If you’ll forgive me for quoting a meme, “This sucks, man.”
Jackson Holliday, the #1 prospect in the Orioles system and in all of Major League Baseball, will not be starting the season with the big league team after all. The Orioles announced on Friday afternoon along with a number of other roster cuts that Holliday has been reassigned to minor league camp, meaning that he won’t be on the Opening Day roster.
Other cuts that were made on Friday along with Holliday include: Heston Kjerstad and Kyle Stowers being optioned to the minors, and all of the following non-roster players being reassigned to minor league camp: David Bañuelos, Coby Mayo, Connor Norby, and Albert Suárez.
These moves leave 38 players still in camp, with another 12 cuts to be made, but these are really the big ones that seem like they firm up what’s going to happen with the starting infield and with the bench. Kjerstad and Stowers being optioned but not Cowser is a strong clue there, and as for the infield… they’re not actually going to put Kolten Wong on the roster while leaving Holliday in the minors, are they? They’re going to roll out Ramón Urías in the starting lineup instead of Holliday?
I hope they don’t do that to us, nothing against Wong or Urías as people. Or Tyler Nevin, who I also hope is not going to be on the team with Holliday in the minors, because that would be unbearable unless Nevin plays well enough to make it bearable, which he probably won’t because he probably isn’t capable of that.
This is a bummer of a news development. The idea that Holliday is not one of the best players to have on the Orioles from square one is immediately disproven by any scouting report of him, by looking at his strong performance in the minors last year and in spring training, and simply by using one’s own eye test on those limited times the team’s spring training games have been televised.
It’s simply not credible. To find a reason that makes any kind of sense for this decision requires digging around in the suitcase of roster manipulation skulduggery, with the team apparently employing the tried-and-true “send him down to the minors claiming he needs to work on his defense a little bit” rationale that will allow the Orioles to loophole their way into an effective seventh year of team control of Holliday before he eventually becomes a free agent.
That’s putting the 2030 Orioles ahead of fielding the best possible team here in 2024, where the team is following up on a 101-win season with what it already knows is a great roster that performed well last year and they added Corbin Burnes to that mix too.
This kind of manipulation was targeted in baseball’s currently-active Collective Bargaining Agreement, with teams being given carrots to incentivize their putting the best players on the roster rather than engaging in these service time games. This is the carrot that paid off for the Orioles last year, when Gunnar Henderson won the Rookie of the Year award, because that has netted the O’s a bonus draft pick at the end of the first round this year.
That same carrot should have been there to ensure Holliday would make the Opening Day roster this season, but the Orioles have ignored the carrot. The carrot would have had the potential to pay off beyond this season as well, because a player qualifying for bonus draft pick compensation could also pay off for his team with a high MVP finish in any of his first three (that is, pre-arbitration) seasons. If Holliday is at all able to live up to the hype in his early career, he could have easily been playing into that conversation.
What sucks further for everyone who’s excited to see Holliday is that now that the Orioles have determined to send him to the minors, the incentives swing towards keeping him in the minors for a while – maybe as much as two months, rather than the bare minimum of three weeks or so to get the seventh year.
That’s because the other end of the new CBA provision is that a player who finishes as runner-up in the ROY voting is credited with a full year of service time regardless. The Orioles experienced this also, two years ago, when Adley Rutschman – whose debut was only delayed by injury – came in second place in the ROY voting. They might now have to think about how to make sure Holliday doesn’t get enough MLB playing time to potentially finish as the runner-up.
This sucks. It is the kind of thing that if the Orioles come up a game or two short of any postseason spot after the regular season, it will be hard not to wonder whether it could have been better if they’d simply made the right now choice about Holliday instead of putting some vague possible future benefit at the forefront.
Maybe the Orioles will be good enough to overcome the obstacle. They were last year, much to everyone’s surprise. But this kind of naked cynicism on display shouldn’t leave anyone feeling good about the kinds of decisions that might be made by the Mike Elias front office in the near future.