Baltimore Orioles: Evaluating the Wade Miley Trade

Jul 19, 2016; Seattle, WA, USA; Seattle Mariners starting pitcher Wade Miley (20) throws against the Chicago White Sox during the first inning at Safeco Field. Mandatory Credit: Joe Nicholson-USA TODAY Sports /

The Baltimore Orioles trade to acquire Mariners pitcher and veteran lefty Wade Miley is one that presents both opportunity and risk.

As feared before the season began, the Orioles rotation has struggled greatly. Whereas Chris Tillman has indeed put together a most commendable bounce-back season, the rest of the starting five have been sketchy at best.

Buck Showalter often talks about how Baltimore is a place of opportunity. And more than a couple of Orioles hurlers have fallen short of seizing that opportunity to become a regular part of a big-league rotation.

This would not be such an immediate problem if we were back in 2011 and rebuilding this franchise. But the Orioles need to win now. Now is the time when they have put together an oft-powerful (though not so much lately!) lineup that has spent more time atop the American League East than everyone else combined.

There just really aren’t any certainties with securing pitching help from the outside, even if you had all of the money in the world to go get it. There has not been much available. And there is not a lot of negotiating strength when the minor league system – fair or not – is perceived to not have much talent of trade value. And hence the end result is only being able to get an expensive item that is a salary subtraction from a non-contending, rebuilding outfit.

It has been my viewpoint on multiple occasions to state that the Orioles should not seek out alleged veteran arms to bolster the rotation. This was written in the hopeful belief that at least one of the auditioning candidates on the team or coming up from AAA (Wright / Wilson) would prove to be at least serviceable. This just hasn’t happened with any confident certainty whatsoever.

Having sufficient pitching is a crying need for just about every franchise. If a pitcher is decent and effective at all, few clubs are going to give up that player. So successfully buying starters from outside the organization is, in my view, a myth that is fairly certainly doomed to never be worth the cost.

Beyond dollars and cents, multiplying expensive veteran starters also clogs the system for opportunities for rising talents. Duquette has always said that the Orioles need to get to a place where they grow most of their pitching … that this is the path forward to a successful organization. I agree.

The numbers on Wade Miley (I keep typing Wade Cyrus for some reason) are not particularly outstanding: not this year (7-7, 4.98), not last year (11-11, 4.46), not 2014 (8-12, 4.34). Yes, the two years before that were a combined 26-14 with an ERA of 3.44, while throwing an average of 197 innings. He does throw innings.

The Orioles are buying some innings in Wade Miley; just how effective will they be? But eating up innings, even if done with mediocre results, is deemed to be the greatest need at this juncture. Whereas I hate seeing the Orioles in this position, it is difficult to find another alternate solution. Giving some small measure of condolence is the fact that Miley has recently given his team three consecutive quality starts.

But here is my largest fear: that Miley will become the second coming of Gallardo and the third coming of Ubaldo Jimenez. He arrives with another year guaranteed at $8.917 million before a 2018 deal for $12 million (though with a $500k buyout).

In 2017, the Orioles could conceivably be on the books for $13.5 million for Jimenez, $11 million for Gallardo, and $8.9 million for Miley. That is $33.4 million for three pitchers who are only effective when having a nearly perfect day for their skills and pitch command. The investment is so high that the Orioles will feel they have to use them, and together the three become a blocking pattern for rising pitchers to gain experience and grow on the job. I fear it is risking the multiplication of bad investments.