Friday Bird Droppings: One month to go until Christmas

Hello, friends.

There are now four months and five days remaining until Orioles Opening Day 2023.

In an earlier time in all of our lives, today would be said to mark Black Friday, where many people try to take advantage of sales on Christmas shopping. These days, so many places have expanded the concept of Black Friday into more of the month of November that it’s more of a nebulous thing.

For baseball teams, there aren’t any Black Friday deals to be had whether it’s the day after Thanksgiving or two weeks before it. Free agents aren’t offering discounts for making deals in November. Teams won’t offer discounts to make trades at this point in the calendar. If the Orioles were going to sign a guy today, it’d probably be for the same price he’d get in two weeks.

Maybe now that we’ve gotten past this holiday, the market will start to kick into gear. It’s about a week and a half to go until the winter meetings, which are usually a catalyst for some kind of deals. Things could happen before that.

Orioles fans remain anxious because, as has been written before and will be written again, this is the first offseason in a while where it feels like something is going to happen here in Birdland. And if something could happen, then it could happen any minute. As I jokingly say to my wife every time I look at Twitter, “Time to see if Mike Elias signed Justin Verlander.” He hasn’t, of course, and probably won’t. But one of these days I’m going to check and discover he signed somebody.

I hope that you’ve had a nice Thanksgiving, wherever you spent it and whoever you spent it with. It’s a holiday that I’ve always enjoyed and I find after the COVID-altered 2020 that I appreciate it even more now. Getting to spend time with loved ones is not something to be taken for granted.

Around the blogO’sphere

A few random Orioles facts from 2022 (School of Roch)
I daresay this might even be called “several” random Orioles facts from 2022.

Prospect Kyle Brnovich, Orioles give back in Florida following Hurricane Ian (Orioles.com)
The day after a holiday is never a bad time for a feel-good story of a player and the team helping people recover from a storm.

The Orioles infield: Five questions on who plays where, who gets added (The Athletic)
Among Dan Connolly’s predictions is that the Orioles will not end up signing any of the big shortstops on the free agent market. That’s one area where I agree with him.

Making the farm system productive for the big league team (Steve Melewski)
Melewski offers another reminder that some of the accumulated prospects might end up contributing to the Orioles by being traded for pitching.

Birthdays and Orioles anniversaries

There are a pair of former Orioles with birthdays today. They are: 2014-15 infielder Jimmy Paredes, and 2019 four-game pitcher Nate Karns.

Is today your birthday? Happy birthday to you! Your birthday buddies for today include: Maryland namesake Henrietta Maria of France (1609), steel magnate Andrew Carnegie (1835), Mercedes-Benz co-founder Karl Benz (1844), baseball Hall of Famer Joe DiMaggio (1914), author/illustrator Marc Brown (1946), and football Hall of Famer Cris Carter (1965).

On this day in history...

In 1758, the French abandoned Fort Duquesne, two months after losing a battle near the site to a British force that included Virginia militia officer and future president George Washington. The British, on capturing the location, rebuilt a fort nearby called Fort Pitt, which when it eventually turned into a city bore this name: Pittsburgh.

In 1863, future President U.S. Grant’s Army forces defeated the Confederates and broke the siege of Chattanooga with a victory in the Battle of Missionary Ridge.

In 1952, a play based on Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap opened in London. The play is still running today, with nearly 29,000 performances in the books - close to double the next-longest running show, Les Misérables.

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And that’s the way it is in Birdland on November 25. Have a safe Friday.