Tag Archives: Corbin Burnes

Is the Orioles’ reign of error ending?

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Is a new day really dawning at Camden Yards?

You thought the National League West ogres in Los Angeles had a long World Series title drought? The Orioles haven’t won a World Series since over a week following the premiere of the first Hooters restaurant. (In Florida.) And, since a decade before Peter Angelos bought the team out of bankruptcy court.

“Bankrupt” has been a polite way to describe the Angelos reign of error. Oriole fans celebrated, then cringed too often for comfort after Angelos bought the team from Eli Jacobs. Now they may have cause to celebrate something sweeter than the Orioles’ slightly unexpected return to competitiveness last year. May.

Once upon a time Angelos swore the Orioles would be pried from his literal cold, dead hands, as in upon his death. Now, his son John, who’s been running the Orioles since his father was diagnosed with dementia, plans to sell to two equity billionaires, David Rubenstein (the Carlyle Group) and Mike Arougheti (Ames Management Corp.). The price: $1.73 billion.

This, writes The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal, whose career as a baseball writer began by covering the Orioles for the Baltimore Sun, could portend the turn toward a new direction.

The Rubenstein-Arougheti group won’t take complete control of the team right away. They’re beginning with a minority investment but intend to take complete control upon  Peter Angelos’s death, allowing the Angelos family a tax benefit by waiting to give the group full ownership. (Rosenthal observes they’d have faced a capital gains tax levy on the difference between the team’s 1993 and current valuations.)

Rubenstein is known to have Baltimore ties and to be a significan philanthropic presence in the region. His personal worth is said to be $3.8 billion, while Arougheti’s is said to be $1.8 billion. Rosenthal also cites a Baltimore Banner report saying Hall of Fame shortstop and Orioles icon Cal Ripken, Jr. is going to be part of the new ownership group. Could the future look any sunnier for Oriole fans?

Well, they once thought it was sunny days ahead when the elder Angelos bought the team, too.

Two years later, in the wake of (let’s call it as it really was) the owner-provoked and pushed players’ strike, Ripken made it safe to love baseball again when he passed Lou Gehrig for consecutive games played and marked the occasion with a hefty home run off Angels pitcher Shawn Boskie in the fourth inning.

The Orioles have been to a few postseasons and through a lot more losing in the Angelos era. The elder Angelos became too hands-on despite a lack of common baseball sense. Tom Verducci of Sports Illustrated once described his style as slash-and-burn management, as in burning eleven managers in eighteen seasons before the comparative stability of Buck Showalter (8.3 seasons) and incumbent Brandon Hyde (entering season six).

From 1998-2011 the Orioles endured what was once believed unfathomable for a franchise with a history proud enough: a fourteen-season losing streak. The elder Angelos also dithered on creating an international Orioles scouting operation and presence and let his already chaotic front office mistreat valued players.

Things once hit so far bottom that Verducci reported in 2001 that agents with Oriole clients found those clients telling other free agents, “You don’t want to come here.” That sentiment was inconceivable in the era between their first World Series title (1966) and their last.

Last year’s Orioles surprised the world by reaching the postseason at all. They saw enough of their young talent start coming of age, and they saw a farm system looking plenty good enough for the seasons to come. Right?

Oops. Along the way, John Angelos was stupid enough to suspend his lead television broadcaster Kevin Brown over information on a team-provided graphic comparing last year’s O’s against the Rays to previous seasons in which the Rays seemed to own them. Oriole fans can’t be blamed if enough of them think they can’t have nice things without something nasty along with them.

Barely had the news sunk in about the Rubenstein-Arougheti group agreeing to buy the Orioles when bing!the team swung a trade for former Cy Young Award-winning Brewers pitcher Corbin Burnes for a shortstop on the cusp of Show readiness but with a few warning signs, a pitcher who might project as a useful reliever, and the 34th pick in the 2024 draft.

Further warning signs, though: Burnes has lost some hop on his signature sinkerball, his strikeout-to-walk ratio has dipped, and big boppers had a finer time with him last year than two years earlier. (2021: seven homers allowed. Last year: 22 homers allowed.) But he’s still Corbin Burnes and he’s still formidable enough. For a season to come at least. They hope.

Thus far the apparently glandular adulation thrown the new ownership group seems to be precisely what NBC Sports-turned-independent Craig Calcaterra calls it: “he’s not John Angelos, therefore he’s perfect, and if you suggest otherwise, blogger boy, you’re a hater.”

But Oriole Nation has been there/done that in the past, a little too often. The Angelos Era may be over, but then Mets fans threw champagne parties over the end of the Wilpon Era and the advent of Steve Cohen, too.

Cohen has been through more than a few growing pains thus far. Met fans whose patience rivals that of the piranha at mealtime (they are legion) think one bad inning equals grounds for summary executions—in April. Oriole fans may be far more patient, but the Angelos reign of error wore that patience to the thickness of a sheet of paper.

The Rubenstein-Arougheti (-Ripken) Group has quite a job ahead, assuming the rest of baseball’s owners approve their advent and their purchase deal. It’s not simple being viewed en masse (and perhaps prematurely) as saviours. Once upon a time America thought (really) that even Richard Nixon had to be an improvement over Lyndon Johnson. How did that work out?

