Thursday Bird Droppings: Where the Orioles are building from the ground up

Hello, friends.

There are now 84 days remaining until the next Orioles game. If you stopped counting between Christmas and New Year’s, you may not have noticed that we’re officially closer to the next O’s game than we are to the last Orioles game. Hooray for 2018 being in the rear view mirror!

It’s not too late to make a New Year’s resolution yet, if you’re into that sort of thing. Yesterday, our Alex Church offered a few possible resolutions that some O’s players might want to make.

The O’s themselves were resolved to invest more money internationally even before the calendar turned to 2019, and they followed through on some of that in announcing the hire of Koby Perez to be the senior director of international scouting yesterday.

The moves that the Orioles have made so far don’t have a lot of immediate excitement to them. That’s to be expected given where they’re starting from. You can’t turn some behemoth of the seas around at the drop of a hat. And in the same vein, you can’t go from 115 losses to something good the next year, not with the farm system being what it is.

This is what we have to get used to for a little while, though. Feeling like things are going in the right direction is as good as it’s going to get. For now, at least, that’s how it feels like.

Around the blogO’sphere

Wondering how the roster would look with its current options (School of Roch)
I’ve been trying to maintain some uncharacteristic mild optimism to start the year, but looking at this actual projected roster in early January has stopped me cold.

Elias’ 2019 Orioles could resemble the 2012 Astros (Baltimore Baseball)
The 2012 Astros lost 107 games. Hey, that would still represent an improvement of eight games over last year!

The measure of success in 2019 (Steve Melewski)
Wins from the MLB team have very little to do with it, no surprise.

Bryce Harper would succeed with Orioles, but it won’t happen (USA Today)
From the “water is wet” department of baseball punditry.

Birthdays and anniversaries

Of all of the players to ever play for the Orioles, only one has a birthday today. Happy 29th birthday to current Oriole Mike Wright Jr.

Is today your birthday? Happy birthday to you! Your birthday buddies for today include: Roman philosopher Cicero (106 BC), Chinese warlord “Do not pursue!” Lu Bu (169 AD), author J.R.R. Tolkien (1892), The Beatles producer George Martin (1926), Battlestar Galactica creator Glen A. Larson (1937), Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones (1946), Community creator Dan Harmon (1973), and two-time Super Bowl champion Eli Manning (1981).

On this day in history...

In 1521, the pope of the time, Leo X, issued a bull, Decet Romanum Pontificem, in which he excommunicated Martin Luther from the church. Luther had burned the previous papal bull in which he was threatened with excommunication.

In 1777, the Continental Army, led by George Washington, defeated Cornwallis’s British troops in the Battle of Princeton.

In 1868, the Emperor of Japan, Meiji, stripped the power from the last remaining shogun, marking an end of the Tokugawa Shogunate and the start of a Restoration that bore his name.

In 1953, Frances P. Bolton was sworn in for her seventh full term as a member of Congress. This is noteworthy because her son, Oliver, was also sworn in to the House of Representatives, marking the first time a mother and son served simultaneously in Congress.

In 1959, Alaska was admitted to the United States, becoming the 49th state.

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And that’s the way it is in Birdland on January 3 - or at least, unless something happens later, which you never know, it might. Have a safe Thursday.