Mark Reynolds is taking strikeout funks, homer binges, walks and plus chemistry to Cleveland. Clearly interest going both ways — between Mark and Baltimore, that is — was sorely lacking.

Many of us will miss Mark, Blog of Team included. And if he figures out how to bring his batting average up, we’ll miss him a lot.

[This was Blog's favorite Mark moment (besides when he almost got intarperated).]

Sixty home runs in two seasons, despite playing without any real certainty about his defensive role until near the end of his tenure in Baltimore. It should have been different and, yes, we all knew it at the time — prior to 2012 campaign that is — that the third base experiment went on too long.

Mark plays best when he’s just letting the game come to him; that’s why he’s a better first baseman. At third after you catch it, a lot of times you have to throw it. That scary moment where you think about the throw wasn’t Mark’s strong suit.

Many of us will be tempted to conclude that Team is not interested in spending money. But maybe — maybe — that’s not true.

Maybe our Cash-Hoarding Head Strategist simply is looking for more value with the $8 million (at least) that Team now has saved by not moving on Reynolds and by trading our other dearly departed chemistry-plus player, Robert Andino.

After all, Dan did see fit to drop $2 million on Nate McLouth, who gets on base at a higher career clip than Reynolds, plays reliable defense, can lead off and apparently has a new lease on baseball life.

Besides Nate — and a sort of halfway interesting Rule 5 draft choice and the signing of a minor league reclamation project — the winter meetings came and went with many beat writers and bloggers telling us to sit tight and be patient. Guess you have to write something when there’s nothing to write about.

Okay! That’s what we’ll do!

But with all that dry powder it would certainly be reasonable to expect something. After all Team does like to roll out new baubles, such as they have been, at FanFest in January.

Maybe Team is being tight-fisted now because Warehouse knows it blew any shot it once may have had at extending Matt Wieters with a friendly contract — and now it’s trying to scrap together enough of a ceiling to make that happen eventually. That’s just a conspiracy theory, though. Probably not a very good one as far as those things go.

Or maybe Duquette cares not a whit for any one at any given moment and sees only a stat sheet with on-base percentage in his mind’s eye when he tucks in at night all warm and cozy beneath his Orioles nightcap.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 10th, 2012 at 15:57 and is filed under the rOster. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.