I haven't followed the Orioles very closely since High School, when I read the newspaper every morning (and the Orioles were actually pretty good). I've often questioned whether that makes me a fair weather fan. With baseball, more than football or basketball, I think it's very hard to get excited about your team in a season that they have little to no chance of making the playoffs. As we saw with the Jets last year, any team in the NFL can make a run at the playoffs, no matter what the preseason predictions say. And if your team starts out really bad, at least you can follow the games with interest to see where they'll end up in the draft order.
With baseball, by the All Star Break, half of the league is looking at an 80 game death march through the rest of the summer. How can a casual fan get excited for that? Is everyone who stops checking the box score every morning after their team gets more than 15 games out of the wildcard a fair weather fan? I sure hope not.
No one seems very optimistic about the Orioles' chances this year (or in the foreseeable future), but I'm still holding out hope that our young starting pitching (especially Bedard and Cabrerra) is going to develop and provide the foundation for a run of successful years. Maybe this year I'll still be checking the scores in September.
April 2, 2007
Opening Day
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I honestly believe that despite the NL's holding even in World Series, if the O's played in the NL, they could easily be a 90-win team simply because there are far more totally crappy teams in the NL who they would get 6 games per year against than they do against AL teams. In the AL, you've got the D-Rays, the Royals, and generally one team from the AL West puts up a stinker year. In the NL, you've got the Nats, one team from the NL West, the Brewers, the Pirates, and the Reds.
So I think the O's will come in fourth again. Maybe, MAYBE third. And that's if their pitching comes through. They are simply doomed by the division they play in. The Sox can spend ridiculous amounts of money on Dice-K (yes Sox posers, your team is doing exactly what your hated Yankees did in the late 90s). The Yankees can go out and buy whomever they want. It's pretty much impossible to even think playoffs in a scenario such as that.
For as much crap as I like to give Peter Angelos, I think the Orioles front office this offseason made generally smart moves to put the O's in the best position they could be in without wildly overspending for players who will make a marginal degree of difference.
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