Golden

 Here's to the Orioles two 2011 Rawlings Gold Glove winners, Matt Wieters and Nick Markakis, who are both first time winners of the award. JJ Hardy was also nominated but lost out to Erick Aybar of the Angels.

I know I'm quite biased on the issue, but I think Wieters is the best catcher I've ever seen play. He's so fundamentally sound behind the plate and also is forced to catch about 30 different pitchers every year due to the O's revolving door on the mound. Wiety is the first O's backstop to win the award, and the team has now won a Gold Glove at every position on the field. 

It's about time that Nick won one of these things; he's been the games' best right fielder for years now, but was always hurt in the voting by having to compete with center-fielders for the award. He has a cannon for an arm: Kalina and I are determined to come up with a new stats category to reflect the number of runners he holds because they don't want to be thrown out, but he still racked up 15 assists. I really like how MLB finally wised up and created separate awards for all three OF positions because I don't think it's fair to compare left and right fielders to their counterparts in center, since it was almost always three center-fielders who took home the hardware. 

Although the program wasn't that exciting, I enjoyed ESPN2's broadcast of the award show and it was nice to see Paul Blair announce Nick's award. I wish that the start of the show hadn't been delayed for thirty minutes so ESPN could wrap up it's ridiculously high scoring college football game that not many people cared about anyway, but anytime I can watch some off-season baseball programming, especially when it has an Orioles flavor, I'm a happy person.