Talk:Are The O's Ready to See .500?/@comment-101732-20060214135554

The point of the article isn&quot;t about Orioles seeing the playoffs. It&quot;s about them finally pulling out more wins than losses!

I&quot;ll be the first to admit this is a fundamentally flawed franchise, and it all points to Mr. Angelos. He&quot;s grubby with money, yet he dictates that we shouldn&quot;t spend any more than peanuts for any player.

But, I think you can see drastic differences between the O&quot;s of last year and those of this year. Palmeiro was a non-factor as a hitter and a cancer on the clubhouse with his steroids scandal. To rid house of him is addition by subtraction, just because we won&quot;t have the bad PR and whoever we get at first only needs to be able to hit the ball without taking steroids to be an improvement. Sosa was an absolute mess. I think it&quot;s worth noting that he went from multi-million dollar per year hitter to non-guaranteed contract player in one year. The O&quot;s were desperate to make SOME move last offseason of consequence, and he was it. But we&quot;re rid of that.

And, despite what many think, the coaching staff in place now should have marked success. A lot of problems from last year stemmed from poor clubhouse environment. Mazzilli wasn&quot;t passionate about this team. In his 1 and a half years, he only came out to argue a call ONCE. Perlozzo did it at least 3 or 4 times in half a season! The players respect him much more, and Conine and Millar, while journeymen, are just the characters we need to rally the young players.

And in the end, I even give up a little, saying that maybe this is just the GROUNDWORK for the future. There were no desperation moves to mortgage our future. We didn&quot;t sign an Albert Belle. The Orioles stayed out of the game and are banking on the minor league system to produce our future stars, and we actually managed to hold onto most of the good ones. Conine, Millar, Patterson are only here for a year. If they fail, we move on.

btw, we didn&quot;t steal Mazzone from the Yanks. I said we "stole" Mazzilli, who was first base coach of the Yankees before managing the Orioles.