Shut down Mickolio!
Shutdown Ray!
Shutdown Trembley!

Ahh Christmas,

I can't recall thinking about the O's, Baseball, or anything related when it's it's Christmas.

I can't wait for that moment to arrive this year, it's been painful.

Sorry to skip over the subject of your post, Pete, but I want to comment on what I think is really bugging readers on the blog.

See, I'm tired of the losing seasons, too. But if there's anything more disturbing to me that 12 straight O's losers, it's the fact that the Tampa Bay Rays won't make the playoffs this year.

What that says to me as an O's fan is that you can spend a lot of time and immeasurable baseball smarts and brainpower building a winner on a shoestring. And if your team is in the AL East, and it doesn't play home games in Boston or NYC, you'll get one shot at bringing home a title before you're racing back to the bottom.

So what if we contend in 2011? Would that really satisfy anyone if we're back in 3rd/4th/5th place again from 2012 to 2023?

And that tells me that this game is fundamentally flawed, something that should be painfully obvious to all of us who have no hope of seeing six figures in our annual income box and are simply glad right now to have a job.

No one who plays a kids' game for a living should make $10 million a year, never mind $25 million. I don't care how they do it, but there's no long-term hope for Baltimore fans until MLB takes a look at the NFL and what that league has done to achieve parity, and thinks hard about its comparative viability.

Maybe that sets me far apart from other disgruntled fans who want the O's to spend their way back to contention (now!), but that game's a lot less interesting to me than the one played when everyone's starting from the same square on the board.

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Pete's reply: Got no problem with what you're saying, except you and I both know that baseball will never have a salary cap.

I can't recall thinking about the O's, Baseball, or anything related when it's Christmas.

I can't wait for that moment to arrive, it's been a painful year.

Wish I could shutdown before the year was over.

Andy Mitchell gave up 1 hit in 5 innings for the Tides and is 11-5. I don't get it. How come he wasn't called up? If he's not a part of "THE PLAN" then why are we stringing him along? The guy has been in minors for years!

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Pete's reply: Well, not every player in any organization is ticketed for greatness. Lots of guys are just minor league players.

Pete regardless of what people think about the orioles or for that matter any subject i don't think you should make statements that imply what i am made of. I think your last reply to me crossed the line just a little.But then again what do i know about anything pete??

Hey Pete. This sure seems to be a recurring problem with this team. By the time Sept, rolls around everyone in the pen is beat up and hurting. That was why I was less excited about Guthrie's start the other night. He did give up only two runs against the Yankees in 6 innings which is quite hopeful, but he also walked a ton of batters and only lasted 6 innings, which has been true of many of our young arms this year.
Our starters have not been lasting long enough in games, which is not exactly a secret. What I want to know is if this should be considered the norm for this team and if they should manage their roster with that in mind. In other words if you start the season just assuming that your BP is going to get a million innings of work, then start using your minor leagues as a R&R stop for relievers so you can effectively carry more guys, and give arms a rest in the middle of the season.
What do you think, am I being too simplistic about this?
As for now, I agree with shutting all of them down. The season is a waste now. It's all auditions for next season, so lets stop pretending. No sense in getting anyone hurt now.

The pitching situation on the club will continue to devolve for the rest of the year as overused relievers wear out and young starters are shut down.

I continue to believe that Andy Macphail's overall plan is the best approach to building a winning organization. But as in any other business, all 5 year plans require some adjustment as time goes on.

Given the fact that the Orioles have a 67 million dollar payroll, which is the 22nd lowest out of 30 teams, what is to prevent them from spending some real money in the offseason for a big bat or two, and a proven MLB starter?

Why not give the rebuilding plan a boost and try to win next year?

Angelos has the money. There is no reason for the Orioles to plan to lose again next year.

Cant wait for Rhadames Liz to come back!!! #1 draft pick here we come!

RE: John in South Bend

MLB is flawed but an individual game is fine. It's really nuts to care about winning the world series or a league championship. The organization of MLB skews the playing field in the direction of those teams with the big bucks and big fan bases. Some don't think it matters and cite the various teams who have won the series over the years. As John in South Bend emphasizes, the variety of winners doesn't imply a level playing field. The richest teams are competitive almost every year. Teams with fewer resources occasionally hit the jackpot when they make a series of very smart and very lucky baseball personnel decisions.

Individual games are still fun to watch when the two teams are reasonably close in talent. The inherent luck of baseball gives both teams a good chance to win. Even a bad team wins 40% of its games. If the O's are managed well, as Mr. MacPhail is doing now, then I expect individual games to be interesting for a long period of time. But I refuse to be a MLB sucker and follow the standings closely. I'll continue to enjoy the game for what it is.

