With all the talk about the Orioles in rebuilding mode and beefing up their farm system as they look forward to becoming competitive, we need a reality check from examining the trades made since 2016. We had a large number of legitimate major league starters (and even stars) that we have traded away for prospects. Management assures the fans that this is the pathway to success. Certainly it has been the pathway to the ownership scaling down he payroll to only $52 million. That begs the question that major league baseball should set some type of floor —a minimum payroll level that teams must meet. Otherwise you are just taking advantage of your fans.
As you scan down the list below of Orioles transactions, you don’t see a lot of value returned for all that the team has given up. It is difficult to evaluate the future contributions of some of these prospects, but the results so far have not been impressive. We no longer have any valuable trading chips remaining so we are depending on our farm system and position in the draft to raise our level of play.
