Kurt Ainsworth, 2004 Topps #404

I'm probably not setting a great precedent by posting mostly by explicit request. However, my mother gave me a nudge this evening. As she pointed out, pitchers and catchers reported to spring training today, and that's as good a reason as any to dust off my blogging cap. Besides, I try to be a good son.

So here we are, 49 days from Opening Day. Sweet merciful crap, spring training is way too long. I wouldn't blame the players for getting as stir-crazy as Kurt Ainsworth seems to be in this candid shot from the summer of 2003. Then again, that facial expression could be saying, "My shoulder is being held together with Big League Chew and fishing line." It wouldn't be that far from the truth. Also true: the "Fun Bird" on Kurt's left sleeve is still one of my least favorite O's logos. Somehow it crosses the line from endearingly goofy to just plain corny. Plus, I'll always associate it with those barftacular Orioles teams of the early 2000s.

Until next time, I'm going to go apply for a trademark on the word "barftacular".

Rafael Palmeiro, 2004 Topps #620

Did you hear that the Orioles signed Palmeiro yesterday? Patrick Palmeiro, of course. Who did you think I meant? Anyhow, the O's inked Raffy's oldest son to a minor league deal yesterday. Patrick will turn 26 next month, and batted .256/.315/.404 with 13 homers and 68 RBI for the Sugar Land Skeeters of the independent Atlantic League last year. You might remember that the Skeeters signed Rafael Palmeiro at the end of the season so that he could play alongside his son. Now the younger Palmeiro will get another crack at affiliated ball after a three-year stint in the low minors with the White Sox.

Baltimore Orioles, 2004 Topps #641

I wouldn't have thought it possible a week ago, but today the Orioles ended the 2015 season on a five-game winning streak, allowing them to break even at 81-81, good for third place in the American League East. Despite the fact that the O's have collected the most wins in the A. L. since the beginning of 2012, thoughts of the dark days of 1998-2011 (fourteen straight losing seasons) are never that far from my mind. So for all of the challenges that the Birds faced this year, I'm really grateful that they made it back to .500. Now, then...

182 days until Opening Day. What do I do now?

Nick Markakis and Adam Loewen, 2004 Topps #691

Here's proof positive that Nick Markakis has been an Oriole for a long time. The O's grabbed him with the seventh overall pick in the June 2003 amateur draft. That year, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays took Delmon Young with the first pick. Eleven years later, there's no such team as the Devil Rays, and Delmon is probably en route to his sixth team after spending this past season as Baltimore's pinch hitting ace. Later in the first round of that 2003 draft, the Montreal Expos spent the 20th overall selection on pitcher Chad Cordero. That one's a two-fer: a defunct team and a player who's out of baseball altogether despite making the All-Star Team in the Nationals' inaugural 2005 campaign. Just to hammer the point home, Markakis shared his rookie card with the Birds' previous first-round pick, Canadian junior college pitcher Adam Loewen. In the last decade, Loewen has switched from a pitcher to an outfielder/first baseman and back to pitcher again. As the longest-tenured member of the Orioles, Nick Markakis has enjoyed a level of stability that is foreign to Loewen, Young, Cordero, and scores of other baseball players.

Today, Nick celebrates his 31st birthday in an odd sort of limbo. The O's have bought out the $17.5 million option on his contract for 2015, paying $2 million for the privelege of making their senior player a free agent. Rumors and whispers make it seem like all but a foregone conclusion that #21 will stay in Baltimore, with a four-year contract in the $40-48 million range. But if it were so cut and dry, why would it take several weeks and counting to put it to paper? I know that the Orioles typically move at their own pace, but it seems like they're leaving things to chance. I'm sure some fans panicked when word leaked that Markakis' agent was meeting with other teams last week, though you'd have to chalk that up to due diligence.

