If you're an Orioles fan who has stood fast with Andy MacPhail's rebuilding program for the past 26 months, it's OK to be a little scared right now.
It's all right to wonder whether all the dominoes are going to fall in the right direction. I'm wondering that. You're wondering that. Trust me, MacPhail is wondering right along with us.
Rebuilding, as you've seen over the past few months, is not a perfect science. It's mostly about good long-range planning and development, but it's also part crapshoot and - yes - even a little bit of blind faith.
The Orioles are testing what remains of that faith right now. They lost seven of nine games on the first road trip after the All-Star break, including five of six to the rival New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox. They lost the (nonmathematical) second-half home opener on Monday night to a pitcher (Bruce Chen) who left Baltimore under unhappy circumstances and returned with an 0-5 record for one of the two teams actually doing worse than the Orioles in the won-lost column.
Manager Dave Trembley is under fire - even though he was just forced to send 6-plus-ERA starting pitchers to the mound on back-to-back nights against the Kansas City Royals - and the fan base gets more restless by the day.
These are not happy times, so I'm not going to sprinkle Orange Kool-Aid on you and tell you it's raining. Right now, it's probably starting to taste more like yellow snow.
That's why today's game against the Royals is another critical juncture in this transitional season. Top pitching prospect Chris Tillman is scheduled to take the mound for his major league debut, and he'll become the latest in a series of Orioles up-and-comers to try to keep the customers satisfied until things truly start to get better.
Tillman was the highest-ranked Orioles pitcher on that Baseball America list of the top 100 major league prospects that came out this spring. Catcher Matt Wieters was No. 1, of course, but Tillman was No. 22 and Brian Matusz was No. 25. Tillman and Matusz were ranked as the eighth and ninth best pitching prospects in baseball.
Now, I don't want to put too much stock in those rankings, since neither Brad Bergesen nor Nolan Reimold made the top 100, but it's still indicative of how the industry views Tillman's potential, so it's fair for fans to take another night off from 11 1/2 years of legitimate skepticism to take a look at the kid and imagine what he might do in the future - especially with Matusz and Jake Arrieta (No. 67) still waiting in the wings.
