Matt Kremnitzer: O's philosophies may have to change

As Andrew Stetka discussed yesterday, you know the Orioles are not going to re-sign all of their impending free agents. There's a very real possibility that they decide to let all of them walk. The choice to not re-sign Nelson Cruz, and to a lesser extent Nick Markakis and Andrew Miller, hurt the 2015 team somewhat, but a lot of that collapse has come from other key parts of the Orioles taking significant steps back. That departing group did not have much to do with the starting rotation crumbling or J.J. Hardy performing offensively as one of baseball's worst everyday players this season.

As my colleague Jon Shepherd of Camden Depot has pointed out numerous times, the Orioles have decided to put most of their financial resources into the major league team. For the last few years, that has made a lot of sense. With the emergence of Manny Machado, Adam Jones, Chris Davis and others, the Orioles did what they could to add cost-effective, complementary pieces around them. They took players in the Rule 5 draft. They signed a never-ending list of fringe players and minor league free agents. They brought in players off the scrap heap, like Nate McLouth and Steve Pearce, and helped turn them into useful players. They employed platoons and defensive shifts. They've done a whole lot of out-the-box things, and they even played Pearce at second base! They also took a chance on Ubaldo Jimenez, signing him to the most lucrative deal the club has ever given a free agent pitcher.

But they also traded away competitive balance draft picks for Bud Norris and with Ryan Webb. They sent away international bonus slots they weren't going to use. The Orioles have not spent much internationally; they've been a bottom six team every year in that category since at least 2010, and they were last in 2013 and second-to-last in 2014 (and they won't fare much better this year). Many of the team's fringe signings did not pan out (Wesley Wright, Everth Cabrera, Delmon Young etc.), and that money certainly could have been allocated better (particularly with the benefit of hindsight).

Because they were in playoff races in previous years and felt like they needed extra help, they dealt away players like Jake Arrieta and Eduardo Rodriguez. You can defend either move, though that's not really the point (and I'm not trying to rehash those arguments). It doesn't make it any easier to watch Arrieta blossom into one of the game's best pitchers and Rodriguez post a strong rookie campaign for a division rival. Even giving away Zach Davies for Gerardo Parra does not look great at the moment.

Meanwhile, something is broken in the Orioles' player development process, and it's not just because Arrieta is dominating in a different uniform. Chris Tillman has been this team's most successful homegrown starting pitching talent. However, he he hasn't been good this season, is entering his second year of arbitration and doesn't exactly have a promising outlook for future seasons. Kevin Gausman has a ton of talent and will be in the rotation next year, but he has a long way to go after the team's confusing treatment of him the last couple of seasons. With Dylan Bundy unable to stay healthy and some discouraging news about Hunter Harvey's elbow, there isn't much to get excited about pitching-wise in the O's system. There's a reason why fans are so excited about Jonathan Schoop seemingly breaking through to join Machado as one of the team's young stars.

Maybe the Orioles aren't targeting the right players in the draft. Maybe they could do something different developmentally. And maybe they've been unlucky. The farm system is the organization's real weakness right now, the result of a combination of poor overall execution and the inability to add enough young talent.

Do you want to see the Orioles spend more money? Of course you do. No fan would say otherwise. But whether we like it or not, we're talking about a business. The Orioles are not going to start dropping insane sums of money on players, and they're not going to spend a whole lot more than their mid-market status. So do you want the Orioles to utilize that available money and maximize the talent on the major league roster? Or, would you rather them spend more internationally and stop trading away competitive balance picks to invest more in their future to help build a long-term, sustainable winner? Like many teams, they aren't going to do both on a large scale at the same time. That's unfortunate, but it could always be worse. Teams like the A's, Rays, and Pirates have found ways to succeed on much less. Maybe this season will give the O's a chance to rethink some strategies.

Matt Kremnitzer blogs about the Orioles at Camden Depot. Follow him on Twitter: @mattkremnitzer. His thoughts on the O's appear here as part of MASNsports.com's continuing commitment to welcome guest bloggers to our little corner of cyberspace. All opinions expressed are those of the guest bloggers, who are not employed by MASNsports.com but are just as passionate about their baseball as our roster of writers.