Mark Whicker: Orioles’ acquisition of Burnes might be most important move of off-season

The Baltimore Orioles won 101 games and the American League East division last season. Now they’ve added 2021 National League Cy Young Award winner Corbin Burnes to their rotation. Photo: Baltimore Orioles

February 18, 2024

By Mark Whicker

Canadian Baseball Network

Chris Davis bashed 53 home runs for Baltimore in 2013 and 47 more in 2015.

For this, he was given a contract that paid $23 million per annum from 2016 through 2022. He didn’t quite make it that far, blown away by the tornadic winds of his own swings and misses. In 2018 Davis needed only 522 plate appearances to strike out 192 times. He hit .168 that season with 16 home runs. It ended, mercifully, in 2020, when he began the season 6-for-52. He was released at age 34 and didn’t find major league work again.

The Orioles took a while to recover from the symbolic fallout. In 2017 they began a string of six consecutive losing seasons, three of which featured 115, 108 and 110 losses. In 2018 they were 47-115 and finished 61 games out of first place in the American League East. Acres of empty seats yawned at Oriole Park at Camden Yards, once the toughest ticket in the American League. In 2019 the club drew 1.3 million.

When Earl Weaver managed the Orioles’ glory teams, he would often say, “You’re never as good as you look when you win and you’re never as bad as you look when you lose.” Depending on the time of night, he was apt to jumble those phrases, but the implication was always clear. Triumph and disaster were both closer than you think.

Sure enough, the Orioles are coming off one of their best off-season periods in recent history and they didn’t even have to unpack the baseballs. They traded some names off their long prospect list to get Corbin Burnes, a former Cy Young Award winner from Milwaukee. He joins a starting rotation that improved dramatically as the Orioles won 101 games in 2023, the second-most in baseball.

What happened next was far more resounding than a pitcher’s stat line. David Rubenstein, son of Baltimore, formed a group that bought the franchise from the Angelos family for $1.7 billion. The partners are not fly-by-nighters. Former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg is involved, as is USA Basketball chief Grant Hill, sports entrepreneur Michele Kang, ex-Baltimore mayor Kurt Schmoke and Cal Ripken Jr. his own self.

Rubenstein, one of the founders of the Carlyle Group, a private equity behemoth, is accustomed to buying fine things. He spent $21.3 million for one of the few remaining copies of the Magna Carta. So if Burnes has another Cy Young-caliber season as he heads into free agency in 2025, the Orioles theoretically will be able to match zeroes with the competition. Certainly it has the makings of a far more stable operation than the one run by the Angelos family, who owned the Orioles for 31 years.

John Angelos operated the club after his father Peter became ill, and until last year was knotted in a three-way family legal tussle; his brother Louis was suing him, and his mother Georgia was suing Louis. All of that dropped this year, and John was trying to nail down an agreement to open new businesses around the ballpark. He promised Oriole fans that their ticket prices would skyrocket because of the project, which is not the way you want to celebrate a return to first place, but then sold the team abruptly after he’d asked for $600 million to finance the project.

Peter Angelos, a lawyer who had gotten rich off asbestos settlements, was a local hero when he bought the club that had once been owned by Washington power broker Edward Bennett Williams, and for a while the Orioles had a fat payroll and got to postseason play. But the farm system was drying up underneath all that, and when the Orioles fell, they splattered. Angelos did hire Mike Elias from the Astros after the 2018 season. His predecessor, Dan Duquette, had already begun amputating parts to restore the body. Trading Manny Machado to the Dodgers hurt, but it brought starting pitcher Dean Kremer. Trading Dylan Bundy to the Angels was tough because it was Elias’ first major deal and because the Orioles had invested in his promise, but it brought back starting pitcher Kyle Bradish.

The Orioles needed stars and the Angelos regime wasn’t maxing out the credit card. The draft would be the only source, and Elias and his talent miners brought back gold. Catcher Adley Rutschman, who in reality was as valuable as any A.L. player last year, was the first overall pick in 2019. Jackson Holiday, the shortstop who has been anointed the top prospect in the minors, was first overall in 2022. Gunnar Henderson, who had 28 home runs last year and is the shortstop (Holiday will be presumably moving to third base or the outfield), was a second-round pick in 2019.

Bradish was 12-7 with a 2.83 ERA and Kremer was 13-5 last season. Felix Bautista might have been the most beastly closer in baseball, with 30 hits in 61 innings, but he’s out with Tommy John surgery. Elias quickly signed Craig Kimbrel to handle that, with plenty of help from Yennier Cano, and now he has Burnes.

Burnes was a lightly recruited shortstop at his Bakersfield, Calif., high school. He wound up at St. Mary’s and was turned into a pitcher because nature abhors a vacuum. Burnes was 0-4 with a 6.19 ERA. He went to a summer league in the Hamptons, in New York, and came back with the cutter that earned him a fourth-round slot in Milwaukee’s draft.

In each of his three seasons in the Brewers’ rotation, Burnes did something memorable. He led the N.L. in ERA (2.43) in 2021, led the league in starts (33) and strikeouts (243) in 2022, and last year he had a league-best WHIP of 1.069, although his WHIPs in the previous two years were lower. Burnes couldn’t hold a lead over Arizona in a damaging wild-card series loss in 2023, but in an era when teams ask little of their starting pitchers, Burnes has a bit of gladiator in him. For three consecutive seasons he’s had 200 or more strikeouts. And in 2021, Burnes struck out 10 Cubs in a row, getting a swing-and-miss to set down every one. Since the end of the 2020 season he has more strikeouts than any pitcher outside of the Yankees’ Gerrit Cole.

The presence of a clearly defined staff ace has not been watered down by all the game’s changes. No one can accurately measure the advantage players have when they go to the ballpark knowing that today’s pitcher will give them a legitimate chance. The Brewers were 57-36 the past three years when Burnes started.

All in all this has a chance to be the most important move of the off-season. Yeah, Shohei Ohtani is with the Dodgers, but he isn’t pitching this year and the Dodgers were a scoring factory without him.

“I think we have a good shot now,” said Elias, seeing no need to pretend. The last time the Orioles gushed this much talent, Earl Weaver was the manager and regularly called them “the best damn team in baseball.”

That is music to the cauliflower ears and the battered beaks of the Orioles fans, who faintly remember their grandparents talking about Brooks Robinson. Conveniently, it might also be true.