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What did you expect? he asked himself: a Baltimore Orioles season preview

Pity the wretch, but do not cry for him. He is the sum of all his sins.

Stoner is a fictional biography written in the 1960s by one of the millions of humans who have gone by the name John Williams. It is a tragically beautiful portrait of an ordinary intellectual-type who became an ordinary college professor who lived an ordinary life. It really speaks to me.

There's a few lines at the end as the title character pensively reflects:

Dispassionately, reasonably, he contemplated the failure that his life must appear to be. He had wanted friendship and the closeness of friendship that might hold him in the race of mankind; he had had two friends, one of whom had died senselessly before he was known, the other of whom had now withdrawn so distantly into the ranks of the living that...

He had wanted the singleness and the still connective passion of marriage; he had had that, too, and he had not known what to do with it, and it had died. He had wanted love; and he had had love, and had relinquished it, had let it go into the chaos of potentiality. Katherine, he thought. "Katherine."

And he had wanted to be a teacher, and he had become one; yet he knew, he had always known, that for most of his life he had been an indifferent one. He had dreamed of a kind of integrity, of a kind of purity that was entire; he had found compromise and the assaulting diversion of triviality. He had conceived wisdom, and at the end of the long years he had found ignorance. And what else? he thought. What else?

What did you expect? he asked himself.

I read the book a few years back on the recommendation of your pal and mine Cy Schourek and that passage has stuck with me ever since. I'm reminded of it often and it has become something of a sweet, resigned elegy for me.

I was reminded of it again when I sat down here to write about the Orioles.

What Did They Do This Winter?

2018 is a big fat red-letter year for the Orioles. Manny Machado, probably the best Oriole since Ripken, will be a free agent after this season. The same goes for Adam Jones and Zach Britton. Also, importantly, it is the final year on the contracts of manager Buck Showalter and General Manager Dan Duquette. If ever the Orioles had every reason to put on their sunglasses and jam the pedal through the floorboard, now is the time to do it.

They didn't.

Now, it is worth mentioning that they had quite a ways to go to get the team to contention. Reds fans can sympathize. The O's had the worst rotation in baseball last year by ERA. Worse than the Reds, even. Pity the wretched fools. But going into the winter, there were two obvious paths they could trek: they could trade Machado for a stack of star prospects (he would certainly have commanded a handsome ransom) or they could keep him for this last year and really go for it. They decided to keep Machado, but they didn't really go for it, either. What do they expect, I ask them.

Their rotation needs a lot of work, so they signed Andrew Cashner. They also brought back Chris Tillman, who was so bad last season that vultures ate his hat numerous times, mistaking him for carrion. They just recently signed Alex Cobb, who will surely help. But dang. They needed to really make some big moves if they wanted to keep up with the Red Sox and Yankees and I just don't think Cobb will be enough.

Starting Lineup

C Caleb Joseph
1B Chris Davis
2B Johnathan Schoop
3B Tim Beckham
SS Manny Machado
LF Trey Mancini
CF Adam Jones
RF Colby Rasmus
DH Mark Trumbo

If you wanna give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they tried really really hard to shore up the rotation but just couldn't get the right deals done, you might then assume that they would turn their sights on the lineup to try to get better there. But their only remarkable addition is Colby Rasmus, he of startling platoon splits and limited upside.

Machado is finally moving to his natural shortstop now that JJ Hardy is no longer with them. That's gonna be really fun to watch because no man of this planet can confidently say he is a better third baseman than Machado is. Trey Mancini was third in AL ROY voting last year, which is neat.

The phantoms poisoning the nightmares of Baltimore fans are the aged and gaunt erstwhile sluggers Davis and Trumbo. In 2015 Davis led the league in home runs with 47, so the O's signed him for a ton of money. In 2016, Trumbo led the league in home runs with 47, so the O's signed him for less than they did Davis but still a lot. In 2017, the two combined for -0.6 bWAR. They are both 32 years of age and the Orioles are furiously weeping and pleading for them to not be so old yet.

Rotation

Alex Cobb
Kevin Gausman
Dylan Bundy
Chris Tillman
Andrew Cashner

Orioles fans have been waiting for centuries for Gausman and Bundy to fulfill their impressive potential. So far they've been about league average, which is disappointing. If the two of them plus Cobb can give them 30 starts apiece and solidly above-average numbers, they could actually have something interesting. Anything less is just not going to do it, though. Gabriel Ynoa is an interesting young arm here, too.

Bullpen

Zach Britton
Brad Brach
Darren O'Day
Miguel Castro
Mychal Givens
Richard Bleier

For all the weaknesses we have documented so far, the bullpen is an actual strength of this team. Zach Britton is one of the best left arms going right now, but unfortunately he ruptured his Achilles tendon over the winter and probably will not pitch until June. Brach, O'Day, and Givens are the kind of nondescript dominant bullpen arms that one can very easily overlook. The Orioles lost 87 games last season, and given how the rotation performed, they probably could easily have lost 100 if it weren't for these fellas quietly dominating the late innings.

Outlook

What did you expect, I asked them. The Orioles finished last in the AL East last season and did very little to improve. Adam Jones is a treasure and Machado is a generational talent, and the Orioles owe it to those guys to do any damn thing. They could have traded them to contenders are tried to rebuild a beleaguered farm system or they could have gone out and got some pitchers to help them out, but they didn't really do that, either. It's a shame, really. Machado is going to be a Yankee or some bullshit next season and Orioles fans will continue a long tradition of feeling exactly how Orioles fans have felt for 30 years. Their one solace is that maybe Duquette and Showalter will move on and they can get a braintrust worth trusting.