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Thursday, January 26, 2023
The Baltimore Orioles acquired left-hander Cole Irvin from the Oakland Athletics on Thursday, bolstering their rotation as they look to take a step forward in the ultracompetitive American League East.
Irvin, who turns 29 this week, emerged as a reliable innings-eater over the last two seasons, throwing 359.1 innings at a 4.11 ERA after the A’s acquired him from Philadelphia for $100,000.
Baltimore used its significant middle-infield depth in the deal, sending 21-year-old Darell Hernaiz to Oakland. The Orioles also received 24-year-old minor league right-hander Kyle Virbitsky as part of the trade.
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1. A triple short of the cycleMaybe the As can sell to agents the idea that they'll have Aguilar pitch against their guys who are pending FA and get some side payments from the agents in question. I'm not seeing a viable ML team with real intent anymore though. A real commissioner would take the team and auction it off to find a serious ownership group.
Granted, if that's his upside then that's not worth an average SP. But if his upside is above that, then the A's did fine here ... excepting losing 120 games this year but what's a few losses among friends when the team is guaranteed about $260+ in revenue?
If he adds 15-20 lbs of muscle and a little bit of launch angle to his swing he could be a good-hitting 2B perhaps though. Juan Samuel with less Ks is probably what you're looking at as upside. I mean, that isn't so bad I guess. But, I see that as his 15-25% best outcome.
That strikes me as a hell of an upside.
Gee, ya think...?!
Actually, "ultracompetitive" makes me imagine all the players dressing up as this guy.
If he had a better arm, third could work out well - but... ah well. It'll be interesting to see where they use him relative to a roughly equally valued prospect already in their system Euribiel Angeles (less range, more dependable glove but so-so athletic tools, could suffer from that thing when someone has really good bat to ball skills but not a lot of power so they make too much weak contact (see Nick Madrigal and a host of other people) to succeed in the bigs.
That said he's been solid on the A's so why give him away for peanuts?
If the owners don't want to spend money on the A's, then neither do I.
Have you seen their mascot?
Zips has Hernaiz at average d at short;
I'm pretty sure that's just ZiPS saying "we have little/no reliable data so he get regressed all the way to league average."
Less speed too (mlb.com has him with 55 speed
Now that seems odd. He's 59 for 69 in steals. I can imagine steal success rates are quite high in the minors but if a guy with blah speed can have that success, he must be darn good at the other aspects of baseruning.
So I'll toss out another pie in the sky comp: Davey Lopes
Don't know what your guys problem with Stomper is. Stomper is awesome.
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