I Never Would Have Guessed that our First Post would be about the Orioles

Well, hello out there. If you’re just trolling through, make sure you check out our “About” page. I’m Dauthan, and I’ve blogged before, but never really about baseball. I’m really excited about the possibility of this blog, and thrilled to do it with my brother, Wyatt.

Anyway, on to the point of this post: It seems as though the Orioles have taken a turn for the better in philosophy and player management. For the past 15 or so years, Baltimore pretended as though they were AL East contenders, or at least Wild Card contenders. In reality, they rarely were better than the 3rd best team in their division behind the Red Sox and Yankees; often, they were the fourth best team in the division, behind the Blue Jays, too. Nonetheless, they never seemed to resign themselves to a rebuilding phase, instead handing out big contracts to David Segui, BJ Surhoff, Aubrey Huff, Jay Gibbons, Ramon Hernandez, Javy Lopez…the list could go on. They have had quality players on the positional side with regularity, the problem is that they’ve been paying nice, complementary, middle aged corner players as though they’re stars, and they never seem to have enough pitching.

However, over the past year or so, it seems like the Orioles are figuring out that they have to regroup occasionally if they want to compete in the AL East. Let’s start with the trade of Steve Trachsel to the Cubs for Scott Moore and Rocky Cherry last August. Neither player they got back is going to set the world on fire, but Trachsel has been cooked for some time, and getting anything – not to mention two reasonably useful players – in return is just gravy. Anyone could have made that deal, though; the really impressive moves are coming. A few minor moves that I like quite a bit are just free agent dice rolls, but with little cost: adding guys like Freddy Bynum, Alex Cintron, and Roberto Novoa. Again, none of these guys are All-Stars, but Bynum has positional flexibility and some pop, Cintron is having a rough year, but his career .277/.314/.400 line and average shortstop defense is an adequate stopgap solution at shortstop (at the very least, it’s better than Luis Hernandez). Novoa might never be anything, or he could be an effective middle reliever someday. He throws hard, and it costs the O’s very little to find out what he can be.

What really point the O’s in the right direction are the offseason trades of Erik Bedard and Miguel Tejada. Bedard was moved at peak value, and the O’s got their centerfielder of the present and future, Adam Jones, plus a useful lefty reliever in George Sherrill. The O’s have used Sherrill in an expanded, non-specialist role, for which he’s well suited. Now, it looks as though he might command something shiny from whoever loses out on the Brian Fuentes Sweepstakes at the deadline.
In the Tejada trade, the Orioles got 5 guys who may be part of the next good Orioles team for one guy who probably wouldn’t be. Luke Scott, again, is no All-Star, but if he’s your 5th, 6th, or 7th overall hitter, you can score some runs. They got three pitchers – Matt Albers, Troy Patton, and George Sarfate – who all can be contributors now and for the foreseeable future. Lastly, they got a good-if-not-great third base prospect, Michael Costanzo, who has shown a nice bat at every level on his way up until this year at AAA.

Following that, the O’s knew this year would be one in which they wouldn’t contend. There was a lot of spring training/early season chatter that Brian Roberts might be headed somewhere else – namely, to the Cubs. Holding him looks like a good idea now, as none of the proposed returns – often centering around around Felix Pie – don’t fit the O’s needs. It’s also worth noting that the O’s have drafted well recently.

Have they been perfect? No, they definitely could have moved guys like Ramon Hernandez and Melvin Mora before their production declined.  They might want to shop Daniel Cabrera now, as his peripherals have been declining for 3 years now.  Also worth noting on the positive side of the ledger is adding Jeremy Guthrie.

This all is a bit unexpected to me, the O’s new general manager, Andy MacPhail, oversaw some middling Cubs teams with a couple of exceptions over the past 2 decades, and Peter Angelos can be quite a meddling owner, so the two of them seemed an unlikely pair in my eyes to make the right decisions, but it looks like the O’s are on the right path, even in a division where it seems like everyone has it “figured out.”