(Hip) Breaking News

Hey Guys, the Orioles signed Jamie Moyer today.  He is old.  In fact, he might be older than a lot of the fathers of his current Norfolk Tides teammates.  Except JC Romero, Willie Eyre, Joel Pineiro, Miguel Tejada, Brian Roberts, Bill Hall and Nate McLouth.  They are all also old.  Instead of fielding a AAA team it’s like they are trying to field an AARP team down in Norfolk.  Seriously, the average age down there is so old that everyone had to be re-immunized for polio.  But really, when these guys started in the league the main obstacles to reaching the bigs were dysentery and fording the Snake River.

So there it is, get yourself down to Norfolk and catch the exciting Tides baseball club before the inevitable dementia/alzheimers outbreak.

See you at the yard (I’ll borrow Moyer’s bifocals)

~Jjaks Clayton

Endy Chavez Is Really Good

We’ve all heard the age old anecdote “If you don’t have anything nice to say then don’t say anything at all” so here are my thoughts on Endy Chavez:

Baltimore: The City That Reads…Stupid Shit On The Internet (And Loves It)

Hello Baltimore, for the most part when I write here I don’t use foul language but I’ve had enough and some is bound to come out in what follows.  It’s been a while since anyone has written anything in this space.  Most of you probably haven’t noticed because no one reads this thing.  In the sparse history that I have written for this blog I have come to realize that the fact no one reads this blog is, to me, a compliment.   It’s a running joke around here that we don’t get many page views (almost ever) and the Orioles season so far has made me very proud that virtually no one wonders when there will be new content on ESH.  That sounds strange, doesn’t it?  Well, I’ll explain.

So Long J. Guthrie

Over the weekend the Orioles traded starting pitcher Jeremy Guthrie to the Colorado Rockies for pitchers  Jason Hammel and Matt Lindstrom.  This is going to be a different kind of post from me, I promise no stats and no research.  Straight from the heart.

I love baseball and more than that, I love the Orioles.  I am an Orioles fan.  The word fan is just a shortened version of fanatic, which means we are all a little crazy.

World English Dictionary

fanatic  (fəˈnætɪk)
—
1.	a person whose enthusiasm or zeal for something is extreme or beyond normal limits

This Is Birdland, Mr. Gutsy

It was a cold and dreary night in Birdland and the city was under attack from an enemy to the north and his army of followers.  The super villain, Captain Jeterus, was executing his plan to flawless perfection by weakly hitting the citizens of Birdland over and over again.  Not strong enough to actually hurt because of his lack of power, Jeterus chose to dink and dunk Birdlandians into an annoyingly soft submission.  It doesn’t take much these days as the metropolis is full of despair after decades of failure in protecting itself from the two evil empires of the north.  Hungering for help and thirsting for a hero, everyone in Birdland is on their last breath waiting to be saved.  A few have stepped up to join the fight, somewhat heroically, but soon learn that they cannot do it themselves.  Birdland is too far gone, too downtrodden and fractured to be saved by just one man.  In making one final push to save all those who call Birdland home and believe in the thought of good over evil, these are the stories of those men:

It’s the return of the ESH Poll Question

Unwritten Rules

There has been a lot of uproar lately about baseball’s “unwritten rules” and I’ve come to the conclusion that people don’t have any idea what they are talking about.  Much like fighting in hockey, people think the point is just to punch someone in the face, or throw a ball whizzing past their dome just to get your jollies off.

Vlad The (Rally) Impaler

Yesterday all of Birdland exploded with talk of Vlad Guerrero.  Unfortunately (as a lot of us predicted when he was signed in a publicity stunt) this explosion was not due to how he has been tearing up the league with his offensive pedigree.  No, it is because he has been almost worthless to anyone but opposing pitchers by selectively hunting down Orioles rallies and would be rallies and murdering them with the type of cold-blooded ruthless regularity that you would only expect to find from a comic book villain.  

Vlad Guerrero

He sucks, we told you so.

You (Still) Can’t Spell Mark Without K: A Snapshot In The Season Of Mark Reynolds, Volume II

The Orioles have played 47 games since my last spotlight on Mark Reynolds and his evil strikeouts so I thought it was time to update you all on how strikeouts are still overblown as being an indicator on sucking as a professional batter. In those 47 games, Reynolds has played in 46 of them and struck out 48 times in that span.

He Got Something Right…

I have made it public knowledge that I rarely agree with Kevin Cowherd of the Baltimore Sun but in his latest entry for the paper about some dos and don’ts at OPACY has at least a couple instances where I completely 100% agree with him.