The NFL can't adopt a similar strategy. There is far less luck in football. The teams with the most resources would win 90% of the games and their poor cousins only 10%. Baltimore's Loyola would beat Notre Dame about once every 20 years. You never see such disparities in baseball.

I'm not saying money is the only thing that matters in baseball. Poor management can cancel out the natural advantages of a rich franchise.

Any Pollyanna who believes that money is a small factor should talk to their employer. The employer needs to know that he or she shouldn't be wasting money on high salaries and great benefits to attract the best workers. According to the Pollyannas, slashing salaries in half will not have a discernible effect on productivity.

I think since the O's are packing it in and shutting the team down they should let fans come in and play the games. It might pack bigger crowds to see something like that and we would secure the #1 pick in the draft. Also who knows maybe some of the fans could be better in the pen than the current orioles bullpen!

I'm shutting down on September 13th.............

Pete - this is the first year I've caught your blog. I know you dabble in Ravens news but do you cover the other sports as well on the blog after the O's are mathematically eliminated? (ie college football, Terps basketball, Women's Beach Volleyball etc.)

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Pete's reply: I think dabble is the right word. I'll do more Ravens and some Terps.

The subject is the O's bullpen? Seriously?

Their bullpen has been awful for so long, it actually has become a laughable subject...

Here it comes...... All the accomplishments we've seen from Pen dudes here and there. Please save it!

Starters/Bullpen.....doesn't matter! What matters is L after L after L after L after L after L after L, etc, etc.......

We're in year 2 of AndyMac's 11 year Cub plan folks. You should research old clippings from his early rebuilding years in Chicago. Different era, with the same results.......

Just dig in for the long, long haul and be happy for the MASN upgrades. You get to see Tex do his thing in HD!

The unbalanced schedule has to go (so does the interleague play gimmick, but that's a separate issue.) Only the O's, Rays, and Jays have to play the Yankees and Red Sox 18 times each. Bringing back the balanced, especially with the wild card, would make the game more fair.

Wayne,

How long did it take in Minnesota again?

You should stick to the print copy of the Sun along with your Chicago paper clippings. Although I hear they may be sold out today...

John in South Bend really beat me to the punch. That's been my precise question as I try look ahead. Do we need to go thru a 3-4-5 year "rebuilding plan" - finishing 30-40 games under .500 each year - in order to create a window of opportunity that lasts only 2-3 years? It's one thing to be a chronic loser because you haven't developed nor executed a good plan (like the pre-MacPhail Orioles of this decade), but looking at Milwaukee (rebuilding under Doug Melvin from 2002 til 2007 - all for just one wild card birth) and Tampa Bay, I wonder what our reward will be? For me, it should at least be finishing well over .500 (with at least one pennant) for at least the same number of years it took to rebuild.

Maybe Baltimore's market, fan base, ballpark and TV situation make the O's a notch or two better off than the Brewers or Rays. It better be, else I'm not sure what the point is for the O's staying in business!

I don't know if I agree with the "shutdown" theory or not. I know that this pitch count mania started after Billy Martin blew out a bunch of good young arms on his early 80's stint with the A's.
I do like the idea of developing pitchers and buying bats. I just hope those bats are not Drungo Hazewood and Dallas Williams.
I am still up in the air about Trembley. I want to root for him, but still find alot of his moves iffy. I still think at some point you have to stop using youth as an excuse and start to develop that proverbial culture of winning.
Anyway, Pete, Thanks for a great blog.

When we buy some talented ballplayers and if we ever get major league pitchers to supplement the handful of major league ball players we have we have now and...we get a real manager, I'll think about buying a season plan again. 9 years of spending money to watch 2nd rate baseball is enough. 25 games below 500 and being the first team in the majors to be mathematically eliminated from the playoffs is more than enough.

Same old story, tired arms at the end of the year and while I suppose it's better to be on the safe side with the young phenoms, the fact is we will undoubtably have another brutal Sept.
At what point is this no longer acceptable? Teams are fighting for playoff spots so is it fair for us to be be basically fielding a AAA team for over a month? What about the teams that don't have the luxury of O's games in their Sept. schedule?
Whose going to start in place of Tillman/Matusz? Bass, Liz, Hendrickson.sic Andino? Are we going to have 20 pitchers on our roster or do we just burn out the ones that don't figure to be around next year? Given the fact that we will be lucky to win 10 more games with a decimated lineup, why not sit out Mora/Wiggy and co. and let some young position players get some experience too?
I know I posed a lot of questions but I am getting tired of the end-of-the year meltdown that seems to start earlier and earlier.

