The Orioles of recent years were a lot of fun to watch because they were so good. Something that made them even more fun is how their being good threw almost the entire baseball pundit industry for a loop as so many scrambled to downplay how the O’s could not possibly be so good because they did not look like the conventional wisdom of what a baseball team should look like.
Does any one player embody this more than Darren O’Day? As baseball is filled more and more with big, hard-throwing relievers who light up the radar gun, the Orioles found themselves a stalwart reliever with a funky side-arming motion whose success from 2012-15 is equal to or greater than just about any other reliever could ever achieve in the same time.