Last night the Orioles released a statement from Dan Duquette regarding the whole banned from South Korea thing. Here is that statement:

"On behalf of the Orioles organization, I offer a sincere apology to the Korea Baseball Organization and the Korea Baseball Association for the club's unintentional breach of protocol in failing to tender a status check in the process of signing Seong-Min Kim. The Orioles respect Major League Baseball's recruiting policies and the governing bodies and people that contribute to the growth of baseball around the world."

Oh, well, as long as you're sorry.

School of Roch: Duquette on Ramirez and other topics
"Orioles executive vice president Dan Duquette has pretty much dismissed the possibility that he'll sign veteran designated hitter Manny Ramirez." Woooo!!!

Signing Cespedes should be the priority | Baltimore Sports and Life
$60M for a guy who has never played a day in the majors is pretty risky, no?

Camden Depot: Cup of jO's: Orioles Pitcher Whiff Rates
It's a pretty chart!

Obscure Oriole Spotlight: Chris Tremblay
Read about someone you might not have even known existed.

Greetings, everyone. I'm pretty sure none of you know me or have seen me around much because I'm more tuned into Broad Street Hockey, SB's Philadelphia Flyers blog, especially this time of year. One of the things I've been doing while listening to the games for the past several weeks has been coding up a baseball simulation in visual basic. It took a while, and some hairs were pulled out as the bugs were worked out, but I finally got it work and I then ran 1000 iterations of the 1977 American League on it. Why '77? Not sure really, but it does offer some very good teams (KC, NY, BOS, BAL) and some very bad teams (TOR, SEA, OAK). After the jump, I'll discuss what the simulation considers and the results of the 1000 iterations of the 1977 American League.

Continue reading this post »

On Monday's conference call with reporters, the Orioles' Executive Vice President of Baseball Operations, Dan Duquette, talked about how he was still looking to strengthen the bullpen heading into spring training. Fast forward a few days to today, where we now know what he meant by strengthening: as first reported by MASN's Roch Kubatko, the Orioles have signed Luis Ayala, a right-handed reliever, who spent 2011 with the Yankees, accumulating a 2.09 ERA in 52 games spanning 56 innings pitched.

If you're like me, you're probably wondering why a guy with that kind of superficially good stat line was still on the free agent market in February. Diving into the world of Baseball Reference gives us some possibilities as to why. Ayala is 34, so whatever he is, he's probably not changing. And what is Ayala? Well, he had a pretty nice 2011, but let's wind back into the past and look at... oh. Oh God. Back away slowly. Back away, don't make any sudden movements, just back -- RUN FOR YOUR LIVES THEY'RE COMING OH GOD AIEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Where was I? Oh yeah, Ayala's career numbers. Turns out he was a nice surprise find for the Yankees in 2011, perhaps another part of the same Satanic pact that allows them to get the likes of Freddy Garcia and Bartolo Colon at bargain basement prices and turn them into useful pitchers for a season. In 2010, Ayala did not even sniff the major leagues, probably because he spent the whole year in AAA across three different organizations, during which time he put up a 6.42 ERA in 47.2 IP. In 2009 he was in MLB between the Twins and the Marlins, and he had a total of a 5.63 ERA in 40 IP. In 2008 he was with the Nationals and the Mets and he had a 5.71 ERA in 75.2 IP.

So that's probably why Ayala was still on the market to be signed on February 10. Ayala has a career K/BB ratio of 2.63, though last year it was only 1.95 (39 K, 20 BB), which is probably why his FIP was 4.19 against that 2.09 ERA. Reports are that the contract is a major league deal, meaning that there will be a forthcoming DFA to clear room on the 40-man roster. I think if I'm any fringe roster guy that Dan Duquette didn't bring on board, I'm not looking forward to any phone calls for the next couple of hours.

There's no word on the dollar signs involved in the contract, though Fox Sports' Ken Rosenthal thinks there is an option year involved in the deal. Orioles fans can only hope the dollars aren't too high for a guy who had one good year out of the last four.

