The Joke Is That the Last Time the O's Were Good Was When The Pixies Were Actually Relevant

The joke is also Ty Wigginton at shortstop.

Welcome to Ripken Is 8! There are precious few Baltimore Orioles blogs on the internet, especially if we exclude the ones currently agitating for General Manager Andy MacPhail to trade for Kevin Kouzmanoff. A number of the good ones out there are news blogs run by reporters for either the Baltimore Sun (Peter Schmuck) or MASN.com (Roch Kubatko, Steve Melewski) that are heavy on news coverage and player updates, and in Kubatko's case, horrific jokes and puns.

That means they're understandably uninterested in either doing hard analysis or making sarcastic, snide, and demeaning throwaway jokes about men with whom they constantly interact and upon whose favor their jobs rely. Those aren't problems we have here at Ripken Is 8, as we are all unemployable trolls living under the Route 40-MLK overpass.

Our purpose is to examine not only the bafflements, missteps, and poor base-running decisions of the Baltimore professional baseball franchise (of which there will be many), but also their occasional quiet triumphs - see Pie, Felix and Reimold, Nolan - and to still be here when with any luck, Andy MacPhail, Dave Trembley, and their ragtag band of cost-controlled misfits surprise the world and finish a season over .500.

But enough about us! Word has come down from on high that MacPhail has just traded reliever Chris Ray to the Texas Rangers for crafty veteran starter Kevin Millwood! First, we're going to call our therapist's emergency line and talk through our PTSD flashbacks to Steve Trachsel.  Then, an update.