I'm with you on always being at least "bad" and never full-blown horrendous, but this season may actually work against that argument since even a full-blown horrendous roster managed to outperform expectations by so much to be fun.
I wanted to come back to this comment. I guess I don't understand the perspective on what the 'works against' part is. Someone like 2035 said that in 2019 there's "nothing we can do" to compete. The goal of that is to embrace non-competitive behavior. The narrative from him (and others) is that you can't compete in a season. ...but this season has nothing to do with the results of 3-years of a non-competitive roster and yet they still pulled a rabbit out of their collective hat.
There's lots of ML examples of unexpected teams competing. This seasons Orioles is maybe the most extreme.
While there's some later-comers to this party, only you you and MikeB have argued for having a better than terrible team over these years, not to compete, but to watch better Baseball. Someone like 2035 has argued there's "no difference between a 50-win team and a 70-win team" ....but when that 60-something win team plays crazy well, they and win 83 games, we see the hypocrisy in people's positions because there were plenty of people excited for this fringe result.
My argument is you always can do the most you can and try to compete. That's not selling off everything for fringe opportunity (I get accused of)...I'm just saying you can always build a 70-75 win team (never the goal long term, only under short term challenges) without sacrificing a better, longer-term plan (no sacrifice of WIN LATER) and create more WIN NOW opportunity.
...but just because you put some effort into winning doesn't mean you get to win. It's competition so everyone shows up to compete and if you do poorly, you are going to lose and there's lots of examples this year of teams that wanted to compete (ie make the playoffs) but are in the draft lottery, instead.
I have stood alone on the 'any team can compete' island. That doesn't mean every team will compete and it doesn't mean you don't want to improve the baseline Talent to compete, but this seasons Orioles team proved that any team can compete...so my question to 2035 is whether he has changed his opinion and believes that to be true now.
I'd certainly like to have a roster that needs less outrageousness in order to reach meaningful goals.
Now it'll be about if they are doing enough to really be considered as trying to win.
I wanted to address this because we've had this discussion in other threads. I don't want the bolded above to be mis-construed with my opinion elsewhere.
I believe in the Performance FormulaTM. Winning will be about more than Talent but many teams will get to the other components of Winning differently. I would have a different approach if I was the Mets, Dodgers, Cardinals, Reds or Rays.
I am not convinced (don't believe) that bribing guys to come to Baltimore is going to improve the T portion of the assessment enough to challenge other components of it. You need to know who you want to be so in EVERY season, I want guys that want to be here and pull the rope in the same direction. You want big guys on the rope, but it's most important that everyone on the rope is committed to pulling that rope.
Producing that roster (for me) isn't about total spending or AAV of specific guys you can add or anything else. I'm all for adding more/better Talent, but for me, that should be more targeted than throwing cash at a recency biased WAR result. Not saying it can't work, but it's not how I would focus on maximizing my WIN NOW approach.