The O’s have put Jonathan Villar on outright waivers. You know, a guy who hit .273/.339/.453 with 24 homers, who stole 40 bases, and was worth 4.0 bWAR. You know, one of the few guys on the team who was even watchable?
ESPN speculated it was to try to make it easier to trade him ahead of the nontender deadline Monday. However, he has 6 years of service time; he can reject the waiver and become a free agent. The O’s have also supposedly been shopping him already with no takers (who knows what the O’s were asking for in return, too). Now, a team can just claim him and agree to pay him whatever arbitration award he gets (it’s his third and final arbitration year)—expected to be around $9M…or he can become a free agent. This looks to me like a pure salary dump, jettisoning one of their best players to save not much money in baseball terms…and really not giving a damn about providing Oriole fans a team at all worth watching…or hope. To me, this looks like a whole new level of tanking. If I’m missing something, please tell me.
Fan Interference 
Clearly they are pissed about the Tiggers sucking more than them last season and have decided to go all in to get the #1 pick in the 2021 draft.
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How bad do you have to be for guys to elect to go to Japan instead of playing for your team?
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I spent some time in the aviation biz a few historical epochs ago and there was an old saying that being a commercial pilot entailed endless hours of sheer boredom punctuated at odd intervals by moments of sheer terror.
What does this have to do with odd moves by floundering front orifices? Well. I was musing this morning about the orfseason as viewed from the sump level of the league, which we share with the Orioles – see how flat the larvae are down here? – when your daily MLB news digest lists all the rumors about the free agents who matter and the teams that matter rumored to be trying to sign them, and my Feesh show up, if at all, as not much more than column inch filler.
It occurred to me that keeping track of our beloved if misbegotten Feesh is a lot like that old pilot’s ethos: we wait and watch, uninvolved, while the good ones sign elsewhere after the apocryphal innerest of our friction layer franchise has been used for a few weeks to inflate the asking price of guys who are about as anxious to sign here as my cats are to take a dip in the pool (Jon Heyman and Scott Boras, we’re looking at you). And then, when after weeks of same we’ve been lulled from anticipation to ennui, news breaks with the celebratory pretense of the engagement of a minor earl or duchess that we’ve signed some reclamation project burgeoning with VETERAN PRESENCE to a minor league contract.
That’s when the horror sets in: that vision, recycled from the past two seasons, of one of these returnin’ deceased war veterans popping up with the tying run on third….
Did I just hear someone cry “more sugar!”
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Villar to the Feesh, of all places. We’ll take it.
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