Monday Bird Droppings: The day before the World Series edition

Hello, friends.

There are now 157 days remaining until Orioles Opening Day 2020. No MLB baseball will be around to get us through the night, since this is the day where nothing is going on before the World Series begins in Houston on Tuesday night.

Isn’t it just great that the Yankees lost the ALCS? Soon there will be 10-year-old children who have not been alive for a Yankees World Series. They’ve got another 26 years to go before they reach my level of an Orioles World Series drought, and I know better than to hope for such sports failure for them, but it would be nice. As it is, the “2010-19 is the first decade where the Yankees didn’t make the World Series since the 1910s” fact to emerge from the end of the ALCS is delightful.

That it’s the Astros who beat them is also nice. The reason for this is simple. Since Mike Elias and Sig Mejdal, now the architects of a hopefully approaching period of sustained Orioles success, helped build that team, then there’s more reason to hope that they’ll be able to do something like it here in Baltimore.

Not that it’s so easy as waving a wand and having it happen in a couple more years. If nothing else, the Astros were fortunate that they already had players like George Springer and Jose Altuve sitting around in the system when Elias’s old boss, Jeff Luhnow, took over there.

I just don’t think that the Orioles are going to find that any of the guys kicking around the minors here are that good, though if Ryan Mountcastle wants to surprise me, he should feel free. It’ll be a little different even if some of the Orioles prospects are successful, since the last three top picks of the Dan Duquette era were pitchers Cody Sedlock, DL Hall, and Grayson Rodriguez. If two of those three guys make it, things should be fun in Baltimore.

Around the blogO’sphere

This, that, and the other (School of Roch)
Among the collection of things here, Roch quotes a scout who sees Gunnar Henderson’s future at either second or third base, rather than shortstop.

Stewart to be sidelined until late March (Orioles.com)
We can already scratch one name from the Opening Day outfield competition, because DJ Stewart’s had surgery for a microfracture in his ankle.

One year after the Victor Victor Mesa sweepstakes, the Orioles international program is in a better place (Baltimore Sun)
The short version is that Mike Elias actually has a plan and isn’t just trying to belatedly play catch-up on big, late-arriving names on the scene.

What was the last sporting event that made you cry? (The Athletic)
Dan Connolly asked readers this question over the weekend. I can’t say that I know the answer for me off the top of my head.

One other development over the weekend is that O’s beat writers, starting with Roch Kubatko, are now saying that they’re hearing that there won’t be a FanFest over this offseason.

Birthdays and Orioles anniversaries

Of all the players to ever play for the Orioles, only one was born on this day. That was Valmy Thomas, who played in eight games for the 1960 club. He passed away in 2010 at age 84.

Is today your birthday? Happy birthday to you! Your birthday buddies for today include: poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772), dynamite inventor and prize founder Alfred Nobel (1833), jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie (1917), baseball Hall of Famer Whitey Ford (1928), author Ursula K. LeGuin (1929), actress Carrie Fisher (1956), professional famous person Kim Kardashian West (1980), and model Amber Rose (1983).

On this day in history...

In 1520, Ferdinand Magellan, during the first voyage to circumnavigate the globe, discovered a strait passing through modern day Chile that links the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The Strait of Magellan bears his name today.

In 1600, Japanese warlord Tokugawa Ieyasu emerged victorious over his rivals in the Battle of Sekigahara. This victory was a precursor to his becoming shogun of Japan. The shogunate was in power until 1868.

In 1805, during the War of the Third Coalition, an outnumbered British navy decisively defeated the French and Spanish navies in the Battle of Trafalgar. British admiral Lord Horatio Nelson was mortally wounded during the battle. You can still find his statue standing watch over Trafalgar Square to commemorate the victory.

In 1983, the General Conference on Weights and Measures defined one meter as the distance that light travels in a vacuum over the course of 1/299,792,458 of a second.

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And that’s the way it is in Birdland on October 21 - or at least, unless something happens later on this baseball-wide off day. Have a safe Monday.