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Baseball Dollars vs. Baseball Sense: The Orioles' and Marlins' Offseasons

© Greg Spira

Sometimes baseball clubs do things that make no real sense. Take the Orioles, for example. This off-season their highly respected General Manager Pat Gillick has made a number of moves that at best can be termed bizarre. He has taken what was already an old team and made it ancient by signing 4 ballplayers who are clearly way past their prime - Joe Carter, Doug Drabek, Norm Charlton and, most recently, Ozzie Guillen. Carter no longer has the power that partly made up for his always high out rate, and is now strictly a DH. Drabek and Charlton no longer have good stuff and were simply horrible last year. And Guillen, who has never been effective offensively because of his poor strike zone judgment, has lost all of his range afield as a result of injury. It wouldn't have been a surprise if these players had latched on for final chances with various clubs. But it's shocking that one individual team has gone out and signed all of them. And while signing these free agents the Orioles managed to lose two valuable players, Geronimo Berroa and Randy Myers, to other teams in the free agent marketplace.

The Orioles seem to have taken the irrational preference of teams to sign players with major league experience over more talented players without that experience to an extreme. Meanwhile, other teams are going in the opposite direction because of finanicial restraints. The Florida Marlins' trades of some of their highest paid veterans for young talent is the most obvious current example. Since owner Wayne Huzienga announced that the Marlins would be split up because they were going to show a loss of $35 million a year, Dave Dombrowski has been trading away many of the teams' veterans for young talent. (Now, I don't believe for one second that the Marlins actually lost anywhere near $35 million anyplace other than a very talented accountants' books. But the Marlins were clearly not going to be a profit center for Huzienga anytime soon, and there was no real reason the team had to sport such a large payroll, so the Marlins' actions do seem to be reasonable financial moves.)

In the long run, the club may actually be better off because of these trades. Dave Dombrowski has proven himself to be a very able general manager and has picked up a great deal of talent in his dealings this offseason despite the

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