The Orioles are leaking

General Managers are only as good as their team's performance in the past season. Dan Duquette was genius last season as the Orioles surprised everyone with blowing out the AL East and making it to the American League Championship Series. Duquette brought in pieces that worked perfectly such as Nelson Cruz and Andrew Miller. But so far this off season seems to show a general leaking of talent as Cruz, Miller and now Nick Markakis have been allowed to sign in greener pastures. Will the Orioles be one and done?

Such a pronouncement in December with almost five months of the off season yet to come would be misguided. But the Orioles have allowed at least six wins of offense and two wins of relief pitching to head out the door. In the long run, these decisions may be wise as the total expense of those players long term might be painful. But in the short term, Orioles fans might be getting a little antsy.

The Red Sox and Blue Jays have improved themselves greatly thus far--at least on paper. The Yankees have been spinning in place and the Rays seem in disarray (but with a still promising rotation). If you compare teams in the AL East, you have to look at the Orioles as an 89-win team after losing that talent. Can they make it up in other ways? Perhaps.

The team still has a strong core in Adam Jones, J.J. Hardy, Manny Machado, Chris Davis and Matt Wieters. There are questions marks among that group. Can Davis bounce back off a disappointing season and stay clean? How will Wieters respond after missing so much time with a rebuilt elbow? Can Machado's knees hold up or is this a chronic season to season thing? But let's, for now, assume that those folks will all contribute ably.

The starting staff will return all the same pitchers back into the mix even though Bud Norris has had his name rumored in trades all winter. They are not a great rotation, but with good defense, they get the job done. The loss of Miller will hurt, but the bullpen was pretty good before he even got there and that same cast is back for another season.

With that much stability (barring injuries), how can the production and play of Markakis and Cruz be made up?

Markakis is probably the easiest to replace. No knock on the guy as he has been a very good player for the Orioles. But his offense has only been about seven percent better than league average and that is not as hard to replace as you think. The most obvious answer seems to be Dariel Alvarez, the Cuban refugee the O's signed in 2013. He has raked pretty consistently in the minors and while he is not that patient a hitter, he does hit enough to replace Markakis if his minor league play is an indication.

The only other minor league options such as Mike Yastrzemski and Josh Hart are still a year or two away.

Harder to replace is Nelson Cruz. While Cruz never saw a pitch he didn't like to swing at, his power is a high commodity in today's market. How do the Orioles close that gap? To me, expecting Steve Pearce to repeat his season last year also seems to be dicey. So that is a lot of power to replace.

Let's say that Wieters comes back as good as he was. That is a plus total of 17 homers over the five he hit last year before he was hurt. If Chris Davis can be somewhere between his monster 2013 and disappointing 2014, he could hit 35 homers and add seven more to the total. Platooning Davis with Christian Walker might produce the same results with a better overall batting average.

I'm not sure Jonathan Schoop will ever develop into an effective MLB hitter. His thirteen walks for all of 2014 are a red flag to me as it led to a .244 OBP. But he could add another six homers to his total of 14 last season. And add to that a bounce-back power year for J.J. Hardy who was way below his career yearly homer output last season could make up some more.

If all of that goes well, which, of course, is a big if, the Orioles could make up the power lost by Nelson Cruz. Whether they can overcome the lack of Cruz's presence in the lineup is a very big question.

Like I said, there is a lot of off season left to go and I'm sure Dan Duquette is not going to stand pat. Adding Melky Cabrera or someone of that caliber might still be a possibility.

But even if Duquette stands pat, as I have outlined, the Orioles might be okay as is. The core is still there. For the most part, a team built on defense and a winning attitude instilled by Buck Showalter could keep the Orioles in the mix. Only time will tell if this General Manager will go from hero to bum or whether he was shrewd to let those players walk when he did. I wouldn't count the Orioles out.

Nick Markakis: A-wrist-ed development?

Nick Markakis was the one player on the Baltimore Orioles in 2007 and 2008 that teams did not want to face at the plate. After a very good rookie campaign in 2006, Markakis became a star in the next two seasons and compiled 11.6 rWAR during those two seasons (10.6 fWAR). In 2013, this same Nick Markakis became one of the least valuable players in baseball with -0.1 WAR on both major stat sites despite playing 160 games. What happened to Nick Markakis? Was this a case of a-wrist-ed development?

Markakis came within a whisker of that magical .300/.400/.500 slash line when he finished, .306/.406/.491 in 2008. He was the eleventh most valuable player in 2008 with the fourteenth highest wOBA in baseball. His fielding was also rated excellent with Baseball Info Solutions giving him 22 runs above average in right field. Fangraphs gave him eleven runs above average. Either way, Nick Markakis had, by 2008 become one of the best players in baseball. He was 24 years old.

