The Orioles inked Alex Cobb to a four-year deal worth $50 million earlier this week. It was a nice signing, there’s no doubt about that. Cobb is a player I think many of us would have liked to have in Toronto’s rotation and he ended up signing a reasonable deal with Baltimore.

That’s unfortunate, and while it does make the Orioles better, they’re still trash. That’s why they’re called the Trash Birds, after all.

The thing looming over the Orioles in 2018 is the dawn of an end of an era. Manny Machado, Adam Jones, and Zach Britton are all set to hit the open market this winter and there’s a chance none of them will be back next year. I mean, I have no idea what’s going to happen with Jones and Britton, but everyone knows Machado is gone.

Baltimore finished fifth in the American league East last year. They obviously want to capitalize on the final year of their Machado window, so they went out and acquired Alex Cobb and Andrew Cashner to bolster their starting rotation. It isn’t spectacular, but it’s an upgrade over some of the comedically-bad they kept trotting out there last year. The ‘pen, which is usually a strength for the O’s, took a massive hit when Britton tore his achilles in the off-season. The team will have to rely heavily on their homer-happy lineup to push for a wild card spot this year. At the heart of that is badly-needed better seasons from Chris Davis and Mark Trumbo, and a massive pre-FA season from Machado on his way out of Baltimore would help a lot too.

PHOTO CREDIT: © NICK TURCHIARO-USA TODAY SPORTS

This was the reason why the Orioles were bad last season. They allowed 5.19 runs per game, which was the worst of any team in the American League. The wild thing about that is their bullpen was actually pretty good, yet they still got crushed in terms of runs against. According to Baseball Reference, their starting pitching was worth -7.1 wins above replacement, which, predictably, was the worst in the American League.

Chris Tillman, their previous ace, got smashed around all season after starting the year with an arm injury. Tillman posted a 7.84 ERA over 93 innings, far and away the worst showing of his career. Dylan Bundy ended up being their ace, but after a great start to the season, he tailed off and was shut down in September. Kevin Gausman was a breakout candidate but ended up having a mediocre season. He was the opposite of Bundy in that he got off to a horrific start and then pulled it together in the second half. The rest of the O’s rotation was rounded out by Wade Miley and Ubaldo Jimenez both of whom were predictably bad.

This year, the O’s have a slightly different look to their starting rotation. They let Jimenez and Miley get blasted into space and replaced them with Cobb and Andrew Cashner.

Cashner seems like a regression candidate as his 3.40 ERA from 2017 is much, much better than his 4.61 FIP and 4.6 strikeouts per nine would indicate. Cobb is similar in that he doesn’t strike anybody out, but he’s been successful in the past as a pitch-to-contact guy. His issue, of course, is staying healthy. I think swapping Jimenez and Miley for Cashner and Cobb is pretty easily an upgrade. How much of one? I’m not sure. There’s potential for this rotation to be decent but there also isn’t really a sure thing in the entire group.

The ‘pen has traditionally been a strength for the Orioles. In recent years, their excellent group of relievers have played a key role in compensating for their shitty starters. But this year, Buck Showalter’s bag of relief weapons looks pretty empty.

Zach Britton, the team’s ace closer who didn’t make it into the 2016 American League Wild Card Game is going to miss the first couple months of the season, so everyone is going to have to be pushed back a spot. That puts the good-but-not-great Brad Brach in the closer role and Mychal GIvens and Darren O’Day in the setup spots in the seventh and eighth innings. I mean, that’s still a solid backend, but it’s nowhere near as automatic as it used to be.

This is a group that can mash. Last year, the O’s averaged 4.59 runs scored per game, which was shockingly league-average. They clubbed 232 bombs, which was fifth in Major League Baseball, but their .312 OBP was in the basement with Toronto and Kansas City.

A lot of Trash Birds were surprisingly bad last season. Manny Machado had a pretty disappointing season, posting a good-not-great .782 OPS with 33 homers. Chris Davis and Mark Trumbo, the dynamic duo in the middle of the lineup back in 2016, combined for only 49 homers. They struck out 344 times and only walked 103 times. The bright spots for this group were Jonathan Schoop, who had the highest OPS on the team at .841, and trade deadline acquisition Tim Beckham, who was worth 2.0 WAR with the team over just 50 games.

It’ll be largely the same lineup next year, too. The O’s will have a full season of Beckham, and, if last year’s finish was any indication, he’ll be a massive upgrade to their lineup. The only major addition they made to their lineup in free agency was adding Colby Rasmus to the let’s-swing-at-everything-and-see-what-happens group.

There’s a good chance this lineup is much the same as it was last year. They’ll hit a bunch of bombs, there won’t be anybody on base, and they strike out a lot. Machado will likely regress positively to his career averages, but that could be offset by negative regression by Schoop and Beckham. In order for the O’s to be relevant, they need to smash their way to wins, meaning Trumbo and Davis need to be closer to 2016 than 2017.

When I say the Orioles are trash, it has more to do with the fact them, their manager, and their fans live in the sewer and eat garbage for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. They also have a hell of a time filling their stadium, but when they do, they inexplicably boo Jose Bautista because he made some reliever scrub piss himself and he isn’t a lunchpail kind of player or something Dan Duquette incoherently yapped off about last off-season.

Anyways, when it comes them being trash, like, on the field, that’s probably a bit of exaggeration. They aren’t some Tampa Bay Rays pile of junk filled with random computer generated names. They’re a middling team with some upside who can compete for the second wild card spot so long as everything goes right.

That said, it’s more likely that things go wrong for the Orioles than right. Their rotation is improved but underwhelming, there isn’t a starter who can consistently go out there every fifth day no matter what and give the team a chance to win, the bullpen isn’t good enough anymore to compensate for the rotation, and the lineup, while powerful, is filled with holes.

A fourth-place finish in the AL East with a record slightly below .500 seems likely.