Yoon: (Shrieks) -- Your 2014 Baltimore Orioles

Bats are harder and the pitcher's not wearing a helmet?

bats are also thrown much slower and aren't hard to dodge or deflect?

but are you actually defending throwing at someone tho? neither of abad's throws were aimed at manny's head; they still could have broken bones. the first was right at the knee he just spent 8 months rehabbing.

Given the choice between a ball and a bat from that distance, I'd happily take my chances against the latter.

i'm not defending him, he seems to have started this shit friday -- he's frustrated and acting out like he never has before. i'm mostly just pissed at jaso and the As acting like the butthurt defenders of baseball's honor by throwing at him

yeah, don't throw at the knees. just don't.

five-game suspension. curious to see what his argument is for appealing it. abad was fined an undisclosed amount

i'm mostly just pissed at jaso and the As acting like the butthurt defenders of baseball's honor by throwing at him

you may recall that the first plunking in this series of events was that of donaldson, in his first at-bat after tagging manny 'too hard'

i'd be more annoyed at the guy hitting people with a bat, as opposed to a ball.

you say that like he was beating someone on the ground with it

and yeah i forgot about chen

don't think they'll appeal but i don't think they expect to win it, buck just wants to delay the suspension to be more beneficial to the team business as usual

er, don't think they'll appeal but if they did they didn't expect to win it*

i also didn't realize machado had hit a's catcher derek norris with his backswing twice on sunday, the second time knocking him out of the game

you say that like he was beating someone on the ground with it

uh... i did?

Not as bad as Bert Campaneris in the '72 ALCS (10 games), I'll give you that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2pRNQuKS40

But a little more dangerous than spitting (5 games), I'd say, unless they thought Alomar was rabid.

he made like 4 separate apologies this is the only thing orioles fans have talked about for the past three days i'm done

i'm sorry, but as a fan it is yr sworn duty to support and defend everything they do

i don't even do that though, i wasn't defending him against o's fans who actually do that, this place is always just behind on everything and i'm the only o's fan here so i feel like this whole thread is my duty to maintain at all times

but yes i do really think it's fucking stupid that a bat toss is seen as worse than an aimed fastball at the knees, he apologized several times and promised to apologize personally when oakland is back, and i will defend his being 21 years old, frustrated and emotional and he doesn't deserve to have the "bad seed" label ball fans love to stick on kids that don't act like mantle acted, because i am a fan and i'm invested in liking my team and its best young player.

For what it's worth--if you believe Ball Four (I do)--Mantle's behaviour was terrible in a lot of ways.

that's why i say "acted"

@mlbplatemusic
We just updated Bud Norris's walk up song to Nightcall! Check it out here - http://mlbplatemusic.com/player/Bud-Norris …

My impression of Bud Norris was rather inaccurate.

now in first :')

http://espn.go.com/mlb/story/_/id/11181948/buck-showalter-baltimore-orioles-john-lackey-boston-red-sox-careful-ped-barbs

Cruz went 5-for-5 Saturday night in the second game of a doubleheader, helping the Orioles beat Lackey and the Red Sox to gain a split of the two games. Cruz had three of his hits off Lackey, including a home run, single and double.

After the game, when asked to comment on Cruz's big game, Lackey made a not-so-veiled comment on the Orioles slugger's past suspension for performance-enhancing drugs.

"I'm not going to comment on him," Lackey said. "I've got nothing to say about him. There are some things I'd like to say, but I'm not going to. You guys forget pretty conveniently about stuff."

"There's so many insinuations, quite frankly, about people in every club. You usually don't hear those comments after a shutout or something," Showalter said.

"I mean [Lackey's] doing really well. He's up throwing 93, 95 again and he's got one of the top ERAs in the American League, which with the DH means all of baseball. He's a good pitcher, so God bless him. He was good yesterday."

that 'again' is crafty

http://www.si.com/mlb/2014/07/24/baltimore-orioles-david-simon-my-town-my-team2

u kno season 6 of the wire was gonna be 100% about the inner-city struggles of the baltimore orioles

This team is a great story; why is this thread never updated? No real stars, a lot of unknown scrubs, and somehow they're leading the AL East by a fair bit, and have spent the last two weeks winning series against good teams.

