Juan Samuel.

Shuffling the deckchairs whilst the Titanic sinks springs to mind.

That being said, he can't do any worse than Trembley surely. The Orioles were almost 100 games below .500 during Trembley's tenure and he's only been there three years.

Well they need to find a way to improve and this would be the first step.

I hope they don't do what Pittsburgh did and rebuild for 20 years...

Doesn't help being in the AL East at a time when the Rays and Bluejays have pretty good teams. You could take pretty much any other team from the rest of MLB and they'd struggle in that division.

A fair point, Bottom_of_the_League. How many games would the Astros, Pirates or Royals win if they were in the AL East? Probably not 60.

However, Baltimore went into this season with a bigger payroll than either the Rays or the Jays. I'm sure the upper levels of ownership in Baltimore must be looking at Tampa and Toronto and asking, "if they can do it in the AL East, why can't we?"

The Orioles management hasn't been very good of course, but you've got a situation (although the Twins may argue) where the best four teams in the AL are all the same division. It makes life tricky for all of them - two excellent teams will miss the playoffs, while two probably inferior teams will make the playoffs courtesy of winning the Central and the West.

The Rays will eventually get decimated by free agency, but without a salary cap it's very difficult for the Orioles to make the playoffs. They have to finish ahead of one of the Yankees or Red Sox at the very least, difficult at the best of times.

Well looking at this first innings I'd say new manager, same old s__t.

Not much you can do if your pitchers starts walking everyone. Very nearly escaped with no damage too, but the ground ball just wasn't hit hard enough.

They need to trade away the big earners and the veterans, promote the youngsters from AAA and start rebuilding. Get full salary control of the team through to 2016 and look to challenge in about 4 years from now.

They haven't really got any large contracts bar probably Markakis, Roberts and Lugo. Considering Markakis is only 26 and probably their best player, do you really want rid of him? Roberts is paid $10m per year until 2013 and Lugo has a $9m vesting option for 2011 which probably won't be activated (needs 600 PA's this season), but other than that they have no significant obligations beyond this season. I'd say you'd struggle to find anyone to pick up Roberts and Lugo unless the Orioles pay a large chunk of their salaries.

Therefore they'll have a lot of freedom from next year onwards regardless.