But then he started slipping. It was not real perceptible at first. His wOBA fell to a still healthy .349 in 2009. That same stat improved a bit to .353 in 2010 but fell again to .333 in 2011. His once promising career was heading in the wrong direction as even his fielding slipped precipitously.

The slide could be seen most dramatically in the slugging percentage. Since 2008, when his slugging percentage finished at .491 as stated, these are his successive three seasons: .453, .436, .406. There was clearly something going wrong with Markakis.

We received a bit of a clue when Markakis underwent surgery early in the 2012 season to remove parts of his hamate bone in his right wrist. It can never be good when something is so messed up that they have to remove parts of your body to fix it. That surgery gave a clue that perhaps Markakis was slipping due to an ailing wrist.

But here is the confusing part. Before going on the disabled list on June 1, 2012, Markakis was having a bit of a renaissance. He had hit eight homers by that time and had slugged over .500 in May of that season. After he returned from the surgery on July 13, he was pretty decent over the next several months. He only hit a couple of homers a month, but his wOBA rebounded to .359. His season ISO of .174 was his highest since 2008.

But then CC Sabathia broke his thumb with a pitch on September 8, 2012 and his season was finished.

And then came last year. Despite coming to the plate 700 times in 2013, Markakis only hit ten homers and 24 doubles. Both were less than what he did in 471 plate appearances the year before. His slugging percentage of .356 was the eleventh lowest among all qualified players. His walk percentage was down. His OPS was .685, the seventeenth lowest of all qualified players.

Due to his positional fielding not highly valued in right field and with diminishing results as a fielder to go along with that, Markakis hit bottom as a Major League player. His fWAR placed him as the fifth least valuable player of all qualifying players in 2013.

Source: FanGraphs -- Nick Markakis

When Markakis was hitting on all cylinders, the Orioles gave him a six-year, $66 million deal that looked like a great investment at the time. 2014 is the last year on that contract unless some sort of miracle happens and the team wants to take his $17.5 million option, that same contract has become a burden for the tight-cash team in Baltimore. His $15 million salary in 2014 for a player who had a negative value in 2013 is a big problem.

But is there any hope for Markakis to return to some of his former glory? You cannot tell from the projection systems. Steamer has him rebounding only slightly to a .334 wOBA and 1.4 WAR, but that is nowhere near where he was. Oliver projections is much more pessimistic and not only thinks Markakis will finish 2014 with a .308 wOBA and 0.7 WAR, but never sees any hope for him in that system's five year projection.

Nick Markakis enters his 30th year season in 2014. While decline is the norm from here on in, that decline has already happened on a grand scale. But he is still young enough to turn it around. But can he or will he? The numbers do not make it seem likely. He hits more ground balls than at any time in his career, his home run to fly ball ratio has taken a dive and only his line drive rates give any kind of hope. Has this once fearsome hitter turned into a slap hitter?

The Orioles have not made a splash this off-season except in a negative light with the Balfour fiasco. Once again, they seem to be playing things close to the vest (cliche alert!). For the Orioles to have any kind of chance in the AL East, they will need Nick Markakis to return to some of his former glory, especially for the $15 million they will be paying him. Whether Markakis has that kind of player left in him remains to be seen. All the numbers show us is a sharp and sad decline from what was once a promising career.

The first annual Dan Meyer Awards - the Anti-MVPs

Now that the World Series is over, everyone will be focusing on off season awards. The BBWAA will have theirs. The BBA will have theirs and I have already contributed to that effort. All of the focus will be on players that played wonderfully in 2013. But there should be an award for the worst players in the league. Every top statistic has to have a bottom. Every yin needs a yang. Every Red Sox needs an Astros (too soon?). And so I have created my own: The Dan Meyer Awards

Why Dan Meyer? Good question. I was going to go with Dave Kingman. I mean, how else can you hit over 450 homers in the pre-PED era (we presume) and still not make the Hall of Fame? But Kingman had enough good years to put him in the positive numbers for his career. That didn't make him very good. But he was not bad enough to name an award after.

I considered Doug Flynn, a guy who played over 1,200 games and had unprecedented negative WAR for a guy with that many games. But Flynn could field a bit. He was no Mark Belanger, but he held his own with the glove. He could not hit a lick.

The last guy I considered was Bill Bergen, the worst hitter that ever lived. But again, Bergen was a pretty good catcher as far as we can tell for the early dawn of professional baseball. None of them really fit. And so I settled on Dan Meyer. For a fun tribute to the player, look here.

