Lineup Against the Wall: Baltimore Orioles

So it was incumbent upon me to break down both Eastern divisions in this lil' ongoing format of ours before Opening Day. Uh, oops.

Please bear with me, and read quickly, as I abandon any sense of style, intellectual honesty or common baseball sense over the course of 10 posts. This is like the time I waited until the last minute to write that paper, i.e. the decade of the '90s.

First up, the formerly great Orioles of Peter Angelos.

As I mentioned, these are going to come at you fast and furious. If you're looking for trenchant humor and interesting sentence structure, check out the Administrator's Fiction Fix--at least until I force it off the page by the sheer power of my accumulated lazy.

It's no mystery to anyone that the Orioles suck, and have sucked since at least the mid-to-late '90s. They have passionate fans, the first of the great classic-modern ballparks--and some would still say the best--but nothing worthwhile to put inside the thing for baseballic purposes. Their lineup:


Catcher -- Gregg Zaun
First Base -- Aubrey Huff
Second Base -- Brian Roberts
Third Base -- Melvin Mora
Shortstop -- Cesar Izturis
Left Field -- Felix Pie
Center Field -- Adam Jones
Right Field -- Nick Markakis
DH -- Luke Scott

Starting Pitchers:

Jeremy Guthrie (R)
Koji Uehara (R)
Mark Hendrickson (L)
Alfredo Simon (R)
Adam Eaton (R)

Relief Pitchers:

Chris Ray (R)
Jim Johnson (R)
Danys Baez (R)
Jamie Walker (L)
Dennis Sarfate (R)

Closer:

George Sherrill (L)

Bottom line: The Orioles have some excellent position players, like Brian Roberts, one of the two or three best two-sackers in the bigs, and Aubrey Huff, who had his best season in years in '08. Nick Markakis might jump out this year, too, but they're depending on eternal skill-tease Felix Pie in the outfield and Izturis is Mendoza-esque. Still, though, they might actually score some runs this year, which is good because that pitching staff is vile, George Sherrill faded badly last year and they play in a heavyweight division where even an improvement on last year's 68-93 record won't get them better than 4th. Sorry, downashore types. No Oriole for you.

Projected finish: 5th.