Thinking Back to Worse Times

I don't know how many of you have noticed or care, but the Orioles have been playing some awful baseball over the last two weeks. After staying around the .500 mark for the first 60 games of the season, the O's are now a 2011 worst 12 games under .500 and are limping into the All-Star Break. I hope that a few days off does some good for the team since they haven't been showing many signs of life on the mound or at the plate lately.

As an Orioles fan, it can be really hard to remain optimistic, losing year after losing year. But I'm choosing to look at things this way; our roster is largely composed of young players with potential, who just haven't been playing up to it to this point in the season. There are a few stopgap veterans on the team, but not compared to how the roster looked through most of the mid-late 2000s. Those Orioles squads were largely composed of stopgap veteran types, and the team didn't seem to have much direction for the future. At least the 2011 roster shows the direction the team hopes to be heading in, at least theoretically, so that gives me a glimmer of hope for the future.

Along with some other players, like the Craptastic Dueling Victors and Russ Ortiz, Paul Shuey is a good representative of the mid 2000s Orioles stopgap veteran failure.

Paul was a good pitcher for a number of years, mainly with the Indians in the 1990s. But by the time he got to Baltimore in 2007 at age 36, he was attempting a comeback and hadn't pitched in the Majors in four seasons. His BR Bullpen page really says all that you need to know about his time with the Orioles; "Paul Shuey is the only pitcher in American League history to have allowed the 30th run in a game. He did so on August 22, 2007, on a home run by Ramon Vazquez." That's just great. And I hope that another Orioles pitcher is ever put in a situation to allow a ridiculous score like that ever again. Wake up 2011 O's! You don't want to be that guy!