DETROIT — Three days before the end of the Baltimore Orioles’ regular season, in that relatively tranquil period between their clinching of the American League East title nine days earlier and the start of the playoffs six days later, Buck Showalter called Matt Wieters, his injured veteran catcher, into the visiting manager’s office at Toronto’s Rogers Centre and told him he had a mission for him, should Wieters choose to accept it.
Once Wieters said yes, the Orioles put their field general on a commercial flight to Detroit, where he spent the final two days of the regular season in the stands at Comerica Park, alongside the Orioles’ two advance scouts, watching the Detroit Tigers, the Orioles’ presumptive first-round playoff opponent.
It was a brilliant, simple, low-risk, low-cost move with the potential to pay off big. Wieters, out for the year following elbow surgery, was serving no real purpose to the Orioles in Toronto. In Detroit, as a third set of eyes — and with the unique insight of a current player — he just might see something that could win a game in the Division Series.
“Yeah, he brought back information,” Showalter said of Wieters’s scouting trip. “He said some things that we put into play… We’re lucky to have him. He doesn’t have any ego. He’s just like, ‘What can I help with?’”
Through the first two games of the ALDS, which the Orioles lead, 2-0, entering Sunday’s Game 3 at Comerica Park, Showalter’s mastery of the X’s and O’s of postseason baseball has been on full display, whether in his aggressive handling of his bullpen in Game 1 or his bucking of conventional matchups in sending right-handed pinch-hitter Delmon Young to the plate to face a right-handed pitcher in the pivotal at-bat of Game 2.
Orioles manager Buck Showalter talks during a news conference Saturday in Detroit in preparation for Sunday’s Game 3 of the ALDS against the Tigers. Baltimore leads the best-of-five series 2-0. (Paul Sancya/Associated Press) But even more impressive, to the people who play and work under him, are the things Showalter does that nobody sees — the constant examination of long-standing systems and methods that could, with a subtle tweak or an ounce of innovation, yield a tangible benefit to the Orioles’ fortunes.
“When you have a payroll disparity like we do in the AL East,” said Brady Anderson, the Orioles’ vice president of baseball operations, “you have to find whatever little ways you can to get an edge. And there’s nobody better than Buck at doing that.”
Sending Wieters to Detroit to scout the Tigers was one example. On the one hand, it was a product of fortuitous circumstances — a cerebral player with future managerial potential, a season-ending injury and a large degree of certainty that the Orioles would be facing the Tigers in the first round.
On the other hand, who but Showalter would have thought to do it? No statistics or official histories exist on such ploys, but at least anecdotally, nobody seems to recall another example of a current star such as Wieters being pressed into duty as a scout.
“Yeah, absolutely,” Orioles catcher Caleb Joseph said Saturday when asked if Wieters’s scouting report had provided any tangible benefit in Games 1 and 2. “Without going into specific detail, he gave us some little things that have helped — nothing groundbreaking. We had scouts there, too. But Matt is able to give us a little more refined idea of certain [hitters’] tendencies [than a full-time scout can], because he’s a catcher and he already knows those hitters so well.”
The Orioles’ season-long manipulation of their roster, a joint effort of Showalter and General Manager Dan Duqette, is a marvel of social, geographical and contractual engineering, involving the shuffling of players — often established ones — between the majors and minors.
Orioles executive vice president Dan Duquette, left, talks with manager Buck Showalter during a workout Saturday in Detroit in preparation for Sunday’s Game 3 of the ALDS against the Tigers. (Paul Sancya/Associated Press) Often, Showalter would call up a reliever simply to avoid throwing one of his top bullpen arms for a third straight game. At the all-star break, he sent Bud Norris and Miguel Gonzalez — who will start Games 3 and 4 of the ALDS here — to the minors in order to stay fresh.
At the end of August, just as minor-league seasons were about to end and major-league rosters were to expand from 25 to 40, he sent Gonzalez and Kevin Gausman, between big-league starts, to the rookie-level Gulf Coast League Orioles, replacing them with position-player reinforcements, in order to exploit a loophole that requires optioned players to stay in the minors for 10 days, unless the minor-league affiliate’s season ends — as the GCL Orioles’ was about to do.
“At first, it’s kind of hard to get used to,” said Gausman, who was optioned to or recalled from the minors 11 times in 2014. “But Buck always explains that it’s not a performance issue — it’s just a way to keep [pitchers] fresh. Sometimes they needed an extra reliever and I’d get sent out.”
Major League Baseball already changed one rule last offseason in order to close a favored Showalter loophole — a complicated transactional rule involving injured players, 40-man roster spots and postseason eligibility — and could do the same with the late-August loophole.
Once this season, Gausman, 23, was sent to Aberdeen — a short-season Class A team in the New York-Penn League, where he had last pitched in 2012 as a 21-year-old fresh out of LSU — because it was the closest minor league affiliate with a home game on the day the Orioles wanted him to pitch.
“I got there, and was like, ‘Well, I never expected to be back in Aberdeen again,’” Gausman said. “But once you’re around Buck for a little while, you realize there’s a method to the madness.” ↓