But if they make him PBO and bring in Naehring or Oppenheimer from the Yankees to be GM, that might work out. I want to see guys who come from successful organizations. At the time we hired them, we couldn't really say the same about McPhail and Klentak. The argument that "Well, they laid the foundation for the Orioles' renaissance" down inside always struck me as kind of a stretch. And, in hindsight, it's not like the Orioles built something that was really all that special from 2012-16. Just a good team that cracked the postseason three years, managing to get to the LCS once.
We're a big market franchise. We don't need to play Moneyball like Oakland and Tampa Bay do. And besides, for all that those two organizations do right, neither has made it to baseball's mountaintop and they have one WS appearance between the two of them this century. What we need to do is build a good, sustainable farm system that gives us a pipeline of talent. Analytics can help us spend our considerable resources wisely, not be the organizational lifeblood as is the case with Oakland and Tampa Bay (though in the case of the latter, the Rays always have a strong farm system). The ultimate role model organizations situated like us are the Yankees, Dodgers and Cardinals, three organizations that are typically good year after year after year and only very rarely have more than one losing season in a row or go more than three or four years without appearing in the Postseason. Then you got the organizations like the Red Sox and Cubs which need their rebuilding phases but find a way to maximize their windows of opportunity (though Cubs have only done that once).
