Base Hits: 11/14/2008

Aubrey Huff has won the 2008 Silver Slugger award for DH and deservedly so. Before the season, I described Huff as a "hitter in decline" but I was wrong, at least for last year.

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The West Oahu Canefires will play in the Hawaiian League Championship game on Sunday. Oriole prospects haven't had a lot to do with their success (Tim Bascom, for instance, has been horrible) with the bright spot being 3B Tyler Henson hitting .261 with 16 RBI and a team high 25 walks. Adam Loewen plays for the Canefires too. He is hitting .143 with no extra base hits. And he's been hit by a pitch three times in just 8 games. Good!

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Sarasota has hammered out a proposal worth more than $30 million to become the Spring Training home for the Baltimore Orioles after two days of meetings with Oriole officials. The offer has yet to be voted on by the Lee County Commission before the offer is official.

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Former Oriole manager and universal sad-sack Sam Perlozzo has joined the Charlie Manuel's staff with the Philadelphia Phillies. God help them.

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A clip from Dave Sheinin's Nationals Journal blog as the free agent season begins. (The Nationals seem to think they have a legitimate shot at signing Mark Teixeira...oookay...)

*The Nationals' chief competitors might be just up the road in Baltimore. Someone who speaks to Peter Angelos regularly told me that he has never seen him so fixated on a player as he is on Teixeira. Others have told me that Angelos has been asking everyone in baseball what they think of Teixeira.

My educated guess is that the Orioles will end up making the highest bid for Teixeira.

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Song of the Week: Bringing a little country feel into the mix with the excellent alt country band out of Athens, GA, Drive-By Truckers with "Gravity's Gone" Have a nice weekend.

Mark Teixeira: He's Not Coming and We Don't Want Him

The relative success of the 2008 season has some Oriole fans starting to talk about the possibility of the Orioles signing Mark Teixeira in the offseason again. I have detailed before why he's not coming but I don't think I've gone into why we Oriole fans shouldn't want him here.

First, you have to understand that he will be commanding a salary somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 million a year. If Andruw Jones can command $18 million per year, Teixeira can command more than that without blinking an eye.

So what are you buying for your money? Presumably, a team is going to pay a premium for Teixeira to get a bonafide slugging first baseman.

Fine. Texieira may be that man. But since the year he hit 43 home runs for Texas, his home run numbers have been in decline. Since 2005, he has hit 43, 33 and 30. He is on a pace to hit just 24 this year. And during his best years for Texas, his home/road splits were quite dramatic.

          Home OPS     Road OPS
2004          .967        .893
2005         1.109        .809

His Isolated Power (ISO) has been in steady decline too. Since 2004:

        ISO
2004    .279
2005    .274
2006    .232
2007    .257
2008    .175

The ISO for 2007 would look even worse if not for the red-hot August and September Teixeira had once he got to Atlanta. He posted ISOs of .325 and .268 respectively.

That success has not carried into this year. .276 AVG, 10 HR, slugging .448. Not the numbers of premier major league slugger. But he will be expecting to be paid like a premier major league slugger.

I think Mark Texieira is a good hitter. He will probably be a good component for a team that is already good. If I thought the O's were one hitter away from contending, maybe my opinion would be different. But the Orioles are not just one hitter away. And he's not going to be the man. He's not going to be a dominant hitter. And he's certainly not a good bet to be that kind of hitter over the course of a 7-year/$140 million contract.