Ox’s Weekly Airing of Grievances, 8/2/2023
It’s a funny thing what the week to week blogging grind entails. It’s my third full week in the blogging game for E52, by far the longest stretch of blogging I have ever done (the grind is really real). My week when I focus on doing this consists of basically scrolling Twitter all week, watching the Orioles, and trying to consume a ton of content in an effort to find cool stuff to talk about in my own unique way.
I find it to be of no use to me to follow anything Ravens related at this time of the year if the O’s are competing. Good news NEVER, and I repeat, NEVER EVER comes out of training camp. I am in ‘ignore and pray’ mode with them. Wake me up when it’s time for me to draft my fantasy football team.
The consistently tough part of this blogging thing is that if you know your audience, and I think I do, most of you are the same exact type of specimen that I am. You spend your time watching the games, reading the tweets and articles and literally inhaling every single important thing written about our teams online. This makes it hard to truly put out content that isn’t regurgitated or unoriginal. But alas, I keep trying with this exact thought in mind. Sometimes I’ll swing and miss, but maybe here and there I’ll hit a home run.
Yesterday we hit the 6pm trade deadline in the MLB and as it seems to constantly be the case, Birdland had a ton of opinions about it. They ranged from one side of the craziness to the other. I’ve opined to my friends and followers that I didn’t see any reason why the Orioles wouldn’t add something at the deadline. It made too much sense with the arms of the entire pitching staff literally falling off. Plus, given the quick hooks and comments made, I am pretty sure Brandon Hyde would have murdered Mike Elias if he didn’t get another arm on the staff at the deadline.
There was A LOT more skepticism than I thought. It’s been quite a few years since we’ve had team in true buying mode, and because of that I think nobody knew what to expect, which always brings about some form of doubt. But at 5:53pm (I was incessantly refreshing the feed) the O’s pulled the trigger and sent a few prospects over for starter, Jack Flaherty. I’ll be honest, I know nothing about him other than he can start games and eat innings and as of right now, that’s plenty enough for me. We can see reinforcements coming in the form of DL Hall and John Means. The extent of their contributions are still very unknown. To add to that, Tyler Wells will be spending some time to de-load in Bowie? Not sure the plan there. I also wouldn’t be surprised if the Orioles try to slip Cade Povich into the roster when September rolls around to eat up a few innings.
But one takeaway for me after yesterday’s deadline is that Mike Elias has this thing figured out. He took a decent prospect that we just didn’t have the numbers for and made him the centerpiece to get a guy in here that will help immediately with some playoff experience. It was done while keeping all of the blue chip prospects. Hats off to the GM. I have to think that we’re in for a doozy of an offseason because the infield numbers just don’t add up. However, that’s for a different time and place. All hands on deck for the stretch run.
Now that we’ve discussed the deadline and have all come to an agreement on the job Mike Elias did, how about we get into a few things I noticed this week…
THE WORST THING OF THE WEEK: The relentless tweeting of NFL player rankings in the month of July. I really really don’t know how some of you have the energy with this. Whether its arguing about them or making them up on your own. I know there’s not much to talk about this time of year, but I think if there’s one month on the NFL calendar that we should all take some time off it would be July. I would literally rather make power rankings of my colleagues in the insurance business than do this same song and dance every year.
One thing I would recommend is to speak less and listen more when it comes to the NFL in the summer time. Unclog all of our feeds for a while you go see a movie, read a book, or listen to a podcast.
With that said, I would say it’s a good idea to consume any and all Ravens content from the E52 boys. I mentioned earlier how tough it is to create content that your audience has not already been exposed to, but Jake and Spencer do it very well. Jake’s “Season in Between” pod has been nothing short of stellar and I bet that plenty of us don’t remember the 2006 Ravens the way we think.
THE BEST THING OF THE WEEK: The end of Joo-Lie (shoutout Ben MacDonald) series at Oriole Park over the weekend. To start, the O’s took two out of three which has seemingly put the Yankees in a tailspin that I don’t think they’re going to come back from. We can check those losers off the list. They’re dead. Starting to get the feeling that after last nights big Grand Slam, and his walk-off on Friday night, that Tony Taters is going to steal the souls of the entire division before this season ends.
To add to it, there were a few sellouts over the weekend. I sadly couldn’t get out there but from my understanding this was a pretty solid pro-Orioles crowd. I imagine there were plenty of Yankees fans there who were sent home disappointed, but the good outweighed the bad for the first time in a while. Also getting word that there were a lot of strong vibes at Pickles before and after the game. I’m of the opinion that a strong Pickles crowd can only help the team, and the fans, from achieving all of their life goals. Shoutout Pickles. Shoutout High Noon.
And finally, we have the Sunday Night Baseball broadcast. I’m putting it here despite any silly opinions you may have on it. The entire broadcast was dedicated to the team and the town and if you think otherwise let me know so I can mail you your invitation to this year’s Player Haters Ball.
We had “Crabcakes and Baseball” graphics, homer hose segments, and a mic’d up Gunnar Henderson. But some of you chose to get upset that the broadcast team asked King Felix about The Wire or pronounced Urias’ name wrong. Please just stop. ESPN has a lot of flaws, but it wasn’t the SNB broadcast. Not this week. Buster Olney was as charming as we could have expected and if his one or two snide comments hurt your feelings that bad then we need to have a different type of discussion.
TRADING CARD OF THE WEEK: This week in the trading card world was the NSCC, also known as the National Sports Collectors Convention, also known to the card bros simply as “National” (don’t say ‘Nationals’ unless you have a death wish). It jumps from town to town and this year it took place in Chicago. It’s the Mecca of trading card conventions. I always aspire to go but I feel like I need to go out there with like $10k just to have any fun so instead, I sit on Twitter and have fun watching everyone buy, sell, and trade.
Coinciding with the National is the release of Topps Chrome Baseball. This is the main set of MLB cards that are released every year. This year’s set includes rookie cards for Adley Rutschman, Gunnar Henderson, DL Hall, Kyle Stowers, as well as few other notable rookies from around the league. All signs point to this draft class being pretty good and thus this set is, and will be, highly sought out in the future. However, the price of boxes may fall in the short term as someone already nailed the Adley Rutschman 1/1 Autograph Superfractor card. Quite possibly the best card in the set. I saw the guy who pulled it post on Facebook looking for $50k for it. So if you believe in Adley and you have a ton of money, maybe it’s a good investment for you. Personally, I’ve seen worse cards go for more money.
Additional note: I scooped up a box and took my chances. I pulled an O’s auto and thought I struck gold. The other guy who I got duplicates of, Steele Walker, not even in the league anymore. Ya win some and you lose some I guess. I’ll be taking a sabbatical from buying cards for a little while now. So to say that the Adley 1/1 Auto is rare would be quite the understatement.
FINAL THOUGHT: I am thinking that the Orioles are going to start making a push to get people locked in for tickets for this year’s playoffs. If you have a season plan, then you should have access to tickets for at least one game per series by my estimation. Save your money and have it ready. This month will probably be the time to pay up. Talk to you next week.
The wave is unnecessary,
Ox