If you are an Orioles fan, you probably get a little extra pride in your voice when talking about Oriole Park at Camden Yards, which will be celebrating the 20th anniversary of its inaugural season this year. No surprise for an O's fan to get excited about Camden, considering the team hasn't been good for more than a decade.

Turns out the O's like Camden Yards a lot too. This season, the team will be sporting a 20th anniversary of OPACY patch on the uniform, and there will be assorted special events at the ballpark throughout the year. Among these will be the unveiling of the previously-announced statues of the Orioles inductees into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Not stopping there, though: today, the team has made public a site celebrating the anniversary.

There are a variety of historical artifacts on the site, but the coolest, by far, is the Eutaw Street Home Run tracker, which has a little interactive map showing the landing spots of all of the Eutaw HRs in Camden Yards' history. This is complete with video of every home run that's landed on Eutaw, all the way back to 1992. I just listened to Jon Miller calling some guy from Texas hitting a home run off Jose Mesa in 1992. Another one has Mickey Tettleton as a Tiger hitting a home run off Ben McDonald. It's a treasure trove. Most of these names I remember, though some I don't. Who was Kevin Bass? I don't know, but he hit a Eutaw HR for the Orioles in '95.

Comedy gold can be found on the site, too, with its tagline: The Ballpark That Forever Changed Baseball™. They really have the ™ on there. This was in the press release and everything. Look, I love OPACY, and I hope this is never in doubt, but let's leave the arrogance of the Pretentious Capitalization and the Random Trademarking to the Yankees, okay? We all make fun of the whole Most Storied Franchise thing, and nobody wants to see the same sort of attitude taking root in these parts.

Not-so-fun fact: in the 20 seasons that the Orioles have played since Camden Yards opened, exactly four of those seasons have been .500 or better; only one, the wire-to-wire run in 1997, saw the O's win more than 90 games. The Orioles had a home record of .500 or better every year from 1992 to 2000 and they have not had one since, although they came kind of close a few times, including last year's 39-42 mark in the confines of Oriole Park at Camden Yards.

Are they going to break that futility this year? Well... no. Probably not. Still, what a great place to watch a baseball game.

I last held this contest prior to the 2010 season and it was a pretty well received. Check out the original post and the announcement of the winner to see what went down last time. The premise is easy: the person who most accurately predicts the lineup on Opening Day wins. The prize is a framed 11X14 photo of Brooks Robinson courtesy of PhotoFile.com. And of course bragging rights over your fellow Camden Chatters.

Here are the rules:

1. You get one point for each player you correctly identify as being part of the starting lineup on Opening Day. That's each position, including the designated hitter and the starting pitcher, for a total of ten possible points.
2. You get one point for every correct spot in the batting order that you place each hitter. That's a total of nine possible points.
3. Positions count. For example, if you have Robert Andino batting leadoff and playing second base, and he bats leadoff but plays third base, you only get the batting order point. If he plays third base and bats ninth, you get zero points.
4. In the event of a tie, there will be three tiebreaker questions for you to answer. Each question will act as its own tiebreaker, it won't be comprehensive. For example, if duck and zknower are tied for first place and duck correctly answer the first tiebreaker question and zknower does not, duck wins and the other two questions are disregarded. If they both answer question 1 correctly/incorrectly, we move on to question two.
5. The contest begins the moment this post is published and will run until 5 p.m. EST on Sunday, January 8th.

Feel free to put players who aren't currently Orioles in your lineup (Prince Fielder? I hear the O's are in the mix) or players who might start in the minors if you think they'll make the team. Remember there is a lot of off-season left and who knows what Dan Duquette has up his sleeve.

Click through the jump to fill out your answers via Google Docs. I know it's fun to see what everyone else thinks, so feel free to put your choices in the comments if you like, but for logisticial purposes using Google Docs makes my life a LOT easier. If you have any questions or need clarification, also put that in the comments.

Good luck!

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The votes are in, and here are the top three vote-getters in our FanPost Contest:

1. You Mean to Tell Me He's Cuban? by Robert R. A late surge put Robert on top. I suggest he uses his winning to buy his mom a nice present.

2. A, B, C, and D Plan by ThreeRunHomer. The unorthodox idea of a 9-man rotation intrigued the voters.

3. The Loss Leaders by dfa. dfa proposed taking on big contracts along with prospects to get the Orioles hope for the future. Not a bad idea, although I don't know if the Yankees are good target.

Congratulations to the winners! I'll be sending an email to the email address you provided with instructions on claiming your prize. If you don't use that email address or don't see an email from me in twenty-four hours, drop me a line at stacey@camdenchat.com.

Thanks to all of the participants and stay tuned for more contests between now and the beginning of the 2012 season.