UPDATE: The Baltimore Sun's Dan Connolly reports that Ayala's contract is worth a guaranteed $925,000 and has a team option for 2013. That's not bad from a money standpoint.

UPDATE 2: To make room for Ayala on the 40-man roster, the Orioles have designated OF Matt Angle for assignment.

Last year, I said that it would be fair to expect the Oriole offense to be significantly better than they were in 2010, by something like 100 runs or so. And that basically happened, as the '11 Orioles scored 95 runs more than their previous iteration. In fact, no other team in the sport improved their offense as much as the Orioles from 2010 to 2011. So much for all of the frustration caused by soul-killing strikeouts and Vladimir Guerrero's poor cleanup hitting, huh?

I've already taken a look at the 2012 bench and made an estimation of it collectively scoring 80 to 100 runs, for a relatively large improvement over the poor bench performance in 2011. Today our focus moves to the starting lineup. This is the performance breakdown of last year's starters:

*As I normally do, I refer to weighted on base average (wOBA), the all-encompassing offensive statistic of choice. Runs Created is derived from it and plate appearances. All data can be found on fangraphs.com.

While Reynolds actually spent time at first and Davis at third, but from an offensive point of view, their position is meaningless. Davis replaced Lee in the lineup. All other players, besides pitchers (who, led by Zach Britton, created 5 runs of their own), figured into the bench part of this project. As a group, the starters totaled 657 runs in 5385 plate appearances.

Continue reading this post »

Exciting times: international scouting kerfuffles! Disgraced sluggers! Nick Johnson. Fear not, friends: picthers and catchers report soon!

Baltimore Orioles beat Pleasanton's Brad Bergesen in salary arbitration - Inside Bay Area It's all in the game, Bergy.

Orioles will have two more scouts on pro assignments - chicagotribune.com Backtracking or all part of the plan?

Camden Depot: Cup of jO's: Joe Mahoney is Tall Yes he is, crawdaddy. Yes he is.

Ex-pitcher Oil Can Boyd admits to pitching while using cocaine - MLB - SI.com I am shocked. Shocked!

Podcast: Dirk Hayhurst talks about Italy, the reality of the big leagues and his new book | Big League Stew - Yahoo! Sports Return of the Garfoose!

Happy birthday to Cesar "Maximum" Izturis.

I'm a big fan of Bundy, the only issue I have regarding him is that his draft demands were too mild. I would've preferred that he request something astronomical, so that he could have slid to the Sox at 19, oh well, can't win 'em all. I wrote about Bundy and Taillon at FakeTeams, the post contains insight from John Sickels of Minor League Ball. You can find that post here.

Below is what Keith Law had to say about Bundy in the top 100 he just released (insider required).

2011 HS STATS

• GM-NA
• IP-71
• W-11
• L-0
• ERA-0.20
• SO-158
• BB-5
• H-20
• HR-NA
• BAA-NA

How advanced is Bundy, a high school pitcher from Oklahoma taken fourth overall in the 2011 Rule 4 draft? One very senior front-office executive who saw him suggested the only reason Bundy wouldn't make Baltimore's opening day roster this year was his height. Aside from being "just" 6 feet tall, Bundy is about as perfect a high school right-hander as you'll find, boasting plus velocity, plus off-speed stuff, outstanding feel for pitching and a great delivery boosted by a legendary conditioning regimen.

He will sit 93-96 mph and touched 98-99 last spring, with a big, sharp upper-70s curveball and a vicious out-pitch cutter at 86-88 that he uses in lieu of his changeup to left-handed batters. The negatives are few; even his lack of height isn't a major concern, since he gets on top of the ball well and works down in the zone. He was worked extremely hard in high school, including a 180-pitch outing his junior year that earned some criticism on the national level, and no matter how well your arm works, an outing of that length includes some pitching while fatigued, especially for an 18-year-old. I'd like to see Baltimore handle Bundy aggressively, getting him to at least Double-A this year if his performance in the low minors follows our expectations.