We should ignore NY and Boston (for now)

[Old#5fan]

The goal for us remains the same regardless of what the Yankees and Red Sox do.

We need to build a team that can win about 95 games. The Yanks and Red Sox are going to spend a ton of money to try and do the same thing. We can't match them dollar for dollar. Whining about every move they make is just stupid. They are going to make a lot of big moves. We'll have to make a few really big moves ourselves, although we don't have the margin for error that they do. If we make a big move and it backfires in our faces, our hopes are dead.

Its not a level playing field, so we have the be smarter and more efficient than they are in order to match them.

And to win that many games guess who the Orioles will have to beat or at least play even? You don't win that many games unless you can win games against Boston and NY. Right now the Orioles aren't even competitive with them head to head and everyone here knows that.

Yet, you don't even mention this obvious fact in your simple statement - "we need to build a team to get 95 wins." Well duh, you got to get enough or develop enough premium talent to beat the MFing Yankees, Boston and Tampa. A rather daunting task and this team even if all the young talent performs above projections in all aspects (which won't happen) still won't be able to do so. I think they need to start signing one big, big name and actual talent each year if they ever want to realistically regain competiveness.

[RShack]

There are only about 15 or 16 real jobs on any major league roster. Eight position players, a DH, five starters, and a closer. That's all the Yanks can fill up with All Stars. And every year they're already pretty close.

To get to a true talent, projected win total of much over 100 the Yanks would have to be unbelievably healthy, and/or sign players for the bench/pen who'd have much greater roles on other teams. They'd have to pull a UNC/Duke in college basketball, where they get players who'd be stars on other teams and get them to be Yanks and sit the bench or pitch long relief. They'd have to sign John Lackey, but with the expectation that he'd throw 75 innings out of the pen.

That's not happening, so the O's goal remains the same - to get 90+ wins and hope for some things to come together.

Wow... that sounds perilously close to my 15-Player-Team Theory ;-)

I agree with most of what you said, including the part about how it's 6 pitchers who really matter. However, I disagree about which 6. I think it's your best-3 SP's and your best-3 RP's. In an age when nobody has a staff of SP's who goes more than 6 IP/GS, and almost nobody has a staff that does even that, you gotta have 3 good RP's who you can count on. Just 1 or 2 isn't enough. And, while I agree that all 5 SP slots count the same in the abstract, in actual reality nobody has 5 good ones. If you've got 3 good ones, you're way ahead of everybody else, and the 4th and 5th slots will likely be filled by iffy or borderline guys in any case. So, I say it's 3-SP's and 3-RP's who are gonna largely determine a team's pitching-fate.

Other than that, I agree with what you said...