The panel has conferred and narrowed down the top five submissions in the Camden Chat FanPost contest. They are in no particular order):

1. The A, B, C and D Plan by ThreeRunHomer
2. Bargain Hunting by Newbird
3. You Mean to Tell Me He's Cuban? by Robert R
4. Medium Risk, High Reward by SeanP
5. The Loss Leaders by dfa

In yesterday's Open Thread, Tezcatlipoca introduced his idea of writing up twenty-nine trades the Orioles could make, one with each team in the majors. It was immediately seen as a fun off-season exercise by a number of us, so I'm officially making it a thing. None of us knows exactly what is a feasible trade, but that doesn't mean we don't spend time talking about it here. So pick a team, take a look at what they have, and write up a trade proposal. Front page writers, put them on the front page. Everyone else, write up a FanPost and I'll front page it for you.

The idea is to come up with a trade proposal for every other team, but there if someone has already picked the team you wanted to write about but you have a different trade idea, go for it. It might take us awhile, but I bet we can get something down for all twenty-nine teams.

If you want to participate and you know what team you want to write about, put it in the comments. I'm going to write a post for tomorrow (stupid work delays me until then) proposing a trade with the Washington Nationals. That's one team down!

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I'm going to try something new this off season, and depending upon how it works out, we might just make it a yearly contest. The Orioles have a new GM in Dan Duquette (I don't care, I'm calling him the GM), and he has a tough road ahead of him. Every decision he makes will be met with criticism and maybe even some praise. Because after all, we all have idea on what will or won't improve this team, right? Well it's time to put your money where your mouth is. 

Each of you is invited to write a FanPost outlining your plan for the off-season, what you think is the best way forward for the Baltimore Orioles. Who would you trade? Who would you extend? What free agents would you go after? What other moves would you make? A panel comprised of myself and some of the other names you see at the bottom of this page will narrow the submissions down to the top five. Those five will be put to a community vote, and the top three vote getters will get a lovely prize! 

Here are the rules:

1. Start your FanPost with the acronym CCC (that's Camden Chat Contest) followed by a colon and the title of your plan. For example, "CCC: Prince Fielder will save us all!"
2. No matter what your proposed plan, your payroll cannot exceed $100M for 2012 (and no fancy back loading of contracts to get around it). And, like Dan Duquette, you are at the mercy of every obligation left behind by Andy MacPhail. That $5.8M owed to Kevin Gregg? You're on the hook for that. For arbitration eligible players, use the guidelines at MLBTR (and note that Alfredo Simon is not arbitration eligible). 
3. Use the information at Cot's Contracts for team payroll obligations. 
4. Proofread, proofread, proofread. Proper capitalization, spelling, and halfway decent grammar are required. 
5. Be realistic. And by realistic, I don't mean what we all think the Orioles are likely to do, but what is likely among free agent costs and likely trades. If you put in your proposal that you will trade Luis Lebron for Ryan Braun, you won't be a finalist. 
6. All entries are due by 5 p.m. EST on Sunday, December 4th. That gives you two weeks, so get hopping! We'll post the top five on Monday, December 12th, and voting will run through 5 p.m. on Friday the 16th. 

Over the last couple of days, we've looked at how the Camden Chat community's aggregate projections for the infield and the outfield stacked up against reality. Today, it's time to close out our little projection retrospective by looking at what we picked for the starting rotation. These picks were made from posts ranging from January 27 through to March 3. A lot happened after March 3. We did not even do predictions for Zach Britton, because there we did not expect to see him until June or so.

Here were our projections for the rotation. Remember, these are the mean numbers of submissions from all participating Camden Chatters.

That was then, when we were arguing over things like whether signing Vlad would be enough to get 82 wins, and if getting 82 wins mattered. This is what it looked like after a 69-93 season:

If you want to know why the Orioles stunk in 2011, the rotation may be the biggest reason why. The O's as a staff had a 5.39 starter ERA, the worst in MLB by more than half a run than the second-worst; first place in the AL was the Rays with 3.53. O's starters threw only 881 innings, the least in MLB with more than 40 innings fewer than the second-worst; first place in the AL was again the Rays with 1,058 IP by starters.

The numbers I posted include only appearances as a starter. We predicted 920 innings from these six pitchers combined. In reality, they threw a total of 497 innings. Seven other Orioles started games for whom we did no predictions: Britton (28 GS), Alfredo Simon (16 GS), Tommy Hunter (11 GS), Chris Jakubauskas (6 GS), Jo-Jo Reyes (5 GS), Mitch Atkins (3 GS), and Rick VandenHurk (2 GS).

Let's break down the disaster player by player.

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Yesterday, I took a look at how our preseason projections measured up to reality for the Orioles infield. Today, let's take a look at our projections for the outfield and the DH. Remember, these are the mean results of all participating Camden Chat members. For the infield, we did pretty good with two players. How did we fare for this set? Well... let's find out. Here are the projections:

Now, let's take the cold shower of reality:

As I often say in response to statistics posted on this site: Yikes. Time to break down some of the grisly details.

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