Because of my concern that the following piece would be seen as something akin to wallowing in the pessimism of an abbreviated downturn, it was my intention to post this column during an Orioles winning streak.  Those have been non-existent of late so, rather than waiting out the present stretch of poor play, I threw caution to the wind, so to speak.  The reason for posting this piece when things were going well was to make it clear that the forthcoming sentiments are not merely the function of the club's poor play on the field at the moment; they are the function of years of redundancy on the part of those in charge of running the Orioles franchise.  But now--because on top of everything else, the 2007 season has turned into yet another complete train wreck more than a month before the All-Star break--you'll just have to take my word for it.

Over the past few years, your friendly neighborhood Webmaster (Bob Bryant) and I have mused on the difficulty of writing for this site.  We've discussed it publicly in message board notes; we've exchanged thoughts by private e-mails and in the occasional direct conversation.  Regardless of the specific medium, the common thread to these discussions, the reason that writing columns for this site is such a difficult endeavor is...nothing ever really changes with regard to the subject to which the site is dedicated.  Some of the specifics change--names, dates, exact events--but the thrust behind all these things remains numbingly consistent and predictable.  How often can one write the same thing over and over again without driving himself stark raving mad?

I don't know the answer to that question.  But...

A few weeks ago, for no particular reason, I was browsing through the Calculus archives (in case you didn't know, all the Belfry's articles are archived; mine are here, Bob's are here) and realized that, to some extent, writing this column has been something like a less interesting version of the film Groundhog Day.  I've been writing what amounts to the same column over and over and over again for the last six-odd years.  In reverse chronological order, there's "Britton for Wright," "No Quick Fixes," "A Crisis of Credibility," "It Doesn't Get Any Worse Than This," "The Organization that Snoozes Loses," "Strategy, Tactics and the Road to Nowhere," "Strategy?  Strategy?  We Don't Need No Steenkeeng Strategy!"  The dates and the titles change, but the theme doesn't:  the franchise has fallen and it can't get up.  

Underlying all of the above, the club--or more accurately those who run it--seem utterly clueless in their attempts to recognize what to do about it.  Instead, the same failed, entirely bankrupt "strategy" is dusted off, year after year, given a dubious spit shine, and trotted out for the whole world to see.  And, as sure as the sun rises in the east every morning here on Planet Earth, the strategy fails.  Year after life-sucking year.

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It's natural to spend some time focusing on the trees rather than the forest.  It helps pass the time, if nothing else.  This year's trees have withered and died before the official start of summer.  And so we rail at the almost universally incompetent, underachieving performance of the 2007 Orioles' offense.  We scream and berate the breathtaking, clockwork regularity of the bullpen's collective collapse.  We speculate about the likelihood of the club's manager retaining his job, whether he deserves to preserve his position and the possible replacements the Warehouse might hire if he's axed.

We do all of these things because we are--heaven help us--dedicated, incorrigible fans of this team and that's what fans do.

But in the greater scheme of things, I submit, none of it really matters.  It's worth keeping in mind that this season--just the latest in what has become a very long string--is nothing more than a chronic symptom of an embedded, untreated disease.

Earlier this year, much time and effort was spent discussing whether the Orioles had what it takes to finish above .500 in 2007.  While this figurative ship has all but departed the dock for good, let's say, just for kicks, that the Orioles will win 82 or 83 games this season.  I ask:  what then?  What would that accomplish?  Quite frankly, other than allowing us to stop saying that this is the Nth consecutive year that the Orioles have finished below .500, my argument is that it would achieve nothing at all because this wouldn't be a team on the rise.  This would be a team on a plateau or a down slope.  It was a team built with the hope of eking out a winning record and little else.  It certainly was never a club that was assembled to take the next step--and it's a giant one--from break even to contention.

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Four or five years ago, during the early part of the Orioles Fantasy Camp week in Sarasota, I was talking with a long-time camper who has a number of unofficial contacts in the Warehouse.  Based on his informal discussions with these people over a long period of time, he told me, he had written off any chance of the Orioles ever turning around their fortunes as long as the present ownership structure was in place.  I took these comments somewhat seriously because of what I knew about the person making them and the manner in which they were made; the remarks were presented calmly, but firmly, with no hyperbole of any kind, and the person making them was not the reactionary sort at all.  I had harbored thoughts similar to his, but I wasn't yet ready to completely throw in the towel back then.

I've hinted at what immediately follows repeatedly publicly and I've explicitly stated it privately.  Now I'm going to marry the public and explicit part:  

As my fantasy camp acquaintance told me years ago, this franchise has no chance to right itself under its present ownership.  

I do not make that statement lightly; I do not make it without a great deal of consideration.

If present ownership was capable of doing what needed to be done, we would--at the very, very least--have seen the seeds of such evidence by now.  We haven't.  We haven't seen any indication that the Orioles' ownership even understands what needs to be done to give the franchise a chance to turn itself around much less actually begun the successful process of doing so.  

That is a fundamental disaster.  

In what appears more and more likely with every passing day to be a tenth straight losing season--and what is, in any event, surely a tenth straight non-contending season--the inability to recognize the pattern that underlies the sub-mediocrity inflicted by this franchise on its supporters is stupefying in its obtuseness.

I know I sound like a broken record, but...what else is there to say?  Teams in the position that the Orioles have found themselves in for years now have two basic choices to make in trying to break the cycle of losing.  

