Was this season a success? No. Was it more exciting to watch than in past years? Yes.

Cross your fingers for ’09

dan the man Says:
Jones – Success.
Sherrill – Success.
Albers – Success.
Sarfate – Success.
Scott – Success.

Johnson – Success.
Huff – Success.
Guthrie – Success.
Roberts – Success.
Mora – Success.
Markakis – Success.

Tillman, Arrieta, Wieters, Matusz, Mickolio, Snyder, Reimold, Montanez – Success.

Andy MacPhail made trades, reaped the benefits, added depth, hired some good organizational guys, honored the WS teams, brought back the retro bird, put Baltimore on the jerseys, got rid of Jay Gibbons, came up with a real plan for this organization, and allowed Dave Trembley to change the ethos of this team by holding players accountable and preaching pride and respect. Success.

This year is a success because AA Bowie was a success. By the way, I’ll be there on Wednesday for Game 1 of the playoffs.

Sci is right, we didn’t find one god damned major league quality starter this year from AAA. And that sucks. But that doesn’t mean the season is a failure. It just means those players aren’t who we thought they were – yet. There’s still hope for Olson and Liz. But the real major league quality pitchers aren’t ready to be brought up yet. Andy knows now that this organization is in real bad shape. He’s had one full year now to evaluate some shit and you know he’s going to make the right moves.

My biggest problem with this year is that we have not discovered one legitimate major league starter. We knew Guthrie was good, so this isn’t a surprise. But it’s now questionable whether Cabrera is even a decent #5 starter, so that’s a huge negative. And after that things have been just awful. Not a legit 4 or 5 in the bunch, in my opinion. Maybe, maybe Liz will be OK, but he hasn’t shown it this year. So in that sense the year has been a complete failure. The minors are looking better for sure, but we’re talking about the major league team, right?

And these swoons just kill the fan base. It’s brutal. So until we eliminate these end-of-the-season swoons, we will not have a truly successful season.

In some ways. I think for the minor leagues it was a great step forward. As an organization, I think it was productive. A success? If the Rays make the World Series and lose in game 7, is the Rays season a success? I think that’s an argument I’d have to make.

With that logic, no.. this season was not a success but I believe that we accomplished a lot with very little. We finally saw some games in HD. We signed some young talent from Venezuela to kickstart our international scouting efforts. The trades, don’t have to really talk about those. The offense spark in the second half.

Overall I was very happy with the Orioles for the first 2/3rds, I liked to see people don the black and orange apparel again, it was nice to see some people get excited about baseball again. I’m pretty happy about the Orioles right now and for the future.

No. Failure. But I certainly liked what I saw for 66% of the season. Pitching, pitching, pitching.