Oriole fans may (underline that) be wise to consider what investigative journalism giant Sidney Zion used to advise: Trust your mother, but cut the cards.

The Brewers burn Burnes erroneously

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Corbin Burnes

No, it wasn’t Burnes’s fault the Brewers sputtered down the stretch last year.

If you had a dollar for every time you heard a sports bar drunk or saw a social media twit blame a team’s best player for its failure to make the postseason, you’d be rich enough to pay Corbin Burnes’s 2023 salary and still have seven-eighths of the fortune you earned. But what if you’d heard the team itself blamed their best player for such failure?

That’s what the Brewers did in beating Burnes during salary arbitration. And while I’m just a little bit on the skeptical side, considering the Brewers wanted to pay him a mere $10.1 million for 2023 while Burnes sought a measly $10.8 million, a $700,000 difference, Burnes’s comments after losing his case disturb.

It’s not that teams have been immune to trying to tear players down in salary negotiations before. If there was one thing the free agency era didn’t change from the reserve era, it’s that.

Maybe they don’t get as nasty as one-time longtime Yankee boss George Weiss did, threatening to make available to Mickey Mantle’s wife a private detectives’ report on his  less-than-exemplary after-hours life to beat that Hall of Famer out of a raise. But they can and do get nasty enough even today.

Much if not most of the time, the team and the player who’s arbitration-eligible settle it before it goes to a hearing, the better to avoid the kind of nastiness Burnes described to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. The kind in which the Brewers elected to blame Burnes for most of their failure to get even to the 2022 wild card game. They elected wrongly. And they may get burned (or should that be Burnesed) for it down the road apiece.

“They’re trying to do what they can to win the hearing,” Burnes said, “but I think there were other ways they could have gone about it and probably been a little more respectful with how they went about it.”

At the end of the day, here we are. They obviously won it. There’s no denying that the relationship is definitely hurt from what transpired over the last couple weeks. There’s really no way getting around that.

Obviously, we’re professionals, and we’re going to go out there and do our job, keep doing what I can every fifth day that I go out there. But with some of the things that are said, for instance, basically putting me in the forefront of why we didn’t make it to the postseason last year, that’s something that probably doesn’t need be said. We can go about a hearing without having to do that.

The Brewers ended July 2022 with a 57-45 record. Burnes himself ended July with a 2.92 fielding-independent pitching rate, a 2.31 earned run average, a .187 batting average against him, a 5-1 strikeout-to-walk rate, and the Brewers were 13-7 in his starts.

They were also only three games behind the Cardinals in the NL Central race and looked as though they’d have one of the league’s four wild cards in hand at the finish.

But they went 12-15 in August and finished the month six games out of first. They went 15-13 in September and finished that month seven out of first. The Central was out of the question by then, even with Burnes himself ending September by outpitching eventual 2022 Cy Young Award winner Sandy Alcantara as the Brewers shut the Marlins out, 1-0. Come 3 October, they were eliminated from the postseason entirely.

Burnes himself had a rough August, at least by the standard of a defending Cy Young Award pitcher. His FIP for the month was 3.98, his ERA was 4.23, but the batting average against him was still .197 even if his strikeout-to-walk rate shrank to 2.7-to-1. And the Brewers were 3-3 in his six August starts.

They went 4-3 in Burnes’s September/October starts and 15-13 overall for the period. Burnes was better than in August: he had a 2.79 FIP for the final span, a whopping 6-1 strikeout-to-walk rate, and the batting average against him was a still-stingy .207. Overall, from August until his final season’s start, Burnes posted a 3.49 FIP, a 4-1 strikeout-to-walk rate, and the span’s batting average against him was a still-stingy .213.

The Brewers went 7-6 in Burnes’s starts from August through 5 October. Except for a 23 August game in which they were blown out by nine runs, with seven runs against Burnes only four of which were earned, the losses were by margins of three or less (and usually two) most of the time. The other exception: a five-run loss to the Mets on 19 September during which Burnes surrendered five earned runs out of the Mets’ seven on the day.

During the same stretch from August’s beginning until their season ended 5 October, the Brewers scored 251 runs but surrendered 254 runs in sixty games. Burnes was charged with 34 earned runs with 37 total scoring against him; by earned runs, he was charged with 13 percent of the runs against the Brewers for the span. The team averaged 4.2 runs scored and 4.2 runs against per game.

I don’t see overwhelming evidence that Burnes’s performance was the key reason the Brewers fell out of the postseason picture. But I do see a pitcher who’s going to go out, pitch the best ball he can pitch with what he has, and then look forward to his first free agency after the 2024 season with a long enough memory that—even if the Brewers can afford to extend him before or pursue him to return after—they won’t even be a topic when he begins to observe his potential suitors.

A team averaging four runs a game down a stretch that cost them a postseason berth should have been smarter than to try putting most of the blame on a single pitcher for a team effort (or lack thereof), just to win a mere $700,000 dollar difference in salary arbitration. To whom will they pay or in what will they invest that seven hundred large to prove it’s worth that kind of mistake?