'Til Death?

The Nats set sail for Birdland, wrapping up the interleague slate with a weekend series. Years ago, I suspected that this “Battle of the Beltways” stuff might, at some point, generate even a scintilla of interest from me. But it hasn’t happened. Not disposed to hate the Orioles, whom I followed very closely prior to the Nats’ arrival, I have instead settled into the neglectful comfort of apathy for the Birds. So I will again treat this series as merely some sort of half-hearted status check.

And let it be said that, from all appearances, the status of the O’s is dreadful. Depending on the result of this evening’s wrapper against the Marlins (“Plenty of good seats available!”), the O’s might have finally reached the 20-win mark by the time the made-for-MASN rivalry resumes on Friday night. But if not, a loss tonight means interim manager Juan Samuel will enter the Nats series batting .222 (4 wins in 18 games) since taking over for Lame Duck Dave Trembley.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way, but the train derailed before it even left the station. Markakis, Jones, and Wieters, perhaps the core of an excellent young lineup someday but not today, mainly serve to nudge down the average age of an essentially dreadful collection of veteran filler. Corey Patterson? Really? (Yes, I know that Felix Pie, not an old veteran, has been hurt, and so has Brian Roberts, a veteran but not dreadful.) The pitching is kind of the same story. Young pitching sometimes takes some time to develop – Matusz has been non-horrendous so far, which is encouraging – but the O’s seem to relish affording the likes of Mark Hendrickson a run at accumulating enough service time to gain a full MLB pension.

In the past 12 (and now 13) seasons of futility, the O’s have cycled through various iterations. In somewhat chronological order, they’ve been a Team Of Veterans, a Team Of Guys Who Just Want to Play, a Team With Some Youth, a Team With Improved Pitching, a Team Making A Splash, a Team With Improved Fundamentals, and now a Team Of The Future. But this has mostly been just marketing; the Orioles entered the “organizational culture of losing” stage eight or nine years ago, and the primary difference I detect between them and the Pirates at this point is that the Orioles have attached brighter labels to their losing ways.

I don’t know what the Orioles should do, given the circumstance in which they find themselves, but I’m sort of rooting that they do something radical and nutty for the remainder of the season.

I’m reminded of an article I read on teh internets about a FOX show called ‘Til Death. I vaguely knew of this show, which stars the big lug of a brother from Everybody Loves Raymond, in the same sense that I’m vaguely aware of lots of stuff that run across the periphery of my mind, but I never saw an episode of it and now I never will. After apparently spending a year or two in the According to Jim role as the mop-up man of the FOX schedule, it’s now officially cancelled. Even before the cancellation, everyone knew it would be cancelled, but due to some sort of agreement between the network and the production company, they kept on making episodes of the show. Even though everyone involved had every reason to believe that very, very few people would watch or even care.

So, according to the A.V. Club article, the people behind ‘Til Death decided to steer their empty bus straight to crazy town, incorporating some bizarre, through-the-looking-glass angles. For instance:

Perhaps realizing that the role of Ally (Joy and Eddie's daughter) had been played by four actresses over the course of the series (including Krysten Ritter!) while the role of boyfriend/fiancee/husband Doug had been played by only Sharp, the series embarked on an astoundingly bizarre story arc: It had Doug realize he was a character in a sitcom whose wife kept getting recast, then sent him to psychotherapy to make peace with this fact.

{. . . snip. . . }

The Doug story arc was one of the more unexpected things on TV last year, including the character riffing on the generic brands the other characters were using (and tossing in a tie-in to another storyline, no less), the other characters joking about how if they were a sitcom they'd be in a timeslot where no one would watch them, Doug slowly coming to realize he could neither swear nor have actual sex, and a whole episode where Ally was recast yet again and Doug had to come to terms with it before realizing the actress playing his new wife was much friskier in the bedroom (even as he realized that the camera would cut away before anything would happen).

The very next paragraph discusses how this Doug character went to a therapist played by Mayim Bialik, who actually turned out to be Mayim Bialik, who was filming her sessions with Doug as part of her own reality show. And apparently Bialik maintained that she was actually Blossom, a real person, not just a television character. Oh, and apparently some fat guy who thought he was Joey Lawrence would show up and mock her. Woah?

Anyway, the Doug story arc is somewhat reminiscent of Terry Crowley’s story arc with the Orioles. Crowley is, of course, the long-time hitting coach in Baltimore. He’s been with the team in that capacity since 1999, so he’s seen a lot of losing in that time – and, one supposes, might even be responsible, even in an indirect way, for some of it. Lord only knows why he hasn’t been dumped by the club, just as waves of managers, pitching coaches, bench coaches, and base coaches have been in that time. But he remains.

Crowley has outlasted so many managers and coaches over the past decade-plus that maybe it’s time to start using his experience in the organization to some strategic advantage. For instance, the Orioles never seem to settle on a manager. They think of Lee Mazzilli as the next big thing, then decide he’s not. They think of Sam Perlozzo as a rock, then decide he was more a millstone. They think of Dave Trembley as a return to doing-things-the-right-way, then decides he’s taking things the wrong way. They never know what they’ve got until they’ve got it.

So, if all these guy have come through the manager’s office in Crowley’s time, what’s a few more for him to deal with this season? Maybe the Orioles should treat the manager’s position as a try-out squad for the remainder of the year. Let’s say the organization has four guys it is considering to take the position full-time. I don’t know who those people would be, exactly, but let’s say they’re Juan Samuel, a long-time organization type like Rick Dempsey, and two managers in their minor league system. Give them a few weeks each, maybe a month (crediting Samuel for time served) to prove their stuff. Hell, maybe even rotate them to gain a tactical advantage – perhaps one of those guys (maybe a minor league manager) is really good with young pitches, so he manages in games started by Matusz or Tillman. I don’t know . . . but it sounds kind of crazy, right?! Granted, this won’t work with bigger names like Bobby Valentine, but he’s already said he doesn’t want the job anyway. So what’s the harm?

Of course, this kind of thing might not help the team in an immediate on-the-field sense, but at this point not even half the lineup of the American Dreams could.

Oddball prediction: O’s take two of three. They’re due.