Opening Day in baseball purgatory: The Orioles are no longer rebuilding, but still no good.
A weekend sweep to the Tampa Bay Rays knocked the stuffing out of a winter of high hopes for the future. Those hopes still exist. They just feel like they're appropriately valued now.
Before we get started, two quick programming notes: one, allow me to deliver Substack’s apology for duplicate emails being sent out Friday afternoon and email. Definitely weird, definitely wish it hadn’t happened when one of the double-ups included a call for paid subscriptions.
Second, many thanks to everyone who paid for a subscription Friday and through the weekend. The response was humbling, and trust that I take the responsibility of all this seriously. I had a very weird energy Friday night at Bowie.
I know it’s early days, and there’s no making it worthwhile based on one day at the ballpark. But I came away from that and a weekend of brainstorming with a notes file full of stories that I can’t wait to get started on. (Apologies to the overworked but indispensable PR staffs across Birdland.) This is going to be a lot of fun, and we’re just getting started.
Can’t say the same about the actual baseball, of course. The Orioles’ three-game sweep at the hands of the Tampa Bay Rays did not deliver the opening-weekend thrills of years past, and instead was a sharp refocusing on the one thing an offseason of farm system praise and lockout-forced stagnation at the major league level allowed to slip out of everyone’s mind since September: this is still pretty rough.