1) They can throw caution to the wind, essentially ignore all fiscal constraints and go full out in an attempt to buy themselves out of trouble with a short-term fix in the form of big money long-term contracts to productive players.  This rarely works.  The Orioles made an attempt of sorts to do this prior to the 2004 season.  It wasn't a full out move, but it was pretty aggressive.  

2)  The alternative is to (hopefully shrewdly) leverage what value they have in established veteran players for inexpensive, young talented prospects while harvesting and (again hopefully wisely) implementing draft picks and signing amateur free agents not susceptible to the draft process to build up a farm system that will pay long-term dividends.  The latter strategy is almost always painful in the short-term and doesn't come with a money back guarantee of success but it provides the best--nay, the only--true hope for sustained competitiveness.  It is in my view the only true solution for this franchise, and I've said so ad nauseum.  It's a strategy that really should have been attempted at least as far back as 1999.  During the losing skein that is now well into its tenth year, the Orioles have never seriously attempted to implement this approach.

What the Orioles have done, in effect, is implement Plan C; they have straddled the above ideas.  They have never seriously attempted to rebuild.  The closest thing to a rebuilding attempt--and it was a half-hearted ineffectual one at that--was at the trading deadline in 2000.  The Orioles have continuously sacrificed youth and potential for aging, physically suspect veterans of dubious skill, have given multi-year contracts to declining players and/or players of questionable talent and have failed to leverage the utility of players of high value prepared to walk away.  

All of these patterns demonstrate a franchise that doesn't appear to know what it wants to do other than to avoid doing what it needs to do.  It demonstrates a franchise that is afraid to appear to fail and in so doing guarantees failure.

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I believe--I do not know--that there are two important components to what underlies the Orioles' current carousel of losing.  The first is that the owner won't rebuild.  And let's face it, convincing someone like Peter Angelos of the merits of a rebuilding plan has to be a tough sell.  "Mr. Angelos, we have to unload all the players on this team with a pedigree for young unknowns.  We have to tear this entire team down to the foundation and rebuild it.  This is going to take years.  And we're almost certainly to see worse performance on the field, very possibly for two or three years...or more...before things have a chance to get better.  Oh, and one more thing.  It might not work.  Ever."  The response is likely to come in the form of:  "the problem isn't the strategy itself...we're just not executing it properly.  We're not getting the right players to fix the holes we've got.  If we could just get the right mix of guys, we'll be right up there, fighting for a postseason spot."  It's got to be pretty easy to convince yourself that this crock of bull is true, particularly when it's what you want to hear and the alternative is so unappetizing.  And especially when you're Peter Angelos who, I believe, so desperately wants to avoid being tagged as the guy who presided over the nadir of baseball in the City of Baltimore.  That's where we're at right now and for someone like Angelos--Baltimore native, hailed as the conquering hero when he purchased the ball club from indifferent carpetbagger Eli Jacobs and reigned over the club's return to the playoff promised land in 1996-97 after 13 years in the wilderness during a period of unprecedented fan support and interest that seemed to solidify the club's legacy in Charm City, and that of Angelos along with it--it must be especially difficult to buy into the notion of deferring any chance to win.  Add to all of this the fact that presently Angelos is one of the more reviled figures in Maryland who, given his age and ego, must be scared witless that he will forever be remembered by most, given our society's displaced attention to sports, as the man who turned the "once proud" Orioles franchise into something halfway between a laughingstock and utter irrelevance.  Never mind whatever else he's done in his life, this is what he'll be remembered for in popular cultural history.  This is the person who's going to submit to the dicey proposition of a long-term rebuilding plan?  I think not.  The longer the Orioles struggle under the Angelos ownership group, somewhat paradoxically, the less likely it is that a rebuilding plan will be adopted.  And since the re-implementation of the self-evidently failed strategy is what will take place, the more likely it is that the Orioles will continue to struggle.  This is our version of the perpetual motion machine.

There is another component to this; it would seem that the people that Mr. Angelos has hired to front the franchise's baseball operations have, to at least some degree, drunk the Kool-Aid because there's been a rather disconcerting tendency for the baseball folks to grossly overestimate the talent they actually have to work with and to routinely misjudge the value of the talent they've acquired.  Note the two-part nature of this component.  The Orioles, in recent years, have never been anywhere near having the nucleus around which to build a contending club.  The position player end of the pool has been palpably shallow, both qualitatively and quantitatively.  The pitching staff has been more of a projective concept than a real life asset.  Add to this the fact that the pieces that have been added to "fill the holes" have often been holes themselves.  We're seeing all of this in spades this season, but 2007 has hardly been a unique instance in this regard.

What the Orioles have been doing for lo these many years is poorly executing a systematically bad strategy.  That's a lethal combination.

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This franchise needs new ownership--the sooner the better--and the change in direction and personnel that come with it, not to mention the commensurate good will from the alienated fan base that a new ownership group would engender.  The alternative is more of the same misguided approach with its concomitant (largely) feckless implementation that we've grown to know and loathe over the past decade. 

Unfortunately--and you knew this was coming--I have little hope of this happening; selling the club would simply cement the legacy that Angelos so desperately wants to avoid, thereby making it anathema to him.

I fear that we have little to look forward to but a seemingly endless supply of "more of the same."  Some new names, some new dates, a new manager, in all likelihood, but the same tiresome old results.  

We seem doomed to be conducting essentially the same conversations five years from now that we were conducting five years ago.  Cinch it up and hunker down, boys and girls; it's going to be a long, long winter.

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