And yet, when they lose, like tonight, you look at the personnel and say to yourself, why did I think this was a good team? Who's ON this team?

Mainly I didn't want zachlyon to feel they were the only O's fan on here.

yeah tonight sucked. we can take down aces but pitchers like hutchison just make us look horrible and totally outmatched. three times this year.

i mean this is a team playing way over its head like most of the time which is all part of the #ORIOLESMAGICBABYAAAAHH but it means that every loss seems like it'll all come tumbling down.

dave cameron's chat today had a bunch of victimized O's fans accusing him of personal hatred, like all fans do eventually, and his increasingly annoyed responses were cute because he is a robot. but this is one of the winningest teams in the majors over the past 3 years and at a certain point you just have to go who cares? get into the playoffs it isn't hard to win the world series, and i think a lot of people would hate that.

fyi the orioles are at 26 total WAR which is right in line with pretty much every other playoff contender, it's not like the performance doesn't line up with the record

Yeah, I get that, I just look at the team and feel like I don't understand how it adds up to that much.

Fangraphs has the team at 17 WAR, but negative runs above replacement from the offense -- according to them, basically the entire aggregate value of the position players on the team is contained in their defense! But maybe I'm not understanding those numbers. b-ref has 14.9 wins from batting, 5.3 from defense. Totally different story.

yeah i'm trying to figure out it works out on FG, bbref is too foreign for me to ever understand

it's weird, but if you look here it adds up. it helps to only look at AL teams cause the league and positional adjustments is so huge. offense and defense scores are treated equally (incl positional adjustement so offense is still counted more than actual defense, obv) and each team gets the same basic league/replacement addition.

i think bbref just adds things up differently, idk

Delmon w/ the economical 1/5

T2 Lined out to left
T4 Grounded out to shortstop
T6 Grounded out to third
T8 Ball, Singled to right center
T10 Ball, Fouled out to first

ugh. that cubs series, while likely of little consequence, smarted nonetheless.

too late to blow it? pref Balt to who's been winning that division lately, but still, Showalter.

prob too late to blow it, tho still 7 h2h games vs nyy

i still don't understand this team.

i've followed the o's for 30 years and even i'm confused.

9.5 game lead and i still can't stop thinking we'll blow it. it'd be worse than the 2011 red sox but still.

i don't know how to be a fan right now. it's so weird seeing other o's fans old enough to act like this is normal. it's totally exceptional to me. totally unexpected. for years i've wondered what it's like to be, like, a brewers fan, and go into the season thinking "hey maybe we'll get to the playoffs this year. wouldn't be strange." like no matter what the brewers always have a chance and there's enough random variance for them to either win the division or finish 15 games out. while my whole life AL East ball has been a gargantuan hill. not for boston or ny but even for them it's always been a battle. our only hope has ever been the wild card. it's as far as my hope has gone. i'd ruled out the division before the season began and figured at best, we'd compete for the top spot until the last few weeks. now the rest of the East has retreated for the first time in my memory as a baseball fan and we're (possibly) easing our way to winning the entire division and i don't know how to exist. it's bizarre. i don't understand how everyone else isn't responding like they're alice in wonderland or something. i don't know how to think. my entire brain is toast. i am dead. how am i supposed to act or think. it's so weird we'll (possibly) be in the playoffs and i won't have to worry about the play-in game.

also if the yankees are eliminated it'll be the first year since the strike (and the year before) that neither they nor the red sox qualify for the postseason.

I understand your superstitious nervousness--everyone's been there--but 9.5 games on Sept. 7? That's gotta be like a 10-0 lead heading into the ninth inning.

i remember going to a game against the angels where the o's scored like 10 runs in the 9th to tie it. still lost but your post has now given me more reason to be paranoid as we will now likely finish out of the wild card.

currently at 99.4% to win the division

of course the brewers' playoff chances have dropped from roughly 85% to about 25% in two weeks

lol yeah

sox were as high as 99.6% in 2011!

