Orioles are staring at a rebuild and Dan Duquette is wrong for the job

Caleb Joseph refused to mince words following the Orioles' 2-1 loss to the Oakland Athletics on Sunday, their sixth straight defeat and another shot of gasoline on the dumpster fire that has been Baltimore's season.

"Tough times here," Joseph told Jon Meoli of the Baltimore Sun. "But nobody is going to feel sorry for you. There's blood in the water right now, and there's a bunch of sharks coming after us. We've got to man up, grow up, start playing better. Period. No ands, ifs, or buts about it. We've just got to play better. We're just not good enough right now."

His resilience is admirable. So is his honesty. The last statement didn't need to be qualified, though.

With all due respect, the Orioles, now 8-26 and already 12 1/2 games back of the second AL wild card, aren't merely "not good enough right now." They're bad, and have been for some time, despite making expensive (and woefully misguided) additions to the active roster this winter.

They're not well positioned for the future, either. Stuck in that unenviable spot between contending and rebuilding, the Orioles are a sad vestige of a club that wasn't even that good when it last made the playoffs, in 2016, with a farm system that continues to languish among the league's worst.

In assessing the overall health of the organization, the Orioles very much evoke an aging Charles Bronson in "Death Wish 9."

And, like with most dysfunctional enterprises, it started at the top.

To put it generously, general manager Dan Duquette has always been more incidental than essential to the Orioles' success. When the team finally snapped its 14-year playoff drought in 2012, Baltimore's first season under Duquette, those 93 wins - good enough for an AL wild-card berth - were largely attributable to his predecessor and, well, luck.

Duquette played no part, after all, in acquiring Adam Jones, Matt Wieters, J.J. Hardy, Nick Markakis, Chris Davis, or Manny Machado - the Orioles' six most valuable position players, by WAR, that year. In fairness, the deals he gave to Wei-Yin Chen and Nate McLouth paid immediate dividends, and the trade for Jason Hammel worked out, too, but nobody expected those relatively minor additions to catapult the Orioles from a 69-win campaign in 2011 to a playoff berth the following year.

Fortunately for Duquette, the Orioles dramatically overperformed in 2012, outplaying their expected record (derived from run differential) by a whopping 12 wins. Over the ensuing years, overperformance became something of a pattern for the Orioles, who captured the AL East title in 2014 and snuck into the AL wild-card game in 2016. And, again, while Duquette's fingerprints are more noticeable on those '14 and '16 rosters, many of the Orioles' key contributors during those seasons - Machado, Jones, Davis, Jonathan Schoop, and Zach Britton, for example - were acquired by someone else.

Moreover, excepting the deals he gave Chen and McLouth ahead of 2012, and the fortuitous one-year pillow contract he gave Nelson Cruz following the Biogenenis scandal, Duquette's efforts to improve his active roster by spending Peter Angelos' money have largely fallen flat. His most egregious gaffe continues to haunt him from the cleanup spot every night: Chris Davis' seven-year, $161-million deal signed after the 2014 campaign, despite the slugger's age and disquieting contact issues.

But he's also responsible for a handful of other ill-advised deals, notably the ones for Ubaldo Jimenez (4 years/$50M), Mark Trumbo (3 years/$37.5M), and, this past winter, Alex Cobb (4 years/$57M) and Andrew Cashner (2 years/$16M).

Frankly, the majority of his multi-year commitments haven't worked out.

Orioles' multi-year signings/extensions since 2012

(Note: For Trumbo, Davis, and O'Day, who remain under contract through 2018 and beyond, the $/WAR calculation was derived from WAR accrued from 2016-17 and monies earned during only those seasons.)

*Traded to Mariners ahead on Jan. 6, 2017
**Traded to Phillies on July 28, 2017
***Traded to Dodgers on April 9, 2015

Duquette's cumulative yield from the amateur draft has been equally disappointing. Since he took over as general manager, the Orioles have graduated just one first-round selection (Kevin Gausman) to the big leagues, and only one (Hunter Harvey) has since emerged as a top 50 MLB prospect. Consequently, their farm system remains weak - ESPN's Keith Law ranked it as the game's 23rd-best in January - and the paucity of impact talent coming up through the minors has, in turn, put more pressure on Duquette to add to his roster via free agency and trades.

Orioles' first-round picks under Duquette

(Note: No first-round picks from the 2017 draft have made it to the big leagues yet, so last year's selection wasn't included.)

The Orioles' inability to cultivate a critical mass of big-league-calibre prospects over the years has been further compounded by Angelos' perplexing policy of not spending money on international amateurs. Last year, for instance, barely four weeks after the international signing period opened, Duquette had given away bonus pool money in six different deals.

"We've been utilizing the international slot money to help us acquire some pitching to help our team," Duquette explained to Meoli in August. "A lot of the other clubs will invest it in pitching to help us in the future or players to help us in the future. We use it to try to strengthen our pitching staff now while we have a window of opportunity with the position players we have here. That's just utilizing a trade resource to impact your team now rather than three, four, five years down the road."

In this particular regard, Duquette is blameless. But it's evident the Orioles enjoyed as much success as they did in recent years in spite of Duquette, though his agency may have been infringed upon by Angelos, a notoriously hands-on owner, in other ways, too.

A regime change is overdue, because it's time to trade everybody with a modicum of value. Duquette, for his part, will continue pretending until Memorial Day that liquidation isn't a foregone conclusion.

"We’re still evaluating our club for 2018," Duquette told Eduardo A. Encina of The Baltimore Sun last week. “Basically, we still need to figure out where we’re going to be, so I think we need a little bit more time to do that."

It's clear where the Orioles need to go, though, and it's just as clear that Duquette - whose contract expires at season's end - isn't the man to get them there. Thanks to his ineffectual dealing and questionable decision-making in recent years, a complete rebuild is in order, and it's now incumbent upon Angelos to install a new general manager who can get fair value for the club's expiring assets (e.g. Machado, Jones*, Britton, Brad Brach), and soon-to-be expiring assets (e.g. Schoop, Gausman, Darren O'Day), and usher the team into a new development stage. (A new baseball operations head would be remiss to not also consider moving Dylan Bundy, who remains under control through 2021.)

*Has 10-and-5 no-trade rights

Will Angelos actually allow Duquette's hypothetical replacement to do what needs to be done? There are reasons for optimism, according to Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic, who reported last month that the power dynamics are shifting in the ownership suite, with the 88-year-old's two sons taking on a more active role in running the team. That's encouraging. Loosening the elder Angelos' grip on the club is key to the Orioles' future. But so is moving on from Duquette, who played a big part in digging them into this hole.