Hello, friends.
Welcome to December. The proliferation of Christmas decorations before it was even Thanksgiving might have made you think it was already the last month of the year, but no. We’ve arrived at the end of the 2024 calendar only now. There are now three months and 26 days remaining until Orioles Opening Day 2025. In another month from now, I’ll just be able to say Orioles Opening Day, since it will be 2025.
We’re still a week away from the winter meetings, which often, though not always, result in some big news. Last year’s biggest winter meetings news was the Orioles signing Craig Kimbrel, which wasn’t all that big of news and wouldn’t have been big even if the Kimbrel signing had ended up working out better for the Orioles. We’ll see if that changes this year, with the possibility of trades or free agent signings coming up. Or things could happen this week before we even get to the meetings. There’s no reason that they can’t.
Over the last few days, some assorted baseball media types – some more informed than others – have been thinking about the Orioles closer position, as you’ll see below. Is it going to be so easy as to have Félix Bautista dropped right back into his role from 2023? That would be nice! Yet even if that occurs smoothly, there’s probably going to be time where he’ll need some rest, either after pitching two straight days or pitching a number of games in a week, and in that case it seems like the O’s could use some kind of addition from the outside.
Will that end up being the first thing that Mike Elias addresses this offseason? Considering it might be easier to plug in someone on a one-year contract in that role, it could turn out to be the simplest one to tackle. A year ago, the O’s struck fairly quickly in getting Kimbrel and then waited around until a couple of weeks before spring training to complete the trade for Corbin Burnes.
With only a couple of exceptions, the market that there was when the World Series ended is the same market that exists now. Yeah, tough luck for anyone who wanted Yusei Kikuchi from the mid-tier, and for anyone who had convinced themselves that the Orioles could or would sign off the top tier with Blake Snell.
