Hailing The Comeback Kid of Birdland

March 2, 2017 Stan "The Fan" Charles

Maybe this winter has gone easy on us. But regardless of the average daily temperature or lack of snowfall, everyone starts having warmer dreams this time of year when the Orioles are down in Florida.

As the calendar turns to March, the full squad (actually less than full due to the World Baseball Classic) already is into the exhibition schedule. That means we know baseball at Camden Yards is just a month away. And the double down of excitement is that the Orioles haven’t had a single losing season in the past five years of the Dan Duquette regime.

Despite an inglorious 14-year run from 1998 to 2011 that saw the O’s combine to go 990-1277 (.437 winning percentage), that was then and this is now. And the now under Duquette has been sensationally better — try 444-366 (.548 winning percentage) with three playoff appearances over these same five years.

Sure, Andy MacPhail did a lot of heavy lifting in his 4½ seasons as the team’s president of baseball operations. MacPhail was the architect of one of the greatest trades in Orioles history — Erik Bedard to Seattle for Adam Jones, Chris Tillman, George Sherrill and two other pitching prospects. MacPhail also pulled off the deal that moved the O’s to Sarasota and landed the team a gem of a home at the renovated Ed Smith Stadium.

It was also MacPhail who hired Buck Showalter as the team’s manager in 2010. Just a year later, it was MacPhail who was able to acquire Chris Davis as part of the transaction that sent Koji Uehara to Texas, just before he would resign at the end of the 2011 season.

But MacPhail had zero winning seasons, and Duquette in his five seasons has yet to have a losing season

Love or hate him, Duquette is one of the most audacious guys you’ll ever meet. While he has yet to drink the victory champagne, Duquette took off — or was forced to take off — nine years from the work he was born to do: building teams that could challenge to win it all.

In what you do for a living, if unable to do that job for nearly a decade in the prime of your career, would you have the confidence to come back and still have stayed up with all that your job had evolved into?

The nine-plus seasons Duquette was away from Major League Baseball were not exactly the laid-back and easygoing years of the ‘60s, ‘70s or ‘80s. No, from 2002 when he was fired by the Boston Red Sox until he began to seek employment as a general manager in baseball again in 2011, was a time of unreal change in the game.

Duquette grew up in the game by old-school baseball lifers like Harry Dalton and the great scout Walter Youse. His teachers were mostly all “eyeball guys” who measured what players could do more by their own tried-and-true smell tests.

How was Duquette able to come back nine years later and straddle that fine line of judging talent by eyeballs and mathematic equivalencies? That’s incomprehensible to me.

Baltimore’s baseball landscape is the best it’s been in the now nearly 25 years of the Peter Angelos regime. Despite early and frequent criticism of Mr. A in his first decade, I now realize that what me and my kind lamented as the loss of “The Oriole Way” was also lost in nearly every single baseball city in North America. Our loss was more severe, simply because for us we fell so much farther than the mediocre or the inept.

This season may not bring us that next elusive pennant we’ve been praying for since Reagan was president in 1983. But one thing for sure is baseball in Baltimore has been fun again these past five seasons. Dan Duquette and his audacious mindset are a huge part of the new winning equation in Birdland that shows no sign of stopping anytime soon.

Stan “The Fan” Charles is founder and publisher of PressBox.