Oriole fans have now watched a team helmed by Dave Trembley for most of a season. We've watched as Dave had some initial success, followed by the traditional Late-Season Swoon the Orioles have patented in recent years (though this year the Royals seem to have absconded the formula and started their push in May), an off-season semi-purge, a well-organized and purposeful Spring Training, and over a third of the 2008 season. We've watched as Dave deals with the media, umpires, and his players. We've experienced his recommendation of pitching coach Rick Kranitz, who has turned the pitching staff 180 degrees (one has to wonder if Kranitz' success has taken even more luster off of the well-meaning but moribund approach of Leo Mazzone.) Despite the terrible baserunning of the club under his watch and going with 'roles' instead of 'matchups', overall we've witnessed a solid managerial performance since Day One. It will be interesting to see how things will be if DT has better players at his disposal in seasons to come.

For now, let's take a look back at the parallels of his hiring and that of one of my all-time favorite coaches. What both of these hires say to me is - you can plan and think and dream, but there's a lot of luck involved in sports, and in life. The ultimate measure of success is what one does with those special people when they fall into your lap.

I wrote this in July of last season, before the Orioles' Swoon of 2007. It appears to be more relevant today than before...I only hope its re-introduction doesn't begat another long losing string :

If you think the O's are in a bad way, their tribulations of the past decade are a drop in the bucket in comparison to the losing ways of my alma mater's basketball team through most of the school's history. The University of Richmond, then a member of the less-than-stellar Southern Conference (the Southern's two minutes of glory were in the late fifties under Jerry West's West Virginia Mountaineers, and the powerhouse Davidson teams that put Lefty Dreisell on the road to the University of Maryland a decade later), put together a total of two winning seasons between 1945 and 1970. That's two. Over twenty-five-plus years. And by 'winning', I mean 15 and 14 games, not 20.

It didn't help that their home court was a converted trolley car storage facility located five miles off-campus, though the distant home did seem to keep the pressure off the coaches - out of sight, out of mind. (Actually, one of the more surreal moments in my sporting life occurred there; the inaugural ABA Virginia Squires played five home games at The Arena, as I watched Charlie Scott, Rick Barry, Mel Daniels, and Dan Issel doing battle in a dark and dusty 4000-seat trolley car barn.)

The Spiders' home court changed with the opening of the Richmond Coliseum in 1971. Fans began showing up at games, and the newspaper actually covered them. Their fortunes on the hardwood, however, remained the same. Lew Mills, an amicable balding alumnus-coach, carried on the long-standing losing tradition he helped establish as a player some twenty years prior.

The stakes went even higher as the University opened a glistening new 10,000 seat arena on campus, the Robins Center. Students attended the games for the first time; they didn't like what they saw. By the end of that season, Mills was booed on a regular basis. After the next season, Lew was out, the first Richmond basketball coach fired in thirty years. (Lew went on to success as the athletic director of then-small time crosstown urban Virginia Commonwealth University.) Carl Sloane, his replacement, had been successful at George Washington. He did bring in a more accomplished level of athlete, but he took on some troubled/risky kids. Three grand larceny and four assault arrests later, the Carl Sloane Era came to a disappointing end after three years and one winning season.

Where to turn next? Why, to the Flavor of the Month, of course. Bill Foster revived Duke's moribund program that had fallen on hard times under Bucky Waters; schools like Richmond looked to his assistants as potential answers. In this case, Lou Goetz was his name, and the running game was his claim to fame. Foster raved about Goetz' innovative and aggressive offense, but there was one problem - Richmond didn't have Mike Gminski,  Jim Spanarkel, or Eugene Banks.

Any coach will tell you the worst thing you can do with non-athletic personnel is run with the ball. But the Spiders did, running into one turnover and ill-fated shot after another, and, being too small on the boards, were vulnerable to cherry-picking on the other end. The Goetz era was ugly -11 wins the first year, 9 the second.

At the cusp of the final season of his three-year deal, Goetz stepped down, citing burnout. What could Richmond do for a coach in September? They shrugged their shoulders and promoted Goetz's top assistant, long-time New Jersey high school coach Dick Tarrant. Tarrant had been Goetz's high school coach, but was running a scouting service in the Northeast when Goetz tapped him as an assistant. Tarrant was already in his fifties; the parade had passed him by. But the university had little choice but to write off the coming season and begin a new coaching search.

But a funny thing happened.

The school had scheduled an opener with Wake Forest that season, assuming that in Goetz's third year they would be ready to take on such a formidable foe. The Demon Deacons came in ranked #18 in the pre-season polls. A packed house watched with the expectation of at least seeing a ranked team, a rare occurrence in Richmond at that time. The Spiders, playing heady basketball, beat the Deacons in a close game. But as it turned out, this wasn't really an upset as much as a harbinger.

The Spiders won 18 games that season, and Tarrant's 'interim' label was removed. They made the NIT, and two seasons later, they made the unthought-of promised land, the NCAA's, for the first time, beating the Charles Barkley - Chuck Person Auburn Tigers in the first round, the first of several giant-killer performances on the big stage. They even reached the Sweet Sixteen by defeating defending national champ Indiana and a powerhouse Georgia Tech club. The Dick Tarrant Years, with 9 postseason berths in 12 seasons, were the most luminous the program had ever experienced (or probably will ever experience, because a younger coach would have moved on to greener pastures, as happened with their other successful coach, John Beilein.)

What does this have to do with the Orioles?

Plenty, maybe. Hopefully.

Dave Trembley reminds me a lot of Tarrant, a baseball lifer who has been overlooked for various reasons, but whose managing pedigree shows up from the day he gets the job. There's something about leadership and savvy that can show itself very early in the process. I never saw it in Ray Miller, and certainly never saw it in Maz, (who might have been the worst manager I ever saw this side of Maury Wills) and Sammy, though a great guy, just didn't seem to have the aura, either. But I think Trembley does.

Could Trembley be the O's Tarrant, thrust into greatness by the hand of fate?

I hope we have a chance to find out, because I think he might be.