Baseball Prospectus

I had no clue. When I look back at the ways I judged pitchers in my first few years of fantasy baseball, that's how I sum it up. Sure, I had read my Bill James, so I knew that strikeout-to-walk ratio was a better predictor of wins than winning percentage itself. But the numbers by which we're taught to rate pitchers are surprisingly crude. Wins and ERA, the primary statistics considered in Cy Young Award voting, depend on many factors that have little to do with how well a pitcher throws.

When Orioles president of baseball operations Andy MacPhail headed into this offseason, he had an extensive wish list of upgrades for 2010. The coming season is supposed to be more about wins and losses than player development, he proclaimed in September. MacPhail's focus included a top-of-the-rotation starter, one or two right-handed hitters to play the corner infield positions, an established late-inning reliever and perhaps more bullpen help. Position-wise, anyway, each goal was met - MacPhail traded for veteran starter Kevin Millwood, signed first baseman Garrett Atkins, third baseman Miguel Tejada and closer Mike Gonzalez, and re-signed versatile left-hander Mark Hendrickson.

JUPITER, Fla. -- Daniel Cabrera has entered the Orioles' clubhouse on most mornings this spring and walked quietly to his locker, his face mostly expressionless, his eyes staring straight ahead. It's not as if a 6-foot-9, 270-pound pitcher needs to announce his presence when he walks into the room. But the old Daniel Cabrera would greet teammates and reporters with playful refrains of "Good morning" and "Hi, guys." The new Daniel Cabrera does none of that. The Orioles are just hopeful his all-business attitude extends to the mound.

Orioles manager Buck Showalter and acting bench coach John Russell wanted to deliver the news to Matt Wieters, but there was the small matter of finding the young catcher on a day the players didn't have to report until much later. Their search took all of a couple of seconds. About four hours before the series finale with the Atlanta Braves on Sunday, Wieters was stationed in front of his laptop in the visiting clubhouse at Turner Field, watching scouting tape of the Texas Rangers hitters the Orioles will face Monday.

It is not a two-, three- or fouryear plan that the Orioles front office says it is operating under. Club officials are not asking their frustrated fan base for patience while trying to sell it on the merits of another tedious rebuilding process. As the team's 2006 season begins tomorrow at Camden Yards with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in town, executives are maintaining - at least publicly - that the Orioles can win now in the unforgiving American League East. "We're not just looking at this season and saying that we are waiting for next year," said Orioles executive vice president Mike Flanagan, who presided over a front office makeover this offseason.

The Orioles are having their best season on the field in eight years. But the surprisingly strong start -- which had the team in first place for two months -- has not translated into an attendance bump. In fact, if the average attendance of 32,470 (through Friday) holds, it would be the second-lowest since the team moved to Camden Yards in 1992. How to explain these seemingly counterintuitive numbers? For many Bird watchers, the culprit is obvious: the Washington Nationals. Team officials, local business leaders and an economist say the team's new neighbor to the south is sucking away Washington-area baseball lovers, who used to make up as much as a quarter of the Orioles' fan base.

Baltimore is blessed with a bunch of talented sports bloggers who bring their unique perspective to the conversation. I often link up to these local writers in my morning Coffee Companion posts, but instead of just exchanging anti-social links with them, I have decided to be slightly less anti-social by exchanging emails with them in a somewhat regular feature called Blogger on Blogger. Today's blogger is Daniel Moroz of Camden Crazies , one of the many outstanding Orioles blogs in the Baltimore blogosphere.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -Orioles pitching coach Rick Kranitz stood stoically behind the group of mounds, his arms folded, his eyes fixed on the future that was now so tantalizingly close. Brian Matusz snapped off a curveball from one mound and Brad Bergesen threw his sinker from another. Minutes later, Chris Tillman and Jake Arrieta fired fastballs into outstretched mitts, the popping sound audible on the back fields at the Orioles' spring training complex. Most members of what scouts consider one of the best pitching prospect groups in all of baseball are here at Fort Lauderdale Stadium this spring, throwing bullpen sessions, getting into the occasional Grapefruit League game and familiarizing themselves with an organization that is counting so heavily on their development.

I ATTENDED BASEBALL camp at Gettysburg College when I was still in elementary school. One rainy afternoon, we were trapped inside and a coach asked if anybody knew which Hall-of-Famer had come from Gettysburg. I shot my hand up and blurted "Eddie Plank." The man looked at me like I was an alien. He had meant the question rhetorically, I suppose. "Yeah, he won 326 games for the old Philadelphia Athletics," I added helpfully. Another stunned look from coach. Little did I know, but in that exchange and many others like it, I was revealing myself as a baseball "geek" - a kid so obsessed with baseball and its statistics that I would look for any possible way to connect with the game.