For late arrivals to this blog and my social media accounts: I have great respect and admiration for the longtime Washington Post sportswriter Tom Boswell. In July, as the COVID MLB Season was about to begin, he coined a phrase: The Awful Baltimore Orioles. The Awful Orioles has a certain poetic lift, wouldn’t you say? It is alliterative and flows off the tongue easily. And, of course, for many baseball experts and pundits, it is an apt description. Be that as it may — pardon my invocation of the common British transition there, but the name Boswell has that effect on me — I think I will embrace this name for the 2020 team and relish its irony as the team performs better than Boswell and everyone beyond the Patapsco Drainage Basin expects. And if it doesn’t work out, oh, well then. We will just acknowledge Boswell’s formidable prescience and continue our devotion to the Awful Orioles.
Post-Post: I never thought the Orioles were going to be as awful in 2020 as they were in 2019. Call me a sucker, but I actually believe in the rebuilding they’re doing. I predicted in a column last year that the 2020 Orioles would win more games than they lose, and everyone who read that told me I was nuts. We shall see, right?
Dan Rodricks 