Andy Macphail

June 20, 2007 - Orioles announce his hiring as president of baseball operations. The son of former Orioles general manager and Hall of Fame executive Lee MacPhail, Andy returns to the city where he lived as a boy from 1958 to 1965. Aug. 22, 2007 - Decides to remove interim tag from manager Dave Trembley, MacPhail's first noteworthy personnel move. After the news conference, the Orioles promptly lose the first game of a doubleheader, 30-3, to the Texas Rangers, the most lopsided defeat in club history.

It was a calculated risk. The Orioles have opened the season with what manager Buck Showalter willingly concedes is an "unconventional" bullpen, which could leave him and baseball operations chief Dan Duquette with some explaining to do if the starting pitchers aren't able to provide enough good innings to keep the relievers fresh. The Orioles do not have a true long reliever to pick up the slack if the starters again make a habit of stalling in the early and middle innings. That might change over the next few weeks - as circumstances dictate - but the team clearly is hoping that the rotation will go deep in enough games to make it a non-issue.

Dan Duquette had been out of a major league front office since 2002, the year he was fired by the Boston Red Sox after eight seasons as the team's general manager. The Orioles had been rejected by one candidate — and possibly more — in the team's month-long search to replace Andy MacPhail as the club's top baseball executive. On Sunday, Duquette found his way back to the big leagues and the Orioles found what they hoped was the man who would lead the team out of its 14-season abyss.

A couple of months after moving its pro scouting department under one umbrella that would focus primarily on amateur scouting, the Orioles have decided to put a little more emphasis on monitoring the minor leagues. The change is based more on logistics than any switch in philosophy, Orioles amateur scouting director Gary Rajsich said. In December, Dan Duquette, the Orioles' new executive vice president of baseball operations, announced that six of the club's eight pro scouts would be joining the amateur side as part of the organization's concentration on improving its annual draft.

For the first four weeks of the season, Orioles hitters vowed that despite their poor offensive numbers, things would get better soon. They had better, or those hitters might not be around for much longer. Fed up with an offense that has scored two or fewer runs in 12 of 28 games, Andy MacPhail put the team's hitters on notice Wednesday in a rare public display of frustration for the Orioles' president of baseball operations. "While you can give them some allowance for the quality of pitching that we've faced, our patience isn't inexhaustible," MacPhail said in an interview with The Baltimore Sun before the Orioles' 7-5 loss to the New York Yankees on Wednesday.

Entering his second full season as the Orioles' president of baseball operations, Andy MacPhail has presided over a massive rebuilding project that has turned the 40-man roster over by more than 50 percent in one year alone. MacPhail, who is under contract with the Orioles through the 2011 season, recently discussed with The Baltimore Sun his relationship with team owner Peter Angelos, second baseman Brian Roberts' long-term status, the progress of top prospect Matt Wieters and other issues.

Go ahead and take your shots at Andy MacPhail today, Orioles fans. Use him like a punching bag. He's expecting it. Rip his vaunted rebuilding plan if you want. Slam him for running a team with the worst record in baseball, a team that took a major step backward the past two months with a core of promising young players who seem to have forgotten how to play the game. But know this: MacPhail, the team's president of baseball operations, seemed to be doing a good job of beating himself up Friday less than 14 hours after firing manager Dave Trembley.

Oh, Andy MacPhail, your words melt in our ears like ice cream on a summer sidewalk. You signed on this week to save the Orioles and instantly you cooed: "At the end of the day, the fans are the boss. They have the ultimate power. Something we all have to keep in mind, whether we're players or running baseball operations, they're customers and you have to treat them that way." You had 'em at hello, Andy. We all know you're busy scouring the country right now to find the right manager, and the guess here is that Joe Girardi's rejection hurt at least a little.

Long before he was a top executive with two world championship rings and a gleaming resume, Andy MacPhail was a Baltimore kid with baseball in his dreams and eye black streaked above his cheeks. He was a 5-year-old who wouldn't take off his Orioles pajamas, an 8-year-old who constantly dragged around his Jackie Brandt two-tone bat and a pre-teen always searching for a game, even if it was against the bigger, older boys. MacPhail, named last week as the Orioles' new president of baseball operations, may have been baseball royalty - his father and grandfather are Hall of Famers - but you wouldn't have known it by looking at the 1960s version.

In some baseball circles, Orioles president Andy MacPhail is viewed as financially conservative. He cut his baseball teeth with the perpetually small-market Minnesota Twins. Now, with the Orioles, he is knee-deep in a rebuilding effort that has already included dealing away two of his best players for 10 cheaper alternatives. He has also gone on record as saying, in most circumstances, he doesn't believe in giving big dollars to free-agent pitchers. Yet MacPhail doesn't fully buy his financially conservative tag. "Not necessarily.

