how they lost and likely played badly in doing so.
I often heard from readers who only judged on the former and took for granted the latter, but to me it made a balanced whole.
That’s gone now as well, at least in the offseason. The Venn diagram of the stories I find interesting and try to pursue and those that seem like the kind the Orioles want me to tell features an uncomfortable amount of overlap, service time manipulation manifestos notwithstanding.
You might remember how this platform began with the description that it would be a continuation of the best and most fulfilling parts of my old job and not a lot of the rest. From when I was still in college writing about Red Sox minor leaguers at SoxProspects.com and charting the developmental areas they were working to address to reach the majors, those topics haven’t changed much. It’s a rich area to pursue stories in.
The problem is that for me right now, and for the beat and the Orioles at large, it seems to be the only one. The lockout prevents any major league roster movement or much insight on the major league team that hasn’t been written countless times. Only writing about the future, which is where the Orioles are focused, seems to be giving a pass on what could be another rough summer when it comes to their present.
It won’t always be that way. That being the reality this newsletter was launched in might make it feel like it will be though. If anyone worried that it would be, and managed to make it this far, at least know it’s something I’ve thought about. A lot.
Wow Jon really appreciate you exploring this issue which to me sounds like "unconscious bias" in writing which I had not even considered as I just think about that regarding "thought processes". Really appreciate you making me think!!