Why are the Orioles so bad? One answer is that they might not really, truly be so bad--that if you overlook their catastrophic 2-16 start, they are a feisty, competitive 8-8 since. That even their catastrophic 2-16 start was somehow feisty and competitive, probably the best performance ever by a team that was losing 16 out of 18 games.
Signed as a minor league free agent on April 21, Patterson was batting .368 in 14 games with the Tides.
He was immediately placed at the top of the lineup in Wednesday's game against the Seattle Mariners. With Roberts out, the Orioles tried Adam Jones and Julio Lugo at the leadoff spot and experienced little success.
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Replacing Reimold, who was batting .205, with Patterson served as an indication that Baltimore wasn't going to stand pat while owning the worst record in baseball.
"I hope it is a twofold purpose here," manager Dave Trembley said. "We need to get somebody that can spark our offense. I am not putting it all on Corey, but he has been a leadoff guy in the past. He was playing very well at Triple-A. Nolan wasn't playing well here. It's unfortunate that these things happen, but they do happen."
Now, Nolan Reimold has not played particularly well. He is coming back from Achilles tendon surgery, and it may help him if he goes to recuperate somewhere other than in the major-league lineup. "Trembley said it was obvious that Reimold had lost his confidence, both at the plate and in the field," the news story reports.
Funny thing, confidence. Reimold may look uncomfortable at the plate, but 1 out of 9 times he steps up to hit, he draws a walk: 11 walks in 96 plate appearances this year. Actually, the rate works out to a walk every 8.7 plate appearances--exactly as often as Reimold walked last year, when he was a Rookie of the Year candidate.
That walk rate means that Reimold has a .302 on-base percentage. And that is to say, this year, hobbled by surgical aftereffects and batting without confidence, Nolan Reimold was so awful, his on-base percentage through 29 games was TWELVE POINTS HIGHER THAN COREY PATTERSON'S CAREER ON-BASE PERCENTAGE.
Uh-oh. Am I shouting? Corey Patterson, in 10 years in the majors, has reached base 29 percent of the time. And Dave Trembley is hoping that will solve the problem of the leadoff slot. Patterson will "spark the offense," except for the 71 percent of the time he will turn around and go sit back down on the bench, because he made an out, because Corey Patterson is the exact opposite of what a baseball team needs from its leadoff hitter.
Some of the things that have made the Orioles the worst team in the majors are genuine baseball mysteries. How can a starting pitcher be as good as Kevin Millwood has been without ever winning a game? How and why, in the course of 12 months, has Adam Jones deteriorated from the next Eric Davis to the next Jeffrey Hammonds to his current condition, in which he looks a lot like the next Corey Patterson?
But other parts of this season's debacle are easy to explain. The Orioles have decent pitching, but can't score runs. To fix this, they are going to put Corey Patterson at the top of the batting order. This is the kind of decision that the people who make decisions for the Orioles make, when they make decisions. Other teams make other kinds of decisions.