Major League Baseball announced today that Joe Torre has stepped down as executive vice president of baseball operations to join a prospective ownership group that will be among those competing to buy the Los Angeles Dodgers. So there's a high-profile opening in the commissioner's office. And around here, that means one thing: Andy MacPhail's name will be floated as a candidate. In fact, within minutes of the official announcement, at least one writer mentioned MacPhail as a replacement possibility.

It was a year of soaring highs and mind-numbing lows in local sports. And of course when you talk about the lows, at least on a tragicomic level, one name comes instantly to mind: Kegasus. Kegasus, you'll recall, was the flabby centaur with a nipple ring and 1980s Hells Angels hair at the center of the Preakness infield ad campaign. He (it?) urged race-goers to be "Be Legendary" in their partying, presumably by getting mega-hammered and waking up hours later, wondering where they left their pants.

Desperately lagging in the world baseball market, the Orioles are attempting to step up their international efforts, and this weekend might serve as a primary example of that change in philosophy. An Orioles contingent — to include manager Buck Showalter, new executive director of international recruiting Fred Ferreira, international operations director David Stockstill and new bullpen coach and Dominican Republic native Bill Castro — will attend a private workout Saturday morning in the Dominican by 26-year-old outfielder Yoenis Cespedes, a Cuban defector.

Dan Duquette hasn't revealed a whole lot about the backroom machinations that are taking place during his first winter meetings as the Orioles' new baseball operations guru, but it's fairly obvious that he wants to make something happen before his front office contingent heads back to Baltimore on Thursday. The big question is whether he has enough inventory to acquire a significant player or two without putting a big dent in the team's youth movement. "I think we have the wherewithal to make a couple of deals," Duquette said during his news briefing Tuesday evening.

New Orioles executive vice president Dan Duquette has begun the reconstruction of his front office, announcing the hiring of a new amateur scouting director Monday while re-assigning pro scouting director Lee MacPhail IV, one of the top lieutenants in the club's previous regime. Long-time scout Gary Rajsich, who was most recently the Toronto Blue Jays professional crosschecker and spent years with Duquette in Boston, was officially named to replace Joe Jordan, who left the Orioles' amateur scouting post in October to join the Philadelphia Phillies.

New Orioles executive vice president Dan Duquette has been working this week to bolster his front office, and now, at least theoretically, he'll have another hole to fill. Matt Klentak, the club's 31-year-old director of baseball operations, accepted an assistant general manager position with the Los Angeles Angels on Wednesday. He will be working directly with new Angels GM Jerry Dipoto, who interviewed in October for the Orioles' top executive job that eventually went to Duquette earlier this month.

Despite interviewing candidates Eric Wedge and Bobby Valentine earlier this week, there is no guarantee that the Orioles managerial search finishes before this season concludes, said club president of baseball operations Andy MacPhail . "I don't know how it is going to play out. We don't know how long it is going to go, too many variables," MacPhail said. "You just made an interim change and then you look at the landscape. I think it depends on your pool of candidates, where you are in the process, how comfortable you are with what your options are."

After more than a week of speculation since the end of the season, Andy MacPhail is indeed stepping down as the Orioles' president of baseball operations after four-plus years at the helm, according to a club source. MacPhail is leaving the Orioles to tend to family and personal obligations, the source said. UPDATE: The Orioles on Saturday announced MacPhail's departure in a news release. "On behalf of the Orioles organization, I thank Andy for his service to the club over the last four and a half seasons," Orioles owner Peter Angelos said in a statement.

The Orioles organization announced this past week that they are bringing the "cartoon bird" back. In reality, the current state of this club is no laughing matter. Dan Duquette was recently named the executive vice president of the team. There may a change in the front office, but more years of mediocrity lay ahead for the Birds, who struggle mightily each season to achieve a .500 record. Andy MacPhail left a frustrated man, not being able to change the fortunes of the club during his tenure here.

Standing alone at a podium in the sixth-floor conference room at Camden Yards on Tuesday morning, new Orioles executive vice president Dan Duquette proclaimed why he is the right man for such a challenging — some might say perilous — job. "I'm a builder," said Duquette, 53, who helped turn around the Montreal Expos and Boston Red Sox franchises but hasn't been in major league baseball since being fired by the Red Sox in 2002. "This is right up my alley, frankly — turning around a ballclub and building a farm and scouting system.