What Should the Orioles Do This Offseason?

The free agent season is officially underway, and before everything starts to get insane with rumors and theories and mystery teams buying everybody up, I want to look at some of the interesting situations to look forward to.

And few teams can promise a situation as interesting as the Baltimore Orioles. After years of dormancy, the O’s burst back on to the scene this year, winning 93 games and taking the Yankees to a decisive game 5 of the ALDS. A record like that is promising, but the Orioles would be ill-advised to rest on their laurels.

In general, a lot of things have to go right in any winning season. Expecting all of them to go right two years in a row can be problematic. The Orioles, especially, would have issues-they scored only 9 more runs than they allowed. With a run differential like that, the Orioles would normally be expected to carry an 82-80 record. A lot of the difference had to do with their historic 29-9 record in one-run games.

Maybe they can repeat some of that, but at the same time, a nine-game swing in expectations is a lot to make up. The Orioles will need to try to actively improve this offseason to stay somewhat competitive. But they also can’t set back rebuilding too much by trading away the farm, or splurge too much on budget.

So instead, I have several different proposals for what the Orioles could do to stay in the race for the AL East, and maybe even improve.

Are the Baltimore Orioles for Real?

With Matt Wieters’ two home runs yesterday (including a grand slam), the Orioles moved back into first place in the AL East, half a game ahead of the Blue Jays. With that sentence, ladies and gentlemen, we have reached the fifth dimension, a dimension of imagination previously unknown to man, where the Orioles, Nationals, and Dodgers all sit atop their divisions, and the Blue Jays, White Sox, and Mets all sit within striking distance. Welcome to the Twilight Zone.

So Your Team Is Out of the Playoffs; Who Do You Root for? (And other thoughts)

As you may have figured out by now, I am a Cardinals and Orioles fan. So, I began planning this post about a month ago when it looked like both my teams would be done by now. I didn’t start it, but the idea was there.

Things have changed a bit since then. Wednesday night was unquestionably one of the greatest nights in baseball’s history, and it was definitely one of the greatest experiences of my life; sitting around with other baseball fans and my laptop, with four MLB Gameday tabs open and one ESPN3 tab that switched between whatever game was most interesting at the moment (although mostly the Cardinals-Astros game). Although technically, I guess it did keep me from doing actual work that needed to be done, but I feel that’s totally justified.

I could try and gush about how incredible Wednesday was; I’m still on a baseball high, the Cardinals made the playoffs* against incredible odds, and anywhere between two and four games that night might go down as classics. (Yes, I’m counting the Cardinals’ game, too; it capped an incredible run. And, just like in 2004, it will get overshadowed by what the Red Sox did.)

So this is going to be more of a collection of ideas.

MLB's All-Overlooked Team

With the All-Star game just around the corner, we will be seeing some of the most brilliant and visible stars of the game today. I would like to take a moment to recognize something else, though-players who are almost exactly the opposite. These are the players who play just as well as those who will be attending Arizona on July 12th, but are much less likely to be attending themselves. For whatever reason, these players are overshadowed relative to their performance, an All-Dark Matter team, if you will (since dark matter is invisible? Actually, this metaphor works better than I expected).

In any case, even if you didn’t fill out a ballot with these player’s names, you can at least give them some attention now.