I expect Nick Markakis to patrol right field in Camden Yards in 2015, just as he has ever since 2006. But until he signs on the dotted line, he is not officially on the team. He is still an Oriole, and yet he isn't. If I'm impatient and anxious about it, I can't imagine how Nick himself feels.

Geronimo Gil, 2004 Topps #163

I'm posting this one just for my wife, who bellows "Geronimooooooooo Giiiiiilllllllllll!" every time his name is mentioned.

Mike Hargrove, 2004 Topps #270

"Yeah, so...does anyone have any ideas? Anything? I'm fresh out. I hope the clubhouse boy put some beer on ice. I'm getting too old for this crap."

Willis Roberts, 2004 Topps #105

Last night I took advantage of a beautiful spring evening to witness the fourth win of Zach Britton's career, a relatively drama-free 4-1 victory over the hated Red Sox. The young lefty from Texas is now 4-1 with a 2.84 ERA after five starts, and has tied an Orioles rookie record for wins in April. In 2001, Willis Roberts got off to a 4-0 start, but the first of those W's came in relief. Of course, Zach is a highly touted prospect with a killer sinker, whereas Roberts was a 26-year-old minor league vet with a penchant for goofy post-strikeout theatrics.

I've made it to three O's games so far this season, and I'm relieved to have the first win out of the way. With Britton on the mound, I was cautiously optimistic going in, though I was wary of a scuffling Birds offense facing Clay Buchholz. Despite a shaky start to 2011, Buchholz has had past success against our guys, including a *grumble* no-hitter a few years back. The Orioles got to Buchholz early and often, but never did break the game open. A dozen hits and three walks added up to only four runs, but that's practically an explosion these days. Three sacrifice flies (two by Adam Jones and one by Mark Reynolds) and a Matt Wieters dribbler that struck the first base bag and kicked away for a single accounted for the Baltimore tallies.

Meanwhile, Zach was sharp early and tough in the middle innings. A Dustin Pedroia single in the fourth was the first hit the rookie allowed, and Boston's second baseman scored the only run of the night for the visitors after advancing on a groundout, a steal, and a Kevin Youkilis flyout. After Britton retired the first two batters in the fifth, he loaded the bases and had to face Beantown's powerful new first baseman Adrian Gonzalez. He got ahead 1-2 and induced a grounder to second base. He then capped his evening by pitching around a couple of singles in the sixth.

The O's bullpen retired 9 of the last 10 batters of the game. Jim Johnson was just plain nasty, using 25 pitches to blow through the seventh and eighth innings. He allowed a leadoff double to Gonzalez in the eighth, but notched four strikeouts and turned it over to...Kevin Gregg. I didn't want the Birds to sign the begoggled closer in the first place, and a few early-season blowups further soured my opinion of him. But he barely broke a sweat last night, using 10 pitches to get a 1-2-3 save.

I haven't been to an O's-Red Sox game in years. With obnoxious Boston fans packing Camden Yards in recent years and having the nerve to smugly call our park "Fenway South", it just wasn't my idea of fun. There were more Red Sox rooters in attendance than I would have liked last night, but it was pretty tame  after all. The overall attendance was only 18,938, probably due to it being a weeknight game early in the season. Then again, maybe some of the bandwagoners jumped off as soon as Boston lost their first six games and haven't noticed the team's recent hot streak. It helped that the O's arms didn't give the invading fans much to cheer about, but on the few occasions that they did get frisky, those of us in black and orange shouted/booed them down. Even though I was surrounded by navy blue and red up in the upper box, the visitors in my section were well-behaved adult types and it never got ugly.

I also had a great time because I had lots of good company. As has become tradition, my sister rode down to the stadium with me. Our younger cousin Brittany (who was six the last time the Orioles had a winning season) met us there, as did my high school classmate and fellow O's diehard Matt and my former roommate and well-behaved Yankee fan (they do exist) Mike. Heck, we were enjoying ourselves so much that we barely noticed that Buchholz was taking coffee breaks in between each and every bloody pitch.

