Orioles Are Hot--by AL East Standards

NEW YORK — The Baltimore Orioles are the hottest team in the American League East. How hot are they? They are as hot as room temperature. They are as hot as road warrior Mikhail Gorbachev in Minsk. They are as hot, right now, as Alberta, Canada.

Let us put it this way, even if the Orioles were going a lot better, nobody would want to break them up.

And still, hot enough.

“It’s an ugly job,” says Orioles relief ace Gregg Olson, “but somebody’s got to do it.”

Oh, it’s ugly all right. It is no compliment to be the beast of this east. In the National Football League, they have parity. In the American League East, it is parody.

Let’s go to the standings. Since May 18, it looks this way:

Baltimore Orioles 9-7 (-)

Detroit Tigers 8-8 (1)

Toronto Blue Jays 7-9 (2)

Boston Red Sox 7-9 (2)

Cleveland Indians 6-9 (2 1/2)

Milwaukee Breweres 6-10 (3)

New York Yankees 5-11 (4)

Since April 9 when the season began, the Orioles, at 23-27, are 3 1/2 games out of first place.

To the question, can’t anybody here play this game, the right answer is: Not so you would notice.

Even the Orioles have not noticed. They knocked off the Yankees Sunday, 4-3, when Mickey Tettleton, finally deciding to swing the bat, hit a two-run homer, and Olson, who did not have his good stuff, got the save anyway. Did they feel hot? Nobody was passing around thermometers.

I took a tour of the triumphant clubhouse and asked the question of the day: Who’s the hottest team in the East?

Kevin Hickey: “Is this a trick question? Toronto?”

Olson: “Not us.”

Randy Milligan: “Not the Orioles. No way.”

Tettleton: “Nobody?”

Well, you can’t blame them. Nobody thinks the Orioles are actually playing well, although they are playing better than they had been. The starting pitching is sporadic, and the hitting is the worst in the American League, either division. The Orioles’ lone star player is in the worst slump of his life, and Craig Worthington, last year’s clutch RBI man, has one more run batted in this season than Bob Melvin, who has yet to get a hit at Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium. Yeah, these guys are hot, all right.

But, on this road trip, the Orioles are 6-3, heading into Milwaukee Monday for a big showdown series with the first-place Brewers. That five of the wins came against the Texas Rangers and New York should not matter. Any win is a good win.

“Considering how we’ve played,” Tettleton said, “we’re in pretty good shape. Of course, everyone’s in pretty good shape in this division.”

Not everyone. Say, the managers of the respective teams. They should all have unlisted phone numbers. The hottest manager is, of course, Johnny Oates, who just lost his job to Frank Robinson. Where is the justice? In Robinson’s absence, Oates went 2-1, which should win him some votes as Manager of the Year and must make him a shoo-in for the Yankees job. Managing the Yankees is, of course, a decidedly mixed blessing.

Meantime, the Bucky Dent watch continues, but I would not exactly plan my summer around it. The only way Bucky Dent will not eventually pick up the phone to hear he has been fired is if he never picks up the phone -- ever again.

It does not matter who manages the Yankees. They are not going anywhere. There was some thought, though, that Toronto, a talented team, ought to breeze through this division, before meeting with the Oakland Athletics in the playoffs again. The Blue Jays are 27-25. They are the team that always seems to need a wake-up call. The Blue Jays got one last year by changing managers in midseason. Oates is still available.

The Orioles will make do with Robinson (with a 7-6 record in his past 13 games, a pretty hot manager himself). He does have one thing going for him, and that is Olson, who picked up his 11th save in 11 tries. Even in the East, the Orioles would be lost without Olson, who has allowed one run all season. For the first time this year, they pitched him 3 2-3 innings over two days, risking his valuable arm. He said he did not mind. And that is how Oates got so good.

“We’re not in bad shape, you know, considering how the season has gone,” Olson said. “We’re starting to put it together a little. You win a few games in a row, and you can make a real move.”

You win five in a row, and they probably stop the season in what passes for this long, hot summer.