Guest Post: Joe Sheehan On Why The Orioles Should Sign Dexter Fowler

The following post is from Joe Sheehan, who runs a subscription-only email newsletter that covers all of baseball. Joe was a founding member of Baseball Prospectus and has contributed to Sports Illustrated, ESPN.com, and many other publications while being a guest on MLB Network's "Clubhouse Confidential" and numerous radio programs around the country.

On January 27th he dedicated an entire post to the Orioles, explaining that although the team has spent a lot of money this winter it still needs to do more to compete. The post is reprinted here with his permission.

The Tigers have committed hundreds of millions of dollars to Justin Upton, Jordan Zimmermann and others to improve upon a core that probably wasn't good enough to win.

The Orioles have committed hundreds of millions of dollars to Chris Davis and Darren O'Day merely to maintain a core that probably isn't good enough to win.

2B Schoop (R)
3B Machado (R)
CF Jones (R)
1B Davis (L)
C Wieters (S)
DH Trumbo (R)
LF Reimold (R)
RF Flaherty (L)
SS Hardy (R)
IF Paredes (S)
LF Kim (L)
C Joseph (R)
OF Navarro (L)

SP Tillman (R)
SP Gausman (R)
SP Jimenez (R)
SP Gonzalez (R)
SP Wright (R)

RP Britton (L)
RP O'Day (R)
RP Matusz (L)
RP Brach (R)
RP McFarland (L)
RP Roe (R)
RP Garcia (R)

The Orioles have done little to improve upon the team that was 81-81 last season. They spent to retain Davis and O'Day, and they watched Matt Wieters accept a qualifying offer. They return nine of their top ten players by PA and 12 of their top 14 by innings pitched -- losing Steven Pearce, Wei-Yin Chen and Bud Norris. Their most significant additions have been Mark Trumbo, the kind of low-OBP slugger they already had in spades, and Hyeon-Soo Kim, who I might call the Shin-Soo Choo of the Korean Baseball Organization. There's no imminent help from the farm; the Orioles' top two prospects, Hunter Harvey and Dylan Bundy, threw 22 pro innings last year. Christian Walker has been buried by Trumbo and the return of Davis.

By their actions, the Orioles seem to believe that they're the 96-66 team of 2014, rather than the .500 team of last year. From 2012-14, the Orioles won 93, 85 and 96 games, but only one of those teams, the 2014 version, was actually very good:

"Bird" Pun Here

                RS   RA  Diff

2015   81-81   713  693   +20

2014   96-66   705  593  +112

2013   85-77   745  709   +36

2012   93-69   712  705    +7

That 2014 team featured a lot of great performances by players who are no longer here. Nelson Cruz hit 40 homers. Steven Pearce had a 930 OPS. Nick Markakis was second among regulars with a .342 OBP. Chen is now gone as well. Adam Jones, Manny Machado, Chris Tillman and Zach Britton have demonstrated that they're collectively strong enough to be the core of a deep team but not a shallow one. Last year, Machado made the leap, Davis hit 47 homers, Jonathan Schoop had a strong half-season, and the Orioles were still an 81-win team. They needed to do more than rack the balls again. At least so far, they haven't.

The Orioles have had a consistent approach under Buck Showalter: position players that hit homers and play defense; deep bullpens that get ground balls; starting pitching that mostly stays out of the way. Recent Orioles teams have had low OBPs, high SLGs and short-sequence offenses. They're first in homers in MLB the last four years, with 52 more than second-place Toronto; they're third in SLG behind the Rockies (Coors Field) and Tigers. They're first in isolated power. They're eighth in runs…and just 22nd in OBP.

Now, the Orioles can say they've addressed that by signing Kim, and maybe that works. Kim isn't likely to hit near the top of the lineup, though, and that's what they really need to find. They still have playing time available in the outfield, where Nolan Reimold, Ryan Flaherty and Trumbo are all too prominent on the depth chart. It's hard to identify a leadoff hitter on this roster, which is how you end up with a guy with a .306 OBP slotted there. The Orioles seem very reluctant to give up their #1 pick, as they should be, but it may be time to go get Dexter Fowler.

Fowler would become the Orioles' best leadoff hitter since Brian Roberts. He would slot nicely in right field, as he's a 30-year-old outfielder whose numbers in center haven't been great. He's not going to be very expensive -- maybe 3/45 in a market that priced Alex Gordon at 4/72. Mostly, he'd be a reliable OBP guy for a team whose #2-#4 hitters might very well hit 100 homers and slug .520. Fowler could score 120 runs batting in front of Machado, Davis and Jones.

I don't want to minimize the importance of that #1 pick. As a player, Fowler is a lot closer to Daniel Murphy than he is to David Price, and I recently skewered the Nationals for their decision to give up a #1 for Murphy. Consider those two organizations for a moment, though. Or take the Mets, with their success in drafting and developing prospects. There's a lot of homegrown talent in Baltimore, but of late, their core player-development competence seems to be breaking highly-talented pitchers. There's an argument that a #1 pick has less value to them than it does to a team better able to shepherd young men from amateurs to Orioles.

There's also the importance of this year and next to the Orioles. Wieters is a free agent after this season. Tillman and Kim are free agents after 2017; Jones and Machado after 2018. Davis will be around for a while, but he's at his peak. The Orioles are at the back end of the cycle that began in 2012. This team, the Adam Jones Orioles, won't be around much longer, and the Orioles' farm system isn't going to be replenishing the major-league team for a few years. The tension between wins now and wins later is always present, but for the Orioles, there's a strong argument that the wins Fowler brings now -- pushing the Orioles towards 90 wins -- will have more value than the wins a #1 pick will bring in 2019-21 when the Orioles project to be bad.

As far as the Davis contract is concerned, it's surprisingly reasonable because of the deferred money. A listed 7/161 turns out to be more like 7/127.5 in value, an AAV of $18 million a year. Davis is an impossible player to project -- he's wrapped two huge years around one as a replacement-level player -- but he would need to return about 14 wins in seven years to be worth the money, just two per season. $18 million is Jayson Werth money, it's less than what Choo and Carl Crawford got. The seven years may not work out so well for the Orioles, but the overall investment is low enough to make even that manageable. If this were 5/127.5, it would look different but be a lesser deal.

Just bringing back the core of a .500 team isn't enough, though. The Orioles can't look at 2014's 96 wins and assume that with better health, better luck and some development, they'll be that good again. There were key performances on that 2014 team by players who are no longer here, and their absences were a big part of why 2015 went south. For the Orioles to press the Red Sox and Blue Jays, they need another piece, and Fowler is that piece: he fills a lineup and a roster hole, and the OBP skills he brings mesh beautifully with the Orioles' high-SLG, high-ISO team. It's hard to give up a #1, but it's even harder to spend $120 million on an 83-win team.

I encourage you to subscribe to Joe's newsletter, which is $29.95 for a full year or $16.95 for six months. I've been a subscriber since the beginning and can't recommend it enough. As you can see here, his pieces are thought-provoking and insightful and his analysis pulls no punches. He is on Twitter at @joe_sheehan.