Buck Showalter (l.) greets Yankees skipper Joe Girardi in the ALDS last year--a spot Showalter plans on returning with his club again in 2013.  SARASOTA — In and around getting a knee replacement and marrying off his daughter, Buck Showalter spent a whole winter listening to baseball pundits reel off a litany of reasons why his Baltimore Orioles won’t be able to repeat their magical 2012 season in which they won 93 games and took the Yankees to the full five games in the ALDS before finally going home.  They made absolutely no improvements, either by the trade route or free agency, for a team that finished ninth in the American League in runs scored.  They could never repeat, or even come close to repeating, their 29-9 record in one-run games, in which their relievers had a collective 2.12 ERA.  And they can never expect to go 16-2 (including 16 in a row) in extra-innings games again.  It got to a point where Showalter just didn’t want to hear it anymore. The 56-year old skipper doesn’t deal in “can’ts” or “won’ts.” Never has and never will. Just a year ago, after all, wasn’t just about everyone on the baseball planet, with the exception of him, saying the Orioles couldn’t be thinking of breaking their 14-year streak of losing records because their talent level just wasn’t there and the gap between them and the Yankees was just as steep as the $120 million payroll differential.  “My message to my players was that we need to concentrate on the essence of what made us better,” Showalter was saying Monday during the Orioles’ spring training workout at Ed Smith Stadium. “There are no Cinderellas in baseball. The season is just too long. You don’t get lucky for 162 games. We just need to identify now what we need to get better.”  And that, Showalter maintains, is coming from within. Nobody had to tell him the Orioles needed another bat, a deficiency that showed up most in the ALDS when they scored a total of 10 runs in the five games against the Yankees. That bat could just as well have been right fielder Nick Markakis, the Orioles’ best hitter, who went down for the season when CC Sabathia plunked him with a fastball and broke his thumb on Sept. 8.  Or it might even have been left fielder Nolan Reimold, who’d carried the Orioles the first two weeks of the season, hitting .313 with five homers and 10 RBI in the first 16 games before suffering a herniated disk diving into the stands while making a catch and requiring season-ending surgery.  Markakis and Reimold have so far showed no ill-effects from their respective injuries while vowing to pick up where they left off last year, a prospect that understandably warms Showalter.  But that’s not all. He is also cautiously optimistic - and stop me if this sounds all too familiar — that second baseman Brian Roberts, who’s played a total of 115 games over the last three years due to an assortment of injuries from two concussions, hip surgery, a sports hernia and lower back strain, is at last healthy and ready to reassume his critical leadoff role in the walk season of a four-year, $40 million contract.
Buck Showalter says the players all understand why the Orioles front office was idle, and they take it as a vote of confidence.