By the time I got around to writing this post, the Orioles made it two in a row. Dare we hope for a sweep of those dastardly Sawx?

Larry Bigbie, 2004 Topps #453

Things that spring to mind when viewing this card:

-Who is that Seattle catcher? My guess is Dan Wilson. Backup Ben Davis only appeared in two night games at Camden Yards in 2003.

-Actually, it may be Pat Borders. The only day game that the Mariners played in Baltimore was September 7, and the ex-Jays backstop got the start. Wilson entered in the eighth inning, but was not behind the plate for a Larry Bigbie at-bat. The O's won 2-1, thanks to a combined five-hitter by Pat Hentgen and Jorge Julio (go figure).

-Bigbie totaled 31 home runs in his career and was rarely healthy. I hope he got a refund for those steroids he took.

-It was considerate of Topps to blur out the face of the little girl behind home plate. I'm sure the husky gentleman in the Cal Ripken, Jr. farewell tee with the bottle of Bud (who may be her father) also appreciates his anonymity.

Kerry Ligtenberg, 2004 Topps #71

Nothing has ever come easily to Kerry Ligtenberg in baseball. In the early 1990s, he made the University of Minnesota baseball team as a walk-on. There were no major league scouts beating down his door, so he graduated with a degree in chemical engineering and kept his baseball dream alive by catching on with the Minneapolis Loons of the now-defunct Prairie League in 1994. The Mariners purchased his contract during the players' strike the next Spring, but released him four days later. Those four days as a replacement player would cost him membership in the players' union. He went back to the Loons and went 11-2 with a no-hitter, but was ready to call it quits until the Braves signed him in January of 1996. He pitched well and quickly moved through the farm system, getting the call to the bigs the following August. By 1998, Kerry was the Braves' closer, saving 30 games and posting a solid 2.71 ERA and 1.03 WHIP. But the next spring, he injured his elbow and missed the whole season with Tommy John surgery.

Ligtenberg bounced back in 2000; though he lost his ninth-inning role, he compiled a 3.21 ERA with Atlanta and Baltimore. He moved on to Toronto in 2004 and was awful (1-6, 6.38), and seven even worse outings in Arizona in 2005 spelled the end of his major league career. He pitched two seasons at AAA and finally seemed through with baseball after a knee injury cut short his Spring Training stint in Cincinnati in 2007. He started looking into work as a financial planner.

But Kerry Ligtenberg is back, in a manner of speaking. Now nine days short of his 38th birthday, the righty is making a run at the ninth-inning job for the St. Paul Saints, one of the better-known independent baseball clubs. He hit his spots and showed good movement during a 10-minute live session earlier this week, and got the invite to camp. Kerry summed it up pretty well:

"I might be old and gray," Ligtenberg said. "But I still love to play."

Omar Daal, 2004 Topps #479

I've always found the sudden-death nature of extra-inning games to be especially hard on my nerves. With a string of horror show bullpens in recent memory, I sit on the edge of my seat as the latest questionable reliever works with no margin for error and somehow escapes trouble, only for the offense to sputter and send him (or a contemporary) back out to the mound for another inning. So it was in this game. Kerry Ligtenberg, B. J. Ryan, Jorge Julio, Willis Roberts, Buddy Groom, and even *gasp* Omar Daal kept the Phillies off of the scoreboard. Meanwhile, the punchless Bird bats never even came close to pushing across the winning tally. A single here, a walk there. Inning after inning, I found myself pleading...just one run. That's all they needed. You can score a single run accidentally with luck on your side. But the O's pitchers were using up all of the team's luck, wriggling out of two separate bases-loaded jams. So the game continued for ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen...fourteen innings??? That's right. There were two seventh-inning stretches.