There were two Major League players named Dan Meyer. One was a pitcher the Braves unfortunately selected in the first round of the 2002 draft. He had one good year in 2009 for the Florida Marlins. But the rest were all bad. The one we want here is the other one. This Dan Meyer was a fourth round draft pick by the Tigers in 1972 and somehow managed to play twelve awful years in the Majors.

Our Dan Meyer could not hit and he could not field. As best as I can tell, his career was prolonged twice by two successful years where he managed to crack over 20 homers and score positive WAR. But other than those two years, he was abysmal. He never had a single season where his fielding approached league average.

Our Dan Meyer played three positions: Left Field, First Base and Third Base. He was not good at any of them and finished with negative runs for all three. Of his twelve big league seasons, he finished with a negative WAR figure eight times. In six of those seasons, he played more than 120 games, so it was not like he was a part-timer.

Meyer played from 1974 to 1985. The first three years were with the Tigers, the next five years were with the Mariners where he had his best years. And his last four were with the Oakland A's. Baseball-reference.com gave him a total of -6.5 rWAR for his career. Fangraphs.com was a bit nicer and put the figure at -5.5 fWAR.

Meyer is the perfect symbol of these awards. We I salute him! These are not the Silver Slugger Awards. These are the Talc (Mg₃Si₄O₁₀(OH)₂₎ Awards. The Awards will be handed out by position (450 plate appearances were needed to qualify):

First base: Paul Konerko. Konerko has been a really good hitter for a long time which was great because he was no great shakes in the field and he has always been baseball's worst base runner. But his batting bottomed out in 2013. -1.5 rWAR, -1.8 fWAR. Honorable mentions: Adam Dunn, Lyle Overbay. Dunn and Konerko were interchangeable at first base and DH, so either works.

Second base: Jeff Keppinger. Gee, I wonder why the White Sox were so bad this year? Gosh, these numbers are bad. Keppinger had 451 plate appearances, so he just made it. -2.0 rWAR, -1.5 fWAR. His .266 wOBA was beastly (in a bad way). Honorable mention: Darwin Barney whose wOBA was even worse than Keppinger, but whose glove saved him.

Shortstop: Adeiny Hechavarria. The Marlins' shortstop deserves to be here since he has an impossible name to spell and type. Both Fangraphs and B-R agree that Hechavarria cost his Marlins 32 runs on offense. 32 runs!! He was the only shortstop (other than our honorable mention) that met our minimum requirements that finished with a negative WAR in both sites. -1.9 fWAR, -2.1 rWAR (!). Honorable mention: Starlin Castro. That was one awful middle infield for the Cubs, eh?

Third Base: Keppinger could slide in here too. But that's not fair. So the winner is Michael Young. Which probably isn't fair either as he was a sometimes DH, 3B, 1B, etc. But he did enough of them poorly and batted league average and ran the bases poorly and still managed 565 plate appearances. Jackpot! -0.2 fWAR, -1.3 rWAR. Honorable mention: Can we just give it to the entire Yankees' cacophony of third basemen? No? Okay, David Freese then.

Left Field: Vernon Wells. That little devil fooled us for a couple of weeks, eh? He fooled Joe Girardi too and ended up getting 458 suck-the-life-out-of-you-until-you-die plate appearances. -0.8 fWAR, -0.2 rWAR. The Angels did not kill two birds with one stone. They killed two teams. Honorable mention: Dayan Viciedo.

Center Field: Justin Ruggiano. I do not know what happened to Ruggiano this season. He lost 216 points off his OPS from 2012. That is sort of incredible. Thanks to positional values, no center fielder finished below zero in the WAR category. But Ruggiano had negative numbers both on offense and on defense. The latter might be because center is not his best position. Honorable mention: Michael Saunders.

Right Field: Nick Markakis. This was simply a bad year for Markakis and looking at his career, was probably an outlier. All facets of his game tumbled. -0.1 fWAR, -0.1 rWAR. Honorable mention: Drew Stubbs.

Catcher: J.P. Arencibia. This one is not even close. To finish with a negative WAR as a catcher with all those positional points is pretty darned hard to do. Not only did Arencibia finish with an OPS of .592 and a wOBA of .259, but his defense fell too. And if you followed along with his Twitter account, he seemed to be in complete denial. That was one ugly season. Honorable mention: How about Rob Brantly, except he did not get enough plate appearances.

There you have it: Your 2013 Dan Meyer Awards. I would have to go with Adeiny Hechavarria for the anti-MVP. What about pitchers, you ask? I am saving those for tomorrow when the first annual Kyle Davies Awards are announced.