What' this baseball you speak of?

I think you are right. Send Guthrie home and play for next year. 2010 still is the target and we will need Guthrie to get there.

Bass looked pretty good versus Cleveland. The O's need to take a serious look at their minor league system and determine why their pitchers are so ill prepared for the majors. Randor Beird, Cherry , Liz etc have very poor command .Also the number of injuries , i would think,would raise a red flag with the FO.

Bierd is a rule V guy from Detroit, you can blame the O's for him.

So this will be two years in a row where Guthrie misses significant parts of september while the team crumbles around the hole in the rotation.

No, he is not a #1 starter. Nice guy but he evidently can't handle the workload of a #1 guy.

Jeremy shouldn't pitch again in 2008, as no way do you risk this guy. I did like what I saw from Bass, as maybe just maybe, some young pitcher wants to stay in the majors next year unlike the rest of staff.

I am not Andy or Dave (shocker, I know), but other than JJ, Sarfate, George and Albers, the only guy that I would bring back from this years pen is Lance Cormier, as he went from a great start in the majors to a big slump to being their best BP pitcher during the last month. I am not sold on Randor, Cherry and if Walker has a bad spring training, he is an absolute liability out there and should be cut.

Pete, I applaud you for not shutting down the blog after your brutal Hockey game, as you like Jeremy, are a true gamer.

Vance, Bierd and Cherry and even Guthrie were never in the O's Minor leagues. Both came from other clubs straight to the Major league O's. But you are right there are far too many arm issues with those who have been in the O's system.

According to Leo Mazzone, who was on XM this morning, teams should take their best arms and make them starters. If they have 10 arms start 5 in one league and 5 in another etc. Relievers in the minors don't pitch enough to learn how to pitch and they don't throw enough to have good arm strength. He said pitchers should be throwing more between starts to get the conditioning needed. That throwing is not at 100% but 60-70%. To work on mechanics and arm strength. His record in Atlanta shows it works. He never had time or committment to do what needed to be done here (and that is not a knock on Kranitz or Trembley because I think they will have time).

2010 - Major League Baseball returns to Baltimore

Just looked up some stats on ESPN real quick, and I know why the O's pitching staff is so terrible. Sure, everyone knows they lead the league in walks, but did you know they rank dead last in strikeouts and nearly last in batting average against?

Thats not the half of it. Starters are responsible for just a little over half of the walks. Makes you wonder what the team would look like if Sherrill didn't load the bases every time he tries to get a save. And Walker and Sarfate don't really help anything with that stat either. the bullpen does have one thing going for them, they do have a lower BAA than the starters.

The hitting is improved from last year, and the fielding is the same. But the pitching is a decent amount worse. Keep the position players and fix the pitching staff and I would think the W-L columns are a bit different next year.

Jeff V, come on. You are ripping on the best pitcher on the staff because he's got an arm problem and will miss a few starts in September. I guess since the Orioles have won 23 and lost 40 during the 2nd half of the season, and have last place locked up, you think his absence will have a major impact on where the O's finish in the standings. So you want the Birds to jeopardize his future by forcing him to make 2-3 more starts so the team will finish 25 games under .500 instead of 27. The team "isn't crumbling around his hole in the rotation," in case you haven't noticed, the entire staff has crumbled in September as evidenced by the starters ERA of 7.02 and the relievers ERA of 5.55. You are apparently pretty hard to please, as I don't see you ripping on Olson, Cabrera, Liz or the other yoho's they have been sending out to the mound, instead you rip on the one solid major league quality starter on the staff. Not sure a lot of the real fans in this blog support your position.

Pete... Just curious as to your take on Hernandez's defensive wizardry during last night's game.... as an observation, if he was a car going as slow as he was after that ball, he would've saved at least a barrel of oil... maybe 2.

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Pete's reply: I've written this and talked about it many times. Ramon is a slave to his emotional state on any given day. When things are going bad, he's going to drag.

Bet Dave Trembley never thought he'd show up in the same paragraph with Bogie, though I'm pretty sure he'd like to put the rest of the Orioles rotation on a plane to Lisbon.

Smoooooooooooth.........