Birds Watcher - A Baltimore Orioles Fan Site - News, Blogs, Opinion and More

Orlando Gomez (Left) and Jonathon Schoop (Right) received their minor league awards at Camden Yards in Baltimore

Orlando Gomez will be returning for his third season as manager of the Frederick Keys. He led the Keys to their fourth Mills Cup championship in 2011. Gomez previously managed the Delmarva Shorebirds and Bluefield Orioles in the two years previous to Frederick.

The 65-year-old manager set a new Keys wins record (148) that was previously held by Bien Figueroa from ’05-06. Gomez is currently (152-127) with the Keys.

Continue reading this post »

I’ll keep this short because if you’re anything like me, it’s almost 5 p.m. on a Friday, and you’re about clocked out. Regardless, I want to take a second to look at the new strategy of the Orioles to shop internationally. Today, the Orioles signed 18-year-old Andres Aguilar from Guatemala and assigned him to the Gulf Coast League.

Continue reading this post »

As I said earlier this week, MASN will be televising six Oriole games during spring training. However if you’re unable to watch those games or you just prefer the radio, you’re in luck! WBAL radio announved yesterday that they’ll air the following spring training games this season:

Continue reading this post »

Anticipating this coming baseball season is like going down the street from Camden Yards, looking into a fog over the Inner Harbor, and trying to make out the contours of a distant ship. As the vessel draws nearer, more of the structure can be seen. And with a countdown of but a few weeks until pitchers and catchers report, some Orioles details are emerging … a few of which were elaborated upon at the FanFest event this past Saturday.

Continue reading this post »

This is totally off topic with regard to the Orioles, yet it’s an important topic to me and to many Oriole fans so I feel that it’s something that should be mentioned. I attended last night’s Maryland/Duke game at Comcast Center. For the record, Duke won 74-61, although the Terps and new head coach Mark Turgeon had a good showing. However even though there’s always buzz surrounding the Duke game in College Park, the real buzz of the evening came prior to the game when the University of Maryland officially dedicated the Comcast Center floor as “Gary Williams Court.”  Continue reading this post »

Now that the Prince Fielder sweepstakes are over and things have quieted down, I suppose it’s worth looking at the position Fielder plays: first base. Amid all of the chatter with regard to Fielder, Buck Showalter said that Chris Davis would be playing first going into the season, with Mark Reynolds guarding the hot corner at third. So offensively and defensively, where does this leave the Orioles?

Continue reading this post »

 By now we all know that Prince Fielder has signed with the Detroit Tigers for 9 years, $214 million. Let’s be frank; it was a whirlwind couple of days! Nobody – and I mean NOBODY - saw this one coming. If any of the national media personalities knew that “Prince to Detroit” was going down, they sure kept it under wraps until the very end. It appeared that the O’s and Nationals were the two finalists, which was setting up a true “battle of the beltways.” Little did anyone know that the team from Marvin Gaye’s Mo Town was about to “get it on” with Fielder and Boras.

Continue reading this post »

According to the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network’s Roch Kubatko, MASN will air six of the Orioles’ spring training games this year. MASN play-by-play announcers Gary Thorne and Jim Hunter will be joined by hall of famer Jim Palmer and Mike Bordick (making his MASN debut) to call the following games:

• March 5th vs. Pittsburgh (7 PM)
• March 11th vs. Red Sox (1 PM)
• March 18th vs. NY Yankees (7 PM)
• March 23rd vs. Red Sox (1 PM)
• March 24th vs. Nationals (1 PM)
• April 1st vs. Rays (1 PM)

All of the MASN games are at “home” (Ed Smith Stadium in Sarasota FL). I suspect that we’ll be able to see the Orioles at a few other junctures as well via MLB Network and/or ESPN. Last season MLB Network aired games literally everyday from the beginning of spring training up until Opening Day.

Follow me on Twitter @DomenicVadala

Saturday’s FanFest event at the Baltimore Convention Center produced a number of great one-liner comments. After a while, I began to write them down. So here is a list of remarks that caught my ear and even had me laughing out loud a few times!

Buck Showalter – on the subject of Prince Fielder – “What a great name! I’ve never had a player on a team named ‘Prince’ or ‘King,’ but I’ve had a few princesses!”

Continue reading this post »

Anyone that follows twitter, message boards, columns, or sports news knows what happened yesterday. While all of us (myself included) were sleeping at about 1:30 AM a nameless source tweeted that the Washington Nationals had signed Prince Fielder. (I say a nameless source because I think that what the guy did by starting rumors is akin to just asking for publicity and I’m not going to give him any space in this column.) From then until about noon yesterday we saw a marathon of tweets and information from baseball sources regarding Fielder’s destination.

Continue reading this post »