My uncle was long-gone, but my father and I stayed behind. As the innings pushed on into the teens, I started feeling weak and numb in my extremities. I could barely stand. On a hunch, I took my long-empty commemorative plastic souvenir soda cup (commemorating the 1983 World Champion Orioles) to a water fountain between innings and filled it. As I drank voraciously, I almost immediately felt better. I'd sat out in the bleachers in on 95-degree afternoons, and never been worse for wear, but this game had dehydrated me. Some time between the fifteenth and sixteenth innings, Dad and I decided to head for the upper deck and make sure that my sister was still around. She was, and her nerves were in better shape than mine, though some overly enthusiastic Phillies fans in her section had been grating on her.

Meanwhile, Omar Daal was defying the odds, pitching two scoreless innings. This was the southpaw's first relief appearance of the season, and he had earned his position as the team's last resort by losing his last four starts, including a two-and-a-third inning, nine-run masterpiece in his previous start in Toronto. Hell, I was starting to feel sorry for the guy, and the chance of him grabbing an improbable win made me want the game to end even more. So under these bizarre circumstances, with my body and mind incredibly weary and the game plowing on well past midnight, I threw down the gauntlet.

It was the bottom of the sixteenth inning, with two outs and the bases distressingly empty. Who else but David Segui should stroll to the plate? This madness had to end. From my perch high above left field, I shouted in a deep, raw voice:

"Get a hit, Segui, or you'll never see your children again!"

There were a smattering of laughs around me. One man turned around grinning and said I was "harsh". I'm certain Segui didn't hear me, or at least I hope he didn't. Because if he truly cared about his kids, he surely wouldn't have struck out swinging on a 2-2 pitch. David was 1-7 in the game, and so we reached the seventeenth inning.

Omar Daal had used up all of his luck. Singles by Thome and Lieberthal put runners on the corners with one out for outfielder Jason Michaels, whose career high in home runs would be the ten he'd hit in 2004. I mention that because, on this day, he hit a three-run home run to triple each team's sixteen-inning run output. We'd seen enough. The three of us started the long walk out of the stadium, haunted by the cheers and taunts of the jubilant Phillies fans. Now it was my sister's turn to snap: "At least we don't live in PHILADELPHIA!", she barked. That's why I love her.

We would later find out that Luis Matos hit a solo home run in the Birds' last at bat, a symbolic and futile gesture. Too little, too late. 4-2, Phillies. Time of game: 5 hours, 41 minutes. Fifteen total pitchers used, thirty-eight players altogether. 531 pitches thrown to 137 batters in 34 half-innings. And three grouchy members of my family.

Dave Crouthers, 2004 Topps #304

There are all sorts of different ways that I might react when I pull an Oriole out of a pack of baseball cards. Mostly, I get excited, because I feel like I never get a lot of cards of my hometown team. At the very least, if I pull someone notorious to O's fans, like David Segui or Sidney Ponson, I might laugh ironically. When I pulled this card in the summer of 2004, however, one thought crossed my mind:

"Who the hell is Dave Crouthers?"

Frankly, I'm still wondering. This is the problem with the hobby's love affair with rookie cards. Everyone is always trying to get a jump on the Next Big Thing, and eventually they just started tossing random low-level minor leaguers into base sets. I think it sucks that the fringe major leaguers - the underappreciated middle relievers and fifth outfielders of the world - get bumped out anymore. Now MLB has attempted to put a stop to that by declaring that a player cannot have a Rookie Card before they actually play in the bigs. But this is an inelegant solution: now rookie cards are defaced with a big garish ROOKIE CARD diamond and bat logo thing, and the card companies are still taking advantages of loopholes like prospect insert sets and draft pick sets and all sorts of other nonsense.

But whither Dave Crouthers?

Baseball Reference stops after the 2004 season, which he spent at AA Bowie, performing in a mediocre fashion (9-9, 5.01 ERA). In the offseason, he was traded to the Cubs with Jerry Hairston and Mike Fontenot for some guy named Sosa. Did Dave really call it quits? Did he get hurt?

I think we should put poor Dave Crouthers on a milk carton.