Good morning and welcome to Effectively Wild, the baseball prospectus daily podcast.

You just heard the sound of a Baltimore Oriole.

There is a reason for that which we will get into shortly.

I am Ben Lindbergh with me as always is Sam Miller or you Sam.

We started our series of season previews yesterday but we neglected to mention what order we

were going in.

A couple people did ask which is a logical question.

We are going in order of last year's record by division and we decided to start with the

AL and with the AL East for no good reason I guess because of East Coast bias probably.

And so today we have last year's second place AL East finisher on the schedule.

It's the Baltimore Orioles and joining us is the author of the Orioles chapter in baseball

prospectus 2013.

It is Derek Cardi.

Hello Derek.

Hey guys thanks for having me.

Thank you for coming on despite being deathly ill.

We have some questions about the Orioles I suppose.

The Orioles were a team that you and I probably all of us didn't really believe in last

year.

I think probably some of our early podcast episodes last year were about how we didn't

think the Orioles would make the playoffs or we weren't confident in that.

And they did despite that people sort of doubting them right up to the end.

...