John at South Bend,

Amen! Or in other words, if your going to own a baseball team and you want a $40-$60M payroll go to the Central and stay out of the East or West! This is a tale of haves and the have nots!

There has been a lot of great work done by AM, but now the burden is on PA to get out his pocketbook, our payroll is less than 1/2 the Rays and they are 4th in payroll in our division. If PA can't bring himself to put up the $$$$$ he needs to sell and go buy the Pirates or the Royals they"re fans seems to accept this.

The real sad part is the local media. They need to be brutal about the ownership and the management of this team and MAYBE the fans will revolt! But as long as everything is sugar coated and made excuses for them, people will continue to just whine!

"Given the fact that the Orioles have a 67 million dollar payroll, which is the 22nd lowest out of 30 teams, what is to prevent them from spending some real money in the offseason for a big bat or two, and a proven MLB starter?"

The young players that they have are going to start hitting arbitration and free agency eventually. We'll need to be prepared for that unless you want to see all of them in Red Sox and Yankee uniforms.

Without knowing how much Angelos is willing to spend, I'd guess that they can afford two good/great free agents in the next four to five years.

At that point, the young birds will hit free agency and they'll have to reassess the situation. They won't be able to keep all of them, that's for certain.

That's why I don't think they sign anyone this year when there aren't many good FAs... they simply can't afford to guess wrong.

I emphatically agree with those woh argue for a balanced schedule or some such. If baseball is unwilling to have a salary cap, it must pursue some other means of reaching something close to parity. We should not support having our franchise function as the Washington Generals to the New York/Boston Globetrotters. A balanced schedule would help, but it would be even better to rotate teams in and out of divisions periodically. If Baltimore can play in the Central Division in the AFC, it can do likewise in baseball. We can't keep up with NY/Boston money, but if we played a different division and then met Boston or NY in post-season, we might best them in an occasional short series. Or let Boston and New York rotate divisions. Whatever. The current situation is simply nuts.

Some posters have pointed out that although a long term rebuilding may yield an occasional pennant, many turn back into pumpkins shortly thereafter as these teams tend to salary dump for economic purposes and start over with the rebuilding process. Their theory is that to stay in the mix competively over time, a team must spend money.

To test that theory I looked at the current winning percentages of teams grouped by payroll amount. Here is what I found:

The teams with the top ten payrolls in MLB currently have a combined winning percentage of .543

The teams ranked 11 to 20 in payroll have a current combined winning percentage of .501

The teams ranked 21 to 30 in total payroll have a combined winning percentageof .412

Of course there are some low payroll teams having good years, such as the Rockies{ #20 .553 } and the Rangers{ #21 .561 } There are also some teams in the top payroll brackets having bad years{ White sox #5 .481} {Mets #3 .447}

It appears that the posters that assert that money talks and bull**** walks may have a point.

"Given the fact that the Orioles have a 67 million dollar payroll, which is the 22nd lowest out of 30 teams, what is to prevent them from spending some real money in the offseason for a big bat or two, and a proven MLB starter?"

Actually the $67 million number is high. That includes Huff's/sherrill's contract this year plus Mora I think. The O's are only on the hook for somewhere in the mid $40 million range somewhere for next season. They definately have a lot of money to spend should they choose.

Their payroll for active roster players is NO where NEAR $67 M. Not even close! Yeah their eating some big mistakes but PA needs to spend some cash!

I'd just like to know when the few pitchers we have are getting shut down. I've read "perhaps 2 more starts". Well, I was planning on making a 4 hour trek into the Charm City to root the O's on past the Red Sox in mid Sept. but, if all we're doing is throwing AA pitchers at them then I'll keep my money. Why the hell spend a weekend staying at a 300 / night hotel in the harbor, the tickets, food-beverages etc. etc. if we're rolling out an inferrior product? I want the road trip & the fun but this seems like a waste to me right now. I mean we roll out an inferrior product when we're at full strength!
Ray & Albers both need to sit with the others & get their arms seriously checked out or we'll be reading about Ray in one of those, "man he ONCE had an arm" stories.
By the way...you are right on the money Pete...not sure what Andy is planning on BUT, if he dumps Trembley after pulling the plug on the few bright spots on the mound, the season ending injury to our most consistent pitcher in Bergey & trades of Huff & Sherill, then this will turn into one pretty cheesy setup & McPhail will certainly lose credibility. Hope it doesn't end like that...for both their sakes.

What the heck is the deal with all the multiple posts today? I really had no intention of posting so many times, and usually don't have this problem.

