Good luck, Buck

Buck Showalter has his own Mission Impossible and he chose to accept it.

Make the Orioles relevant again.

He's taken on a few doozy assignments over the years:

Rebuild the Yankees of the early 1990s.

Build a team in Arizona.

Put a winning product on the field in Arlington.

He did all three... and Joe Torre and Bob Brenly reaped the rewards of Buck's hard work with a few World Series titles. (I wonder what Buck felt like seeing the Yankee team he helped put together being beaten by the Diamondback team he managed just a year before in the 2001 World Series.)

Well now he needs to take what used to be one of the great baseball cities ever and make them care about the birds again, something they haven't done since Ripken was in uniform.

Step one: Make sure the Orioles don't have one of the worst records in the history of baseball.

He won tonight.

So far so good.