Good morning and welcome to episode 375 of Effectively Wild, the Daily Podcast from

Baseball Prospectus.

I'm Ben Lemberg, joined by Sam Miller, and today we are joined by Jack Moore of Classical

and Sports on Earth, and every other site on the internet where people have written

about sports, and we're going to talk to him about the Orioles a little bit, who have

been, I feel like a feel good story for most of the last couple of years, and you're doing

your best to throw some cold water on the feel good story and make us all feel bad about

the Orioles again.

You've written a couple of times recently about Peter Angelo's at Getting Blanked, and

there hasn't been too much to talk about with the Orioles this winter because they haven't

really done much, they haven't made many moves, and so we've ended up talking a lot about

their stringent physicals, and you've written a bit about their history of tough physicals

and voiding contracts.

It is not just Grant Balfour, so take us through the history of the Orioles and physicals.

Yeah, this definitely isn't a new thing, so it goes back to the late 90s when they signed

Xavier Hernandez to a $2.5 million contract, and apparently they added him to the roster

before they did the physical or before they did their tough physical or whatever, because

they later discovered that he had a torn rotator cuff, and that pretty much ended his career.

They avoided the Orioles' attempt to avoid the contract, and they did manage to save $750,000

after a settlement.

Hernandez, his career ended after that.

The next one was in 2000, you have Aaron Sealy signed with the Orioles to a $4.29 million

...