When Tony LaRussa was the Athletics' manager in the 1980's-early 1990's, he found success by bloating his pitching staff to 12-13 men, many of which were one-inning relief artists, which at the time were plentiful (PLUS, he had a marvelous starting nine so he didn't need a bench). This has become the model for major league teams since then, which has created a league filled with teams with no bench, and an (artificial) shortage of pitchers, since every team is looking for those suddenly-scarce (and totally undependable) one inning relievers that clutter the rosters and move from team to team.

One day there will be a manager with balls who will throw this stale paradigm away and go north with nine pitchers who are capable of throwing seven innings (failed starters, 4-A guys who are now useless components of every team, as they don't fit into the current paradigm). I am convinced that as these guys are now a glut (and this was the structure of EVERY pitching staff from the 1930's up to the 1960's), a manager can buck the current straitjacket and sneak his way to success in this manner (bolstered by a suddenly maneuverable bench). What used to be a one-inning save situation which seems to kill more careers (Jose Mesa, Brad Lidge, Jorge Julio, dozens of others) than it makes will now be a third inning of work for a 'quasi-starter', which is when he is strongest. Committing to this would require a certain amount of chutzpah, something I'm not sure Dave Trembley will ever try. But somebody will...

Pete--When Chris Ray was pretty good (prior to arm problems) in his first two seasons, he got lit up regularly by the Yankees.

I thought he threw one amazingly good pitch with screwball movement to get Posada out on strikes last night. But the home runs? Pitches slung up there, smack dab over the middle of the plate.

Lets see, our young starters are pretty inefficient with pitch count so most won't make it past 5 innings, especially with tired arms so we need 4 innings of relief per game. Since the relievers are also tired and, lately, somewhat ineffective, we probably need at least 4-5 relievers to get the last 12 outs (although if we are on the road and most likely losing it is only 9 outs).

We wouldn't want the relievers pitching 2 days in a row, so we need at least 10 relievers. Also with a 6 man rotation that means 16 pitchers, lucky it is expanded roster time.

Seriously the best solution. although I guess not practical, is to place the starters in the bullpen for a year to extend their innings slowly. They can spot start occasionally. Of course the Orioles can't do that since they have close to zero veterans capable of starting. I guess with arbitration and $$$ teams can no longer do this, or can they?

Does the Sun give you time off for tired fingers from typing too much?

Looks like another shutdown... RIP Adam Jones

02SEP2009

Brian Roberts 2B
Cesar Izturis SS
Nolan Reimold LF
Nick Markakis RF
Melvin Mora 3B
Matt Wieters C
Luke Scott DH
Ty Wigginton 1B
Felix Pie CF

LOL! Why is Izzy in the 2 hole?!?!?! I guess Pie should have done more last night 1 homer just aint enough :)

Anonymous~

He's hit in the 2-spot quite a few times this season. His OPS is 20 point higher there than in the 9 hole. Pie does much much better there than in the 9 hole, but he's also horrible against lefties (.403 OPS). Izturis will be much better today. But Pie's hot, that's why they've kept him in the lineup. And who knows, he might get some big hits and turn it over to the top of then lineup.

christian

would have helped having Pie at # 2 so far this game

Fire Schmuck! He has already given up on the Os ...

Why does RAY even bother pitching to the Yankees ? Even the most ignorant observer can see that his ERA is about 120 against them. Wankees must lick their chops when they see him warming up in the bullpen for Home Run Derby Practice.

It is going to be such a long September.

Anonymous~

In hindsight, it would've helped having Pie at the 2 hole, especially with Reimold's performance. However, besides Reimold, our top 5 batters didn't get on base once. Had they been a little more productive, as should be expected, Pie could've scored a couple runs. I was just going by the numbers, which is probably why Trembley put Pie where he did. He had to play him though with as hot as he's been.

Actually BRob got a single. But other than that, Cakes' sac fly and Reimold's game, the top 5 guys did basically nothing.

Given that Pie left Friday's game early with a leg cramp and the Yankee starter was a pretty good lefty, I have no real qualms with Pie batting ninth and Izturis batting second. It didn't turn out too well but at least I see some logic in the decision.

Now that Pie is starting to reach a comfort zone of sorts, he should deserve more opportunities against lefties and more opportunities batting second.

Izturis is not suited for batting second but that's another need the Orioles need to address.

designated hitters,inter-league play, smaller strike zones, underfunded franchises-pittsburg, florida, san diego,kansas city,milwaukee and posibilly arizona,in other words contraction,should all be implemented.
the steroid witch hunt was a management invention to embarrass the union;thereby, bringing outside embarrassement on the players.
do you really believe that anyone cared about ruth's or mantles drinking, robinson's womanizing. certain pitchers oil balls .
come on-most nfl teams had steroid doctors.the fans pay, theplayers play and the teams make money-that's capitalism!