Good morning Baltimore, it's good to be back. And thanks to Childs Walker, baseball analyst extraordinaire, for his work pinch-hitting here the last two days.
The Orioles -- 6-2 winners over the Texas Rangers at soggy Camden Yards last night -- are playing well and although they're out of the playoff hunt, there is really too much at stake regarding the future to say that the season has been reduced to charting individual achievements -- at least not yet.
But it is nice to reflect on Erik Bedard's chances to win the AL Cy Young Award. Last night, he struck out 11 Rangers over seven innings, making the Texas Rangers appear helpless at times on a variety of pitches. There was a time in a distant, foggy past when the O's owned the Cy Young. In a 12-year stretch from 1969 through '80, four Baltimore pitchers took home the honors a total of six times -- three times by the man with the great hair and gleaming smile, Jim Palmer. The most recent was Steve Stone in 1980.
Bedard is being mentioned as a Cy Young candidate frequently by some of the ESPN baseball guys, and with good reason. Although at 13-4, he's two wins behind the league leaders in that category, he leads the AL in strikeouts (218), is second in walks-hits per innings pitched (1.06), second in win percentage (.765) and fourth in ERA (2.97). A two-out, ninth-inning, three-run homer given up by the bullpen to the Yankees' Shelley Duncan in Bedard's outing before last night deprived him of what would have been a 14th victory -- hardly his only tough-luck outing this season.
But as we head to the home stretch, he has been the AL's most dominant pitcher, having won his last nine decisions (the team has won the last 12 games he has pitched), and that performance may be fresh in the voters' minds -- assuming he can continue. His chief competition, and there is honestly a handful of deserving pitchers, include pitchers from winning teams -- Boston's Josh Beckett and the Angels' John Lackey and Kelvim Escobar. The only pitcher I see as competition from another losing team is Oakland's Dan Haren, but if either Cleveland's C.C. Sabathia or Detroit's Justin Verlander were to go on a streak and help his team win that tight division, either could be a factor in the Cy Young as well.
However, given Bedard's individual achievements on a team that we all know has been an also-ran since Memorial Day, he should be considered the front-runner.
