
Originally Posted by
funkateer
I posted this very fact a couple days ago, when Buck was 6 games away from a .500 record with the Orioles...now he's just 4 games away. I thought it was worth pointing out, because everyone kept pooh-poohing the O's record thus far this season, saying "small sample size, small sample size".....so I decided to look up Showalter's record since he took over at the end of the 2010 season....and even I was surprised to see that he was very, very close to the fabled and supposedly impossible-for-the-Orioles-to-achieve .500 record. The Orioles are .492 with Buck Showalter at the helm.
The important thing about it all is that this has happened over the course of 246 games -- that's practically a season and a half's worth of games ---- NOT a small sample size at all (and the trend is in the upward direction; since mid-August of last season or so).
As I said at the time, this isn't winning them a championship, or even a wildcard....or even the right to say they had a "winning season" again finally....but it ought to mean something to those glass-half-empty types: find another 246 game stretch of damn-near .500 baseball ANYWHERE else in the last 14 years! I'll say it again: this season IS different than the others.....even if it goes in the toilet tomorrow, the O's have not had this long a sustained period of winning at the clip they've been winning at since about August 2010.