Pic of the Week

Wednesday's game in Baltimore. The three figures seated
behind home plate are scouts

So they played a game without the fans Wednesday in Baltimore. That was hardly ideal, but there were clearly greater concerns in that city last week than baseball.

One of my colleagues questioned why they played the game at all. My response: For the same reason they'll wait three hours for an April storm to pass and then play a sloppy, soggy contest in front of 3,000 shivering fans. It's on the schedule, and most if not all inter-division opponents only come to town the once. That was the case this week in Baltimore with the Chicago White Sox. They found a day when the Sox can return to "Charm City" for a doubleheader to make up the games lost on Monday and Tuesday, but nobody wants to make a second one-day trip to play one game if it can be avoided.

So they played a day game Wednesday to beat the curfew, played it in front of TV cameras, assembled media, three scouts and a revolving cast of Baltimoreans trying to get a glimpse through the locked entrance gates.

This hasn't happened before. There have been games postponed for riots, certainly -- 1967 in Detroit for example -- but not a contest in which the fans were barred for safety reasons. Let us hope it doesn't happen again,

Pic of the Week

Baltimore's Nate McLouth is carried by teammate Chris
Davis after McLouth's single drove home the game-winner
in the bottom of the ninth Wednesday.

The Baltimore Orioles aren't supposed to be here, neck and neck with the mighty Yankees at the top of the AL East.

Nate McLouth and Lew Ford aren't supposed to be playing major roles on a pennant contender either, but there they are.

The O's entered Saturday's play having scored 625 runs — and having allowed 646. Being outscored on the season by such a margin means they should be below .500.

But they are outplaying their Pythagorean record by 11 games.

They've done this by somehow winning 13 straight extra-inning games. They've done this by going 27-8 in one run games, while falling short of .500 (22-23) in blowouts. This is exactly the opposite of what truly good teams do. The good teams blow opponents away and take more of their losses in close games —win easy, lose hard. The O's are doing it backwards, and making it work.

Sabermetrically, the Orioles' season is impossible. But there it is.

This is a concept that I intend to someday be organized enough to expound upon: There are two kinds of statistics, "results" stats and "process" stats. Result stats tell us what happened; process stats tell us how it happened.

They both matter, but in different ways. The Orioles have piled up 81 wins, and at this point appear destined for the postseason. Those are real wins, and the Orioles don't, and shouldn't, care how they got those wins.

The sabermetric stuff that says they aren't that good — that matters too, in the context of the future and player evaluation. If Baltimore wins the AL East — and I certainly hope they do, because that means the Yankees won't — management should be savvy enough to recognize that the same formula is not going to work in 2013. 

Minding your O's and R's

It may be difficult to believe, but there was a time when baseball almost lost me.

It was the late 1970s-early '80s, the period between the Rod Carew trade (the fallout of Calvin Griffith's infamous Waseca speech — "I'll tell you why we moved to Minnesota. It was when we found out you only had 15,000 blacks here'') and the beginning of the Kirby Puckett-Kent Hrbek era.

The team was bad, the owner was unwilling or unable to evolve, the old Met appeared ready to fall apart and then was replaced by the Metrodome ... it was really difficult to be a Twins fan. It was too easy to wonder if the organization was trying.

Griffith chose to ignore free agency. He essentially punted the draft. A book on scouting published in the early 1980s described a "Twins draft" as an unathletic white guy, probably a college senior, with no or little negotiating leverage — Bryan Oelkers and Mike Sodders and Eddie Bane.

I never accepted Sid Hartman's defense of this — that Griffith had no choice, that it just wasn't possible for him to compete in the free agency era. (It was the early version of "small market" whining.)

I didn't accept it because there were these two teams in the American League, the Kansas City Royals and the Baltimore Orioles, that had at least similar financial strictures and thrived anyway. The Orioles didn't try to outbid the Yankees for free agents, but they won 90-plus games every year. The Royals dominated the Western Division despite a smaller population to draw fans from. The O's and the R's knew what they were doing.

The Orioles went to the World Series in 1979 and lost, went again in 1983 and won. The Royals went to the World Series in 1980 and lost, went again in 1985 and won.

And now? Out in Baltimore Andy MacPhail – who started the process of building the current Twins operation in 1986 — is trying to revive the old "Oriole Way," which is the basic template for what the Twins have been doing for the past decade. He has some big obstacles — the Yankees and Red Sox have a much larger financial advantage over the Orioles than they did when Paul Richards started building the Orioles operation, and it took a long time for that effort to come to fruition.

But at least there's signs of progress there. Kansas City is just a complete mess.

It's a cycle. Teams rise and fall, and few, no matter their resources, can outspend their mistakes. (The Yankees have, but they also don't make all that many mistakes either.) Managerial competency — field manager and general manager — count for a lot. Ownership that allows competent management is rarer than you might think. (There's probably a MBA thesis in that thought.)

There's a part of me saddened by the lowly status of the Orioles and Royals, because the young me thought they were model franchises. But baseball's a zero-sum game; the wins and losses have to even up, and not everybody can win 90 games every season. If the Twins are winning, somebody has to lose.

Perhaps in another 30 years the Twins will be the downtrodden again and those of us still around will wonder why they can't thrive like the O's and R's.