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/842229-mlb-14-of-the-most-shocking-september-collapses-in-baseball-history/page/1

Using that article as a guide, the biggest blown lead I could find on Sept. 7 was actually the most recent: 2009 Tigers, who led by 7.0. There were another half-dozen teams that led by 6.0 or 6.5. Some of the most famous collapses--'51 Dodgers, '69 Cubs, '78 Red Sox--had had their leads already substantially cut into by Sept. 7. The one closest to home for me, the '87 Blue Jays, were a little odd in that the lead they blew wasn't built up until after Sept. 7; they spent much of the summer jostling with the Tigers and Yankees, but moved ahead by 3.5 on Sept. 26 and seemed safe.

Anyway, unless that round-up missed someone, I don't think anyone has ever blown a lead of more than 7.0 games on Sept. 7.

Quintin Berry ('12 Tigers, '13 Red Sox) is on this team now, huh?

Still hasn't been caught stealing (25 for 25).

Everyone knows it's been a while for the Orioles. This is really amazing, though: when they clinch the division about 10 minutes from now, it'll be the first time they've done so at home since 1969. (According to Buck Martinez, anyway, so that may or may not be true.)

=DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

i was 9 the last time this happened

Un-freaking-believable

Adam Jones pies fans

https://vine.co/v/OWm659gY9M6

https://vine.co/v/OWmwFBLVIXv

I like the Orioles--I'd as soon they win it all as anyone. They're the shock of the year for me, even more than KC. I evidently missed something; never in a million years would I have guessed they'd win 95-100 games and lap the division. It was only a few weeks ago when I saw them at the Skydome and they were all of 3-1/2 games up on the Jays.

http://www.gannett-cdn.com/-mm-/d9e28b9f8cb58a1e25e7cd4ab8af54a28dacf8f7/c=330-110-1422-931&r=x404&c=534x401/local/-/media/DetroitFreePress/DetroitFreePress/2014/09/17/1410980752000-AP-Twins-Orioles-Baseball-OT.jpg

i might root for the Orioles depending on matchups, but Showalter is p much an obstacle.

how did Steve Pearce get on the bWAR leaderboards, btw?

wtf is your deal with showalter

pearce is a great mystery, but i love it. at least w/ fWAR you can (maybe) point to noise in defensive metrics goosing his number a bit...

he's an oldschool prick xp

balfour

orioles are on a small run of inexplicably getting value out of shitty former pirates

gorkys hernandez should give them a call

the mclouth effect

13 wins against the yankees this year, most since '76

i have a brief opportunity to buy tickets to the ALDS! i hope i obtain some!

i mean, without paying 6x as much on stubhub

too soon for a hot stove thread? jj hardy just signed a 3 yr extension

weird timing on that (see the cautionary tale of Roger Peckinpaugh)

http://www.sbnation.com/mlb/2014/10/9/6952859/jj-hardy-contract-extension-orioles-alcs-2014-world-series-1925

Chris Cotillo @ChrisCotillo
Follow
#Orioles aren't done after signing Hardy. Latest on extension talks with Nelson Cruz and Nick Markakis: http://sbnation.com/e/6716684
3:00 PM - 9 Oct 2014

lol ok

sentimental me wants to keep nick around knowing he won't be worth it

cruz would be a terrible move tho, just give him a QO and let someone else deal with the inevitable disappointment

aaaand markakis denies any extension talk.

http://deadspin.com/a-partially-annotated-list-of-baltimore-orioles-promoti-1693563998?utm_campaign=socialflow_deadspin_twitter&utm_source=deadspin_twitter&utm_medium=socialflow

every child's dream has clearly been to inherit a buck showalter garden gnome

although it does sort of make sense he is def comparable to a potentially murderous occult creature

makes more sense than the Mets' deGrom gnome

“What is the purpose?” Showalter asked later. “Do people get up in the morning and they go, ‘Honey, are we going to the game today? …They’ve got that gnome tonight. Pack up the kids. We’re going?’”…Really?!”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/dc-sports-bog/wp/2015/03/11/orioles-manager-buck-showalter-is-not-looking-forward-to-his-garden-gnome-giveaway-night/

hah

can that be the 2015 orioles thread title plz