Orioles president Andy MacPhail and his front office staff are headed to the winter meetings in Las Vegas, and - if you listen to the fans - the heat is on, even though it's not particularly warm in Nevada this time of year.
The offseason has produced little in the way of on-field improvements and much in the way of unsatisfying contract negotiations, which has fueled a fountain of discontent on Orioles message boards and in the blogosphere. It's still relatively early, but Orioles fans already are losing patience with MacPhail and his long-term rebuilding program.
Now, I'm not going to lecture anybody about that. The Orioles haven't been to the playoffs since Adam Jones wore short pants, and there's no reason anyone should be either happy or satisfied with a franchise that has been so incompetent for so long, but fans still have some obligation to judge the MacPhail era on its own merits and not hold him responsible for the 9 1/2 years of futility that preceded it.
MacPhail is known for his methodical management approach, which produced a pair of very successful trades last winter. If you recall, both those deals took most of the offseason and there was plenty of teeth-gnashing when it seemed as if they would never get done. They weren't perfect trades - time will tell whether the likes of Troy Patton and Chris Tillman will reach their potential - but they were exactly as MacPhail promised and they improved the major league team enough to make the first half of the season fairly interesting.
Which brings us back to Andy's second winter of our discontent and the growing sentiment among a fatalistic segment of the Orioles' fan base that he is not up to the job of signing significant free agents and negotiating contract extensions with Nick Markakis and Brian Roberts. Never mind that he has done just about everything he promised to do when he took over the team and still has plenty of time this offseason to do the things he needs to do to continue the ground-up reconstruction of the franchise.
Maybe he'll end up falling short this time, but he isn't the one who has changed since last year. MacPhail came here with a plan to repopulate the minor league system and transition to a younger major league roster. He never set a target date for the Orioles to be competitive in the American League East, though it was generally assumed to be 2010 if all went well. Then the relatively upbeat first half of last season raised some expectations, and the availability of Mark Teixeira (Mount St. Joseph) and Monkton resident A.J. Burnett created hope the process might speed up.
