Mark Zinno: Baseball--Patience & Failure
It's a little over a week into the baseball season and I've already started to hear people asking questions that should only be asked after 45-60 games, not eight or 10. Fans need to lose this football mentality. That's the mentality that after five or six games you know what you are. Lose that thinking for two reasons:
1) It doesn't apply to baseball.
2) It's not 100% true in football either.
The Ravens are a perfect example. They looked awful their last five regular season games and won a Super Bowl.
A blown save in the first week of the season is not cause for people to question the manager's decision making. Nor is it reason to wonder about a player's ability to perform over the course of the rest of the season. Personnel decisions are not made in baseball this early unless an injury happens. Teams have to find out what they are and who they have. The only way to do that is to let guys play. You need to find out what they do in pressure situations. Baseball requires patience and failure. There is a great amount of trust that a manager has in his players that they won't fail and when they do, they have to go back to them to find out if they will fail again.
There are lots of ups and downs in the baseball season and it is too early to start to panic about the Buck Showalter and the Orioles. This team is built for 162 games. They need to play a lot more of them to find out if that assessment is wrong.
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