Baltimore Orioles try to drum up interest with a bad BP hat design?

Could the Baltimore Orioles actually be trying to inspire some conversation about their team by allowing a bad hat design for batting practice to stand?

Give the Baltimore Orioles credit. Faced with the prospect of fielding another team that could easily lose 100 or more games for a third straight season, the team came up with a genuinely unique way to generate some conversation – perhaps the ugliest hat in MLB history.

In a spring featuring some totally messed up batting practice/spring training hats, the Orioles have managed to exceed them all with a truly bizarre design. If you wish to look into the face of horror, behold the O’s cartoon bird with his head impaled by a baseball bat here (courtesy of Craig Goldstein’s twitter feed, which accumulated 315 likes and 34 retweets in under 20 hours).

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Writer Mark Brown described the image as “some kind of eldritch horror, missing only tentacles to give it a true Lovecraftian feel.” (Note to Baltimore management: When the design team for your squad comes up with something allowing anybody to legitimately invoke a horror fantasy writer widely seen as a Nazi sympathizer, you need to push back.)

To my eye – well, my eye says this is a bad mixed-scale image, which may work for bobbleheads (sort of), but doesn’t for this logo. To start with, what’s going on around the end of the Oriole’s bill? Is that part of his body radioactive?

And what’s going on behind the bat, or is whatever that is between the hat and the bat?

Anyway, if you’ve gotten this far in this piece, the Baltimore Orioles strategy has worked. You must be wondering about the actual team just a little bit, right? What do you need to know about a team that has lost 115 and 108 games the past two seasons?

A first glance at the team’s roster might prompt you to say, “There are exactly two players here that I would want on my favorite MLB team, Hanser Alberto and Trey Mancini.”

Alberto seems clearly a player who only needed some playing time to establish himself. In his three years in the majors previous to 2019, he didn’t play in more than 41 games. When the Orioles gave him the chance to play in 139 contests, he slashed .305/.329/.422 and posted a 3.1 WAR. Unfortunately, Alberto might also be called Scott Kingery South, after the Phillies super-utilityman. Both players probably need to be put somewhere to stay to genuinely flourish. Alberto’s fielding numbers suggest that’s probably second base, and shortstop before third.

Mancini, of course, hit .291 last season and pounded out 35 home runs and 97 RBI. He has the only firm spot in the outfield – indeed, in Baltimore, probably the only position on the field.

What else might draw some fans to the Inner Harbor this summer? Among the starters, John Means will enter his age-27 season with an actual winning record for the Baltimore Orioles. Indeed, Means accounts for 11.9 percent of Baltimore’s wins in the last two campaigns, and he didn’t even have a decision in ’18.

It might be somewhat interesting to see if Austin Hays, expected to become a significant starter well before this, will nail down the center field job after a strong September and a .309/.373/.574 line (but in only 21 games). Beyond Hays, there was, to borrow from John Meoli, a lot of “churn” last season, not only in the outfield but everywhere else.

Maybe Hunter Harvey and his 98-mph fastball will make him a solid closer, and maybe you can tell I’m beginning to strain now. Harvey, after all, was described once as “made of glass.”

Next. How Chaim Bloom passed the test in Betts trade. dark

But that was two years ago. Last season he had a 1.42 ERA. That was in only seven games, but that’s good, right?

It’s better than that hat, anyway.

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