gfrank

Nice to see that O's fans here are taking a good attitude about the man about all this. There's a bunch of generally negative things you can say about the guy and his ownership style for the Orioles, but in the greater scheme of things, the positive things he did with his life definitely outweigh those pretty superficial negatives. It probably killed the guy that he had such a bad reputation with the fans for so many years, because by all accounts he actually did genuinely care about Baltimore sports and Maryland in general. He was even instrumental in generating interest and setting a path for getting a football team back into Baltimore, in fact, which was noteworthy at the time considering the NFL had a commissioner who was actively in opposition to there being a football team in Baltimore. It's not totally inconceivable to think that neither the Orioles nor the Ravens franchises would be in Baltimore if it wasn't for Angelos. It's a really horrible shame that he didn't have much of a knack for some of those finer intricacies of running a sports franchise, because in a lot of ways a guy like Peter Angelos is precisely the kind of guy absolutely every team would want as an owner.

Here's hoping he's got a very different grip.

I don't like the move at all. I'm probably guilty of being an optimist, but I always got a bit of a Nelson Cruz vibe from Nunez. Granted that's more of a best-case scenario, but Nunez is only 26(actually more accomplished than Cruz was at that age), there's definitely some real life in that bat, and we're lucky enough to have a hitting coach who has a pretty impressive track record of hitters under his watch hitting or exceeding their ceiling. He's averaged 35 HR and 97 RBI per every 162 games over the last year and a half, and that was for his age 25-26 seasons, and it's not at all unreasonable to think he could have surpassed those over the next two years(as most players traditionally do during their traditional 27-30 peak years), particularly considering we're starting to accumulate more competent bats throughout the lineup. And it's not like our 40 is that jam-packed with unmovable talent who are definitively worth holding on to, I could name a couple other guys without a particularly compelling longterm outlook that would have been a better fit to move on from during such a roster crunch instead of a guy who could have gotten you 35 home runs and 100 RBI. Plus, while in years past DH-types had ever-declining value across baseball for trades, I think you're going to see at least a slight change in that given that it looks increasingly likely that the DH rule will stick on the NL, creating the necessity for 15 more starting lineup spots with guys that roughly fit a Nunez profile. Really the best argument here is playing time, though every configuration people present of that playing time automatically seems to presume that Trey Mancini is going to be well enough to run out there 162 times next year. I'm totally pleased with the sheer optimism of that sentiment, and would make next year a special one even if we run out there and only put up a .277 winning percentage as a team or something, but it still feels like a bit of a reach to presume that somebody with a year off from sports who just had to endure what he had to endure is going to have the sheer endurance for an entire baseball season so soon after something like that. But it's something I'd be overwhelmingly happy to be wrong about, so whatever. But it was important that we keep 30 year-old Cole Sulser and 35 year-old Cesar Valdez for some reason, I guess.

I'll always wonder what could have been with this guy had the circumstances been different, and he had gotten into 130+ games with us. It was slightly inexcusable last year when he was hitting and Buck was still benching him for Rickard for reasons unknown, but you can probably pretty fairly chalk it up this year to Trey Mancini and that season-long slump he never seemed to get out of. It put those nails pretty firmly in the coffin now that Joey's gone out there flashing better leather than he did last year. It's a shame. There are other Oriole teams where he would have pretty easily ran away with the starting job, but this year's team wasn't one of them. I hope he sticks it out a couple more years in the states instead of just going back to Korea. I could really see it clicking at some point for this guy. And judging by the replies here, I probably won't be the only Orioles fan who now has a reason to skim the Phillies box scores for the rest of the year.