Wayward O has covered this nicely but I had to throw in my two cents.
Lots of lashing out at Dave Trembley for leaving Jeremy Guthrie in the game so long Tuesday night. Really? My complaint about Trembley has been that he doesn't leave his starters in long enough. I'm certainly not going to come down on him for erring on the other side of the equation.
But the real issue here is expectations. Some people are acting like this is a team of contenders. They're not. Three weeks ago, 100 losses were being touted across the O's blogosphere and general baseball press. Now that the team started 11-8 (now 12-9), people are acting like Trembley should be trying to keep the O's in the race. They are wrong.
Trembley gave his pitcher a chance, a pitcher who said he could get the job done. (Enough of the "every pitcher wants to stay in" argument. Tired.) Trembley hasn't seen what Guthrie can do in this situation so he decided to find out. Dave gave him the opportunity and Guthrie couldn't deliver. I don't expect Trembley to make the same mistake twice.
The point is, this is Trembley's first full season as manager with a lot of players who are in their first or second year in the big leagues. He is still learning what these guys may or may not be capable of and that's exactly what he should be doing in 2008, wins and losses be damned.
This team will be very fortunate to get to .500 by years end. It's important to remember that.
Nobody knows what kind of team the Orioles really have. I'll cut Trembley some slack while he works it all out. But if he does it again, I'll kill him for it.
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Wayward O also posted this defensive gem by Jeremy Guthrie but you must watch it again. It may be the best defensive play you see all year. (Of course, Ramon Hernandez fired the ball into rightfield right after that, negating everything.)
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Anyway, I have admitted I am a sucker when it comes to Daniel Cabrera and while I'm not sold by this latest run of success, it is easy for me to get carried away. I'll be taking (yet another) closer look at this later.
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"Spanky" Huff is an idiot. It's a good thing he can hit home runs because he certainly doesn't seem to have a head for the game. Anybody see him practically run over Juan Samuel as he ran through the stop sign and got thrown out at home? If Juan Samuel's not sending you, you have to be dead to rights. Juan hasn't been conservative enough of his tenure as thirdbase coach. Home runs or not, Huff must go and Scott Moore must take his place.
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Josh Kalk is a wiz with PITCHfx data and has created "player cards" for each pitcher's 2008 season thus far. Most interesting among Orioles is Jim Johnson's card where his similarity score shows him to be closest to Josh Beckett. I'm not sure how he calculates similarity but any comparison to Josh Beckett cannot be bad.
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