Major League Baseball's foreign-born list came out today, and once again, it's sobering – and expected -- news for the Orioles organization.
According to MLB, there are 231 foreign-born players on 25-man rosters and disabled lists to start the season. That means 27.7 percent of all current players were not born in the United States.
The Orioles are below average in that category, with five: Cesar Izturis (Venezuela), Felix Pie, Julio Lugo and Miguel Tejada (Dominican Republic) and Koji Uehara (Japan). In comparison, the New York Mets have the most foreign born players with 18 on their active roster and DL.
But that's not what is most alarming about these annual numbers. Active rosters get shuffled around continually because of free agency, injuries, etc., and so you can't look at a 25-man list and determine how a team does internationally (the Orioles, for instance, had foreign born players constitute almost half their 25-man roster in 2005).
No, the real indicator to international mining is how many of those players were discovered by a specific organization. And by my unofficial calculation (done by scouring the MLB list) of those 231 players, the Orioles can boast two: Erik Bedard (Canada) and Uehara. It's an official shutout when you consider Bedard was amateur draft eligible and Uehara was signed as a major league free agent.
So, unless I missed an obscure name, there is not one Orioles-produced, non-drafted, foreign-born player in all of big-league baseball right now. None of the 86 Dominican players started with the Orioles (Where have you gone, Daniel Cabrera, an organization turns its lonely eyes to you).
Here's a bright spot for the future, though: The Orioles have 10 foreign-born players on their expanded, 40-man roster including three homegrown minor leaguers from the Dominican: pitchers Wilfrido Perez and Luis Lebron and infielder Pedro Florimon Jr.
-- Dan Connolly