We Means It, Maaaaaan: The Baltimore Orioles of 2021

I actually have the very much less valuable but still worth a few bucks hasty replacement card, before the properly revised, more common one came out.

VICTORY

Orioles June is gonna be lit

3 in a row lol

break 'em up.

Loving the aggressive baserunning here.

Satisfying

mountcastle and santander getting hot make the team a little more tolerable to watch...cedric mullins is a joy, though.

Nice of the O’s to return the favor tonight. Satisfying.

congrats on beating matt harvey

He was actually doing ok this year until he faced us for the first time. Still hope he can pull it back together.

Ryan Mountcastle has three HR in three AB and will get an AB in the 8th.

Another hit at 100mph off the bat but just a single.

Fry walks in a run on a 3-2 pitch, bases loaded, 2 outs, Orioles holding a 2-run lead. This team, man, this team.

Welp.

Normally it’s the Jays doing this.

and looks like they might give that a go here in the bottom of the 9th!

hitting six homers and losing can’t happen all that often

Of course I stopped watching right after Mountcastle's single.

fahhhh

This team can't win without almost losing

THAT'S the magic of orioles baseball.

it's the reason i have an ulcer is what it is

Try being a Keys fan for pain.

I like when this team of nobodys and never-weres unloads its frustration on a reliever having a bad night

fuck you, have a ramon urias dinger

hahaha...do you SEEEE what happens?!

the truth is, urias has been hitting decently and pretty consistently in minors/majors since 2018, not a total no-hoper like some of the filler the orioles have been putting in the lineup

but anyway, never mind, we're good now

ho hum, sweeping away the trash.

Why are they doing this to me

colton cowser is not a real person.

Crisp game today, Matt Harvey had a good start, advantage was taken of defensive lapses

The "5th inning is here time for Jorge Lopez to give up some runs" thing is just getting silly now

Urias hitting .349 for July

Urias with the GWRBI today to complete the sweep of the cross-town Nats, McKenna, porous of bat but fleet of foot, comes scampering home from third on Ramon's groundout to notch the game-winner and the Orioles win after being down in the 9th for, I think, the very first time in 2021?

i like your patter, chief, but porous of bat? and cross-town is a stretch

cross-metropolitan-statistical-area work for you, hoss?

needs references to the parkway and its bricks, critter

Gotta love the walkoff walk courtesy of Ryan "porous bat" McKenna

This team can't win without almost losing

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Tuesday, June 29, 2021 9:30 AM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

Entered the bottom of the ninth, promptly let the Tigers load the bases with nobody out, still won

Oh yeah:

The bullpen has been pretty good but they are sure trying to waste another great Means start right now

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Tuesday, May 11, 2021 9:15 PM (two months ago) bookmarkflaglink

asdhklhfajkshlgwjhi

this just in: adley rutshcman is good. colton cowser is real and cannot be contained by the florida coast league. grayson rodriguez is the truth.

Chris Davis has announced his retirement. pic.twitter.com/3QKvErwTzn

— Baltimore Orioles (@Orioles) August 12, 2021

it is a crime that rutschman was in double-a until five days ago (and that grayson rodriguez is still there)

presumably with september rosters only expanding to 28, there'll somehow be no room for rutschman then, either

joke organization/league

the best reason i've heard for keeping him down is that anyone on a 40-man will be locked out for at least part of 2022 (probably), and it makes more sense to have your big prospects getting reps in AAA than sitting at home.

also if he was brought up it would make the team better when we're only 1.5 back of the dbacks and i WANT THAT PICK IT'S ALL I HAVE TO LIVE FOR

What, so you can once again have the thrill of hearing analysis say "weird, I thought that guy would go at 10-12, must have something to do with underslot issues"

As Matt Harvey turns back into Matt Harvey.

