The question of player development
In the minor leagues, is development more important than learning how to win as a team?
My research project (well, one of them) over the first few weeks of the offseason is seeing if I can establish a correlation between winning games at the minor league level and and the bigs.
I know that MLB teams are graded at the minor league level by how many top prospects they have, but those players don’t always turn out to be superstars. I remember as a young man how Gary Sheffield was supposed to be the next superstar; indeed he had a really good and long career but was overshadowed by contempories like Barry Bonds. Perhaps in two decades we’ll be saying similar things about Adley Rutschman or Gunnar Henderson.
But the question I have is whether winning can become an established culture. For example, the Orioles have had the top-ranked minor league system for a couple years now but in 2022 it was the Tampa Bay Rays (ranked #8 at the time) whose minor league teams found success that season, winning championships up and down the chain. (Their affiliates won the AAA International League, lost in the semifinals of the AA Southern League, won the High-A South Atlantic League while beating the Aberdeen Ironbirds in the finals, swept through the playoffs in the Class A Carolina League, and lost in the finals of the Rookie Florida Complex League. Their only affiliate to miss the playoffs was their lone entry in the Dominican Summer League.) Is that success keeping the parent club in the MLB playoff race as an intangible?
It’s a known fact that the team deemed to have the #1 minor league system will generally reach some level of the playoffs in the following seasons. The Orioles are following that script this year after breaking through with an amazing jump from 52-110 in 2021 to 83-79 last season, staying in the playoff hunt until the final weekend. This season they made it to 83 wins before August was over and, barring an utterly historic collapse, will make the postseason after a seven-year drought. Yet as I write this with a couple weeks remaining in the minor league season, only the AAA Norfolk Tides - a team loaded with some of baseball’s hottest prospects - is a shoo-in for the playoffs. One of their two Dominican Summer League teams was edged out of a playoff spot in the final days of the season; meanwhile AA Bowie is in a playoff chase in the last two weeks of the Eastern League season.
But Advanced-A Aberdeen and our Delmarva Shorebirds are simply playing out the string, as did the Florida Complex League team that was an also-ran. Unless the DSL players are really top-notch, it appears the fate of the 2024 Orioles system may be one where it loses its grip on the coveted #1 slot in the organizational rankings - the talent in the system is predominantly at its upper levels and how long do you stay a prospect when you’re older than the competition but blocked by big leaguers? Will that translate to a short-lived playoff window for the Orioles?
The Orioles have great prospects, but seldom have the pieces come together for a league title. Before this season, the last time Norfolk reached the playoffs was 2015, which, by the way, was also the season Bowie won its lone Eastern League championship. (The Baysox were last in the playoffs in 2021, losing in the LCS, although they still have hopes for 2023. They have made the playoffs in the last four odd-numbered years as the most successful current Oriole affiliate.) When they were an Oriole affiliate before the minor league wipeout of 2020, the Frederick Keys won four league titles in 22 seasons as an Orioles farm team, with the last being in 2011. But they hadn’t made a playoff appearance in the old-school Carolina League - where four of the loop’s eight teams made the postseason each year - since 2017.
In the lower levels, it’s even worse. Aberdeen has made the playoffs just twice in their two-decade-plus history without a league title to show for it, and Delmarva went fourteen years between playoff appearances (2005 to 2019), with only two league titles and none since the 2000 season.
So my contention is that the successful teams learn how to win at the minor-league level and that translates into victories in the bigs. I will have to see how that bears out.
Next week, as the Shorebirds season concludes Sunday, I’ll have the season in review.