Let’s take a look:

Turd Bergesen

With the Orioles offense being unexpectedly TERRIBLE so far this season a lot of pressure has fallen on the starting rotation to carry the team to respectability. For the most part, they have done their job. Guthrie has been solid as always, Arrieta seems to have taken a step forward and Zach Britton has been as good, if not better than you can expect a rookie to be through a month of his MLB career.

Those 3 starters have an obvious stranglehold on a starting spot and give me hope for the rest of the season. This offense can’t be this bad over a whole year, can it? Plus, hopefully in a couple of weeks time we get back last years best O’s starter, Brian Matusz, to add into the mix. Yes, I expect him to be at least very close to the quality he was last year if not a little better. Guthrie, Matusz, Britton, Arrieta and one of Tillman or Bergesen. If you read the headline, you know which way I (and the O’s) should lean. For those of you who still love you some Bergey and consider him a good pitcher…this blog post is dedicated to you.

You Can’t Spell Mark Without K: A Snapshot In The Season of Mark Reynolds, Volume I

It is May 3 and we are a month into the 2011 MLB Season.  The Orioles have played 27 games so far and have a record of 13 wins versus 14 losses.  I wrote a piece a few months ago about Mark Reynolds and how everyone freaks out about his monstrous strikeout numbers and I figured I had a decent sample size from this year to go back and see if I was right or not. 

2011 Eutaw Street Hooligans Fantasy Draft Recap

On Sunday we had the draft for our second ever Eutaw Street Hooligans fantasy baseball league.  It has taken until Friday to get the recap up because I did about a thousand times more prep for this piece than I did for the draft itself.  Not a surprise if you have ever fantasized about me played fantasy sports with me before.  I’m terrible at it, and I will prove that by the end of the year.  

TWIT: March 20 – March 26

Oh TWIT, how I’ve missed you.  I took a week off  but now I am back and ready to go.  A lot went on in the twitterverse last week.  I’ll sum it up for you:

Everyone in the world fills out NCAA Brackets and for the last week everyone in the world has used twitter to complain that their brackets are completely busted, like Rihanna (or a window) after some time with Chris Brown… too soon?  First of all, I don’t condone hitting women, unless they deserve it.  Equal rights everybody, I’m just saying.  But really, you shouldn’t ever hit a lady.  I love women.  Please don’t write me letters, I was joking.

This post has gone bad quickly, so let’s get to the actual twitter part:

This Week In Twitter: March 6 – March 12

This week in twitter we learned a couple things.  First and foremost, we learned that if you want to know what really happens at spring training you come to the Eutaw Street Hooligans and our on the scene reporter, Detective Tom Ludlow:

This Week In Twitter: February 27 – March 5 ( duh, #winning)

Oh my, if you were on twitter this week you know that this was the week that crazy ass Charlie Sheen joined this online community of wackos and instantly became king.  This guy is a train wreck and is now apparently in the Guinness Book Of World Records for his twitter prowess.  This shit is crazy, almost as crazy as he is.  Let me start by saying I eat it up, and it is awesome.  Warlocks?  Tiger Blood?  Ninja Assassins?  All awesome, but I think 1 week is about all the awesome I can take.  We need Jake Taylor to come talk some sense into this guy, ASAP.

This Week In Twitter: Feb. 20–Feb. 26

Hello, everyone, and welcome to your second edition of This Week In Twitter.

Let me start by suggesting you give a follow to Jeff Polman (@funkyball77) – a blogger, strat master and all around good guy despite the team he roots for.

A lot has happened in the world of twitter since last week, unfortunately not a lot of it was that interesting.  Not anything by any of the players anyway.  Let’s cut them some slack, they are getting back into the swing of things and reuniting with teammates.  And honestly, this weeks edition wasn’t going to be about them anyway unless there was something really, really awesome that happened.  Nope, this week I was going to introduce a new part of TWIT which I hope can become an ongoing segment of this column…

Where do your expectations fall if Roberts misses significant time again?

This was my biggest, of many, issues with the club resigning Cesar “Wiffle Ball” Izturis.  Offensively most people would argue that the biggest drop off production wise would be if one of the 2 middle infielders goes down.  I agree, but I do think that this years version of the Orioles is much better equipped to withstand losing Brian Roberts for a long period of time than last years version was.  It is late so I didn’t make a chart this time, but I did do a little comparison between Roberts and who I consider the best replacement in the leadoff spot currently on the roster, JJ Hardy.

Really, you honestly believe this?

That is a question I wanted to ask the scribe of the latest internet ramble that got my blood boiling.  Just to give you an idea, he entitled it “Chipper Jones:  Better than Cal Ripken Jr. and Derek Jeter?“

Ok, so someone posing the question didn’t really bother me, but his answer (and certainly) the way he arrived at it did.  Once again, let’s go through this from beginning to end as I give Jamie Shoemaker what I like to call The Cowherd Treatment.