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Get high on the O's with The Dirt

Patrick Delaney Written by Patrick Delaney, Friday April 08 2011
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After two moves, another kid, and a perpetually graying head of receding hair, I'm back and blogger than ever.  I've also decided to name these posts "The Dirt" - a nod to my high school and a nickname of mine from years gone by. 

So, where did I leave off?  Oh, that's right - the Baltimore Orioles are the class of the American League East.  Even if that's a true statement for only two weeks - it feels so good to write it.  Since this is the first one in a while, I want to get several things off my chest that have come up in recent weeks:
 
Zach Britton:
The kid was the best starting pitcher we had in camp this year and he doesn't make the team?  I don't give a rat's ass what the "business aspect" of the decision was - if he earned a roster spot, he should have headed north with the club.  Management's perspective is that they'll have control over him for one more year if they keep him down?  So what?  Follow that line of thinking, and with the way Weiters hit over the past two years, it’s a wonder why management didn’t just keep him down and then we could have had him under control five years from now. In fact, let’s keep ALL of our prospects down in the minors an extra two years and that way we can control them for even longer! Wait…why even have a major league team? Just don’t bring anyone up; we’ll always have them under control; and we’ll dominate the minors for decades to come! 
 
If management and scouting and player development and our draft gurus are worth a lick, we should have a new crop of players coming up in five years that would more than make up for Britton's departure.  And...if the O's are any good four or five years from now (which is the master plan from MacPhail), then why would Britton want to leave so badly anyway?  Here's a novel thought - he may actually choose to remain with a contender - the team that drafted him and gave him his start.  Holy moly!  That actually happens these days?  (It doesn't, unfortunately, just ask Carl Crawford, Manny Ramirez, Alex "Popcorn" Rodriguez, CeCe "Deville" Sabathia, Mark "Hometown Zero" Texeira, Curtis Granderson, or a myraid of other AL East losers who followed the money north.)  I’m not bitter. On a secondary level, if I’m Britton and I know I have a bright future in the bigs, I want to start recording Major League stats as soon as possible so I can hopefully cement my place at or near the top of the record books. Don’t be holding me back five or six weeks just so you can control me for another year. Everyone knows I’m not going to want to be with your ball club anyway then – I’m going to want to go north and play for the Yanks or the Sox! 
 
Chris Tillman
I don’t care how young he is or how early it is in the season, how do you take a guy out of the game who has a no-hitter going through six innings?  I’m actually placing more of the blame on Tillman than on Showalter – because if Tillman wasn’t such a sissy and if he trusted his stuff more, he would have gone after the hitters from the start, he’d stop nibbling on the corners (who does he think he is? Jake Arrieta??) and walking so many people, and he wouldn’t have thrown so many damn pitches! Buck up – Chrissy! You’re a talented pitcher with some good stuff. Trust it and you would have had a chance at the no-no. Showalter was just being a good company employee (e.g. “We didn’t want to potentially lose him for six months just so he could pitch three more innings.”) I get that. I don’t like it, but I get it. 
 
 
With those two things being said – the O’s are 5-1 and atop the AL East. They’re pitching has been spectacular and their hitting has been good enough. Last night’s 9-5 comeback win was probably my favorite of the young season because they battled back from three separate deficits to finally explode with a five run burst in the 7th inning. It featured a perfectly placed Adam Jones bunt single, Vlad’s first home run (not to mention a very clutch hit through the right side of the infield), Reynolds delivering yet again with men on base, and a solid bullpen effort. The icing on the cake is that the pitching staff has been strung together at the last minute due to a last minute injury to Brian Matusz and last minute illness to Jeremy Guthrie. You hope they don’t send Britton back down once Matusz comes off the DL, but you know management: always sacrificing the short-term euphoria of the best start in over 13 years and the promising season of their most heralded pitcher for the certainty that comes with planning five years in advance for a season in which we don’t know what the hell is going to happen. Makes perfect sense to me. 
 
 
I can’t tell you how good it feels to see stories about the Orioles among the top headlines on si.com (“First place O’s show pop in rallying past Tigers), and espn.com (“First place O’s rally, win again / Red Sox 0-6”). I don’t care how early in the season it is, I’m riding this wave as far as it takes us. 

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