If this is late November, then the Orioles are still in the hunt for some exciting free agents. Time will probably tell a different story, but the star du jour who supposedly is within reach is pitcher A.J. Burnett.
Burnett is a good pitcher with the right home address. He lives in Monkton and is believed to want to play as close to home as possible. You don't need a Garmin to determine which major league team is the shortest commute, but it still might require a crystal ball to figure out whether that will work to any tangible advantage for the Orioles.
I'm guessing it will if they really are committed to signing him, but that just raises another question with no clear answer. Orioles president Andy MacPhail and agent Darek Braunecker talked Friday, and Braunecker said afterward that the Orioles remain one of roughly a half-dozen teams on the short list to sign Burnett, but that would require a dramatic shift in organizational philosophy for the Orioles.
MacPhail has never hidden his aversion to long-term contracts for free-agent pitchers. His original rebuilding plan called for a strong emphasis on developing and amassing good young arms while saving the free-agent budget for that moment a couple of key position players might complete the picture. Pitchers are fragile things, and Burnett has had his injury issues and - maybe most important - the Orioles have little margin for error at this point in their star-crossed recent history.
So, when there are unconfirmed reports that the New York Yankees are ready to offer Burnett a five-year deal worth $80 million, you have to wonder just how the Orioles might fit into this bidding war.
Remember, they have never given a free-agent pitcher more than a three-year contract, and it appears that the minimum number of years required to sign Burnett will be four. The rumored five-year proposal from the Yankees doesn't necessarily mean every other serious bidder will have to follow suit, but it seems unlikely Burnett would settle for three years (and maybe $30 million less in gross value) to be a couple of hundred miles closer to home.
Of course, nobody outside that house knows for sure, though there have been apocryphal tales aplenty of his telling Orioles players how much he would like to pitch in Baltimore. Maybe he really, really wants to play here and would make a huge financial sacrifice to do so, or maybe MacPhail watched the Orioles' young pitching staff collapse at the end of the 2008 season and lost his religion. But if I had to assign odds to either of those possibilities, they would be pretty long.