What, so you can once again have the thrill of hearing analysis say "weird, I thought that guy would go at 10-12, must have something to do with underslot issues"

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Monday, August 16, 2021 7:59 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

they took adley at 1, i have faith they'd do it again if there's an undeniable player there, and by all accounts there will be

adley is a college guy and now 23 years old; when they drafted him in 2019 *lots* of ppl were all like 'he could play for the big league team right now'. he didn't really hit like it that summer, okay.

so now he's spent 2020 at the alternate site. and he's put up a .400 OPB in the minors this year. and admittedly pedro severino is eminently serviceable and practically a star in this lineup.

but the team is terrible and adley -- tHe ToP pRoSpEcT iN bAsEbAlL -- is learning *nothing* in the minors while the o's stall his clock. maybe he'll get there next april 16th when he's 24 i guess.

with a different, less shitty team he'd have been in the majors a year ago, and there's no reason we shouldn't all want that.

rodriguez is only 21 but he's fanning like 15 per nine innings now in double-a. can he possibly be worse than the shit they regularly roll out? do we not want to see the best available players playing in the majors?

also sucks for cedric that he's not even eligible for arbitration until after *next* year -- he'll probably get a $10K raise to $600K after putting up 5 WAR this season. (and if he were eligible for arbitration *this* winter you know goddamn well he'd have been traded at the deadline)

anyway sorry -- the o's are just the most egregious current example of how fucked up the entire system is. the pirates/marlins/etc are little better if perhaps less blatant.

i really hope it all burns down this winter!

not to mention we don't have the rockies or dbacks or second half padres to rip apart. us vs the world babey. adley will take us there

i don't think it's actually possible to compete in the AL East without tanking. not without preexisting latin american talent or a lot of money.

What would you say the Rays are doing?

By the way I am an optimist too. I think the core of a good team DOES exist in the system now, if management is willing to spend around it. But I think we would have been in the same place with the rebuild if we'd been losing 90 games a year instead of 110 games a year, and it would have been less embarrassing. There is one guy, Rutschman, we truly got as a direct result of the ultra-tank, and that took one year of being horrible. Is the core of the next good team Heston Kjerstad and Colton Cowser? Or the guys we got in trade for our entire major league roster like Dillon Tate and Yusniel Diaz and Dean Kremer. Seems more like besides Rutschman it's John Means, Ryan Mountcastle, Cedric Mullins, Austin Hays, Grayson Rodriguez (drafted after 2017 when we were bad but not on purpose), maybe Keegan Akin if the second-half form is real... all guys we'd have even if we hadn't been running so much Pat Valaika and Richie Martin out there day after day after day.

What would you say the Rays are doing?

that was the first thing i said. they're the smartest FO in baseball. i'd like to have them as an FO, but that's not possible right now. "preexisting latin american talent" also applies to them.

but also.... even though they didn't outright tank, they had 4 sub-.500 years in a row not that long ago. i get annoyed with the "they've figured out how to compete every year" meme. also while we're on the subject of embarrassment, i'd be embarrassed if the orioles traded away every great hypothetical player they develop before they hit arb2! i would hate that.

i also think you're not being fair to kjerstad, who might be great, or cowser, who has been fantastic so far. not to mention coby mayo, who is absolutely hitting top 100 lists next year and was only signed because of that fat #2 slot money saved on kjerstad. don't care about the manny trade busts, they were made by a miserable lame duck GM who was already pretty bad at trades. elias somehow got much better returns for dylan bundy and jose iglesias. i'm counting those.

I would not be in the slightest perturbed if the Orioles had 4 sub-.500 years in a row (I've been a fan since the '80s, how could I be?) What's on the field right now is clearly something different than that!

Kjerstad and Cowser of course could be great! Any top-5 pick COULD be. Most aren't. If I believed Elias was uniquely good at turning high picks into valuable major league players, it might be a different story. Then again, if the Orioles had put a better team on the field, maybe we would have picked 7th in 2020 instead of 2nd and you know what? By all accounts Kjerstad would still have been available!

But the slot money wouldn't have been there to get Mayo and Baumler... I know everyone hates the underslot strategy but it really makes a lot of sense given the deranged slot value differences at the top of the first round. Pick 2 grants you way more cash to spend than pick 7 even if you don't spend it all on pick 2.

what if you don’t actually want to be granted more cash to spend

so now you're shaming the orioles for NOT spending money.......smh......

man we sacrifice the #1 pick for the good of humanity and the nats can't even finish the job i hate them

good news -- the orioles will not surpass the 1916 philadelphia athletics -- who finished 40 games behind the 76-77 washington senators -- for (what may be??) the biggest gap between last and next-to-last teams

it's not really the same, of course, and the 464-run difference in run differential may be another story