When the Orioles assemble for their first pitcher and catcher workouts less than two weeks from now, there will be a number of difficult challenges facing manager Buck Showalter and the coaching staff.
Like figuring out who everybody is.
The deal that sent Jeremy Guthrie to the Colorado Rockies for two more right-handers increased the number of pitchers on the 40-man roster to 21, and the number arriving at the Ed Smith Stadium for the first workout on Feb 19. could top 30 when you add in all the non-roster invitees.
New executive vice president Dan Duquette made it his top priority to bolster the Orioles' organizational pitching depth, so none of this should be particularly surprising, but there has been so much turnover this winter that it's fair to wonder how much might be too much.
Of course, any old-school baseball type will tell you that you can never have enough good pitching, but that kind of begs the question. How many of these guys really are good pitchers and how many are the kind of guys whom bad teams pick up hoping to get lucky and end up with some champagne for the price of light beer?
The Orioles will certainly need some extra arms to get through the first week or two of preseason games. They are scheduled to open the exhibition season with a pair of split-squad games against the Tampa Bay Rays and Pittsburgh Pirates on March 5, which means that they might need as many as 25 pitchers just to get through three games the first two days, since only a few of those pitchers will throw more than one inning the first time out.
The herd will have to be thinned pretty quickly, however, since Showalter and pitching coach Rick Adair are going to need a lot of innings to audition the dozen or so candidates for the starting rotation.
That should be interesting. Duquette has thrown out a wide net to accumulate enough starters for at least two full rotations. He has talked up Dana Eveland and Taiwanese left-hander Wei-Yin Chen and the just-acquired Jason Hammel. He has signed Armando Galarraga — the classy fellow who pitched the perfect game that wasn't — to a minor league contract. It would be no surprise at this point if he hopped a jet to the Dominican Republic and talked Pedro Martinez out of retirement.
C'mon, how many teams go to spring training with enough rotation-eligible starting pitchers to begin jury selection?
Orioles fans are understandably skeptical, since they waited out the entire Andy MacPhail rebuilding project and ended up watching the youth-infused starting rotation come unraveled last year because of the mysterious downfall of Brian Matusz, the elbow problem that limited the effectiveness of Jake Arrieta and the slower-than-expected development of Chris Tillman.
Duquette arrived in town determined to make sure that the team isn't caught short in either the rotation or the bullpen again, but fans have a right to be unimpressed with the quality of the arms he has stockpiled so far.
He may end up looking like a genius if Chen takes the American major leagues by storm and Hammel pops and Eveland finally blooms with his seventh major league team in eight years, but doesn't it seem like somebody around here is saying something like that at about this time every year?
The only way the O's are going to achieve Duquette's goal of reaching .500 this season is if some of those things happen and the young nucleus of the rotation takes the big step this year that MacPhail and Showalter were banking on last spring. It's not a good thing when you have to depend on a best-case scenario just to be average.
The Orioles are coming out of another winter without a dynamic free-agent acquisition. They just traded away their most experienced veteran starter for a pair of unheralded pitchers who may be in for a rude awakening in the AL East. This team does not appear — on paper — much more prepared to compete in their brutal division than it was at this time a year ago…or four, for that matter.
So, we enter another season waiting to be surprised. We can only watch and hope that Duquette knows something we don't.
Listen to Peter Schmuck when he hosts "The Week in Review" on Fridays at 10 a.m. on WBAL (1090AM) and wbal.com.