Matt P wrote:Yeah, and Minor signed for around the same as Hobgood. A lot of people think it was a matter of the O's being cheap but in reality they just had no idea what they were doing (as usual).
This isn't a criticism, but hindsight is 20/20. I did some research and found that Leake and Minor we're two pitchers asking for big bonuses and/or ML contracts. It ended up that their bonuses fell in line with Hobgood's but to select either of those two guys would have created uncertainty in the limited draft budget the Orioles had that year.
Yes, the team spent about 8.5M on bonuses in 2009 but, considering the state of their farm system at the time, you have to wonder why it wasn't
at least 50% more. If they would have budgeted at the 12M mark then the demands of Leake, Minor, or someone else wouldn't have mattered. Was this the GM (MacPhail) not properly appreciating how bad a condition the farm system was in or Angelos refusing to accept that the entire organization needed a complete rebuild from the bottom up? Fast forward to the eve of 2012 and we
still have good reason to ask this same question.