It's only June, but it might be time for the Orioles to start seriously pondering the mystery that is Jeremy Guthrie.
The veteran cornerstone of the starting rotation is 2-8 and — by all accounts — much better than that dismal won-loss record. He is a solid guy and a solid presence in the Orioles clubhouse. He's also a dependable innings eater who preserves the bullpen and handles the swings and errors of his outrageous fortune without public complaint or self pity.
In other words, what's not to like, and yet you can make the case that the July 31 deadline for making trades without waivers can't get here soon enough, both for Guthrie and the team.
What? It never crossed your mind that the Orioles might benefit from dealing Guthrie at the deadline to beef up the offense or the position side of the organizational youth movement? It never occurred to you that Guthrie just might need a change of scenery to get out of this strange sub-.500 funk that largely is no fault of his own?
It's almost impossible to explain, but the guy's Orioles career has been a study in statistical injustice.
When he pitches well, the Orioles' offense takes the night off. When he makes a mistake, there never seems to be anyone around to pick him up. Sure, that kind of stuff is going to happen a lot when you play for a series of doormat teams — and you're matched up regularly against the best pitchers in the league — but not this much.
Guthrie isn't totally blameless, of course. If you want to trot out the Orioles' .419 winning percentage over the course of his career (through Friday), you have to ask how Guthrie's winning percentage over that same period is only .417, despite finishing only one season with an ERA above 4.00.
He can be his own worst enemy at times, but it's fair to wonder if he simply suffers from the baseball version of the Stockholm Syndrome and has psychologically adopted his team's losing identity.
If you ask an old pitching coach, he'll probably tell you that winning pitchers find ways to win, which is pretty much what Mark Connor said when he was sizing up Guthrie at the end of spring training.
"Jeremy is at a certain point in his career where it's time to become a winning pitcher," Connor told Dan Connolly of The Sun. "Pitchers really can't control wins so much, but I've been on some teams that were pretty bad that had a couple of guys that won more than they lost. He's pitched in the big leagues, he's been in the rotation three or four full years … it's time for him to be the guy and set an example."
That's certainly easier said than done under the circumstances that have faced Guthrie during his 4½ seasons in Baltimore, so maybe he deserves the chance to find out just how good he could be in a more fertile environment than a perennial losing club in the toughest division in the sport.
He'll definitely have value for all of the reasons already outlined here. If made available in July, he likely would be one of the top starting pitchers on the trade market and he would figure to be attractive to any contending team with a hole in its rotation. Don't know about you, but I'd like to see what he can do with consistent run support in a highly competitive situation.
The alternative for the Orioles would be to keep him and figure out what to do with him as he heads into his free-agent walk year in 2012. Can they justify a rich, multi-year extension for a guy who has never had a full winning season in the major leagues? Do they want to pay him $7 million or so in his final year of arbitration eligibility to buy time while they wait for another of their young pitching prospects to pop?
There's no easy answer, of course. Good pitching is hard to find and Guthrie is a good veteran starting pitcher. It's just getting harder and harder to imagine him reaching his full potential in an Orioles uniform.
Listen to Peter Schmuck on "The Week in Review" on Friday's at noon on WBAL (1090AM) and WBAL.com.