The Orioles have a spring training match up with the Redsox today and luckily for me I will get to watch this one. I haven't gotten to see much about the Orioles on tv as I was traveling this past week and they basically zero national coverage, and for good reason, just saying. I would have liked to have seen yesterday's game versus the Phillies as from what I have read Brian Matusz and Alfredo Simon pitched really well. I know it is only spring training and you can't read too much into these early innings, but any good sign from Matusz is huge considering the year he had last year. The same goes for Simon after missing much of the year with his whole murder charge situation in his home country. The two of them went 7 scoreless yesterday and the team combined to shutout the Phillies. The Phillies didn't have all of their starters out there, sitting the likes of Ryan Howard and Chase Utley. However that is still a formidable lineup and a good one to get a win against. Chris Davis scored the only run with his, and the O's, first homerun of the spring. You would like to see a little more power a week and a half into spring, but as Davis said at this point teams are working more on contact than power. And as we all know a lot of this season is going to come down to how well our guys can get on base in order to give our pitchers a bit of a cusion to work with.
I also missed the Rays vs. O's game in which Reimold got hit in the left side of his face. The good news he has already returned to the club house the question now is how will his return to the plate go. We have all seen players affected by getting hit by a pitched or batted ball with differing levels of severity. It will be interesting to see if Reimold can step up and not show signs of being afraid of the ball or if he will look more like Daniel Cabrera after he got hit by a batted ball, I think we all remember how hard that was to watch. More than likely he will end up some where in between as most players who go through this do. It has to be one of the hardest things to do in sport, to get back in the batters box and face a pitcher knowing that you could get hit again and might not turn out as well. We should see fairly soon how it has affected Nolan as some reports have him returning by the end of the week. We will have to wait and see but that is a pretty quick turn around for a guy who just got hit in the face.
Today's game versus the Redsox should be another good test against an AL East lineup. The Redsox aren't throwing all of their starters out there but most would say that their backups should beat us the majority of the time. The big test will be for Dana Eveland and I am extremely interested in seeing how he performs. Much was made of us picking him up and giving him a shot, today should be a good early sign of whether this move will pay off or not. Let's hope the offense turns it up a little bit as well, I know it is only spring training but I love beating the Redsox, who doesn't? Go O's!
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