Hendrickson doesn’t give you a ton of innings (we can probably expect 140-150 unless he has a major injury). He won’t give you much in the way of strikeouts (probably around 90 in ’09), but he also won’t walk everyone who steps into the box (about 50). And he doesn’t give up too many home runs, which is always good. With our strong defense (pending a first baseman) we might – MIGHT – get lucky with Mark Hendrickson.

So we’re getting a 1.5 WHIP guy to throw 150 innings of below average ball. Sounds like Steve Trachsel part deux. Looking at the numbers does little to cheer me up about Hendrickson. But here’s the stupid part: this is clearly an improvement over Daniel Cabrera. Yes, we made a bad signing and improved, albeit marginally – think about it like that.

The improvement is probably going to be mostly unnoticeable, and with an expected Huff regression, it looks like as of today the Orioles are again a 70 win team, pending Kawakami/Looper/dear god let there be someone else. I’m assuming here that we sign either Millar or Mientkiewicz or someone like that to play a good first base and not hit a lick.

I was looking at some of our minor league pitching numbers, too, and there’s a little hope for some replacement pitchers in July/August/September to avoid yet another season-ending slump. Bergesen and Hernandez had genuinely good seasons – there’s a little worry in my head that the jump to AAA will show off some of their flaws (which they certainly have despite their great numbers…I’m talking about secondary pitches), but we might see one or both of them later on in 2009.

As for Tillman and Arrieta, there’s still a lot of work to be done, of course. They both had very good numbers in terms of strikeouts and home runs, but the walks were hiiiiiiiigh…that’ll have to come down this year.

Anyway, summing up, Mark Hendrickson is crap, but slightly less crap than the DC Cab was last year. And don’t totally despair, help is definitely on the way.