Orioles Victory Card Number 38

Orioles Victory Number 38: 7-0 over the Toronto Blue Jays

1976 Topps Mark Belanger

Whew. That win was a long time coming. After losing their previous 8 games (in which they gave up 5 or more runs in all of them) the Orioles beat their AL East counterparts 7-0 on the back of 6 strong innings from rookie David Hess and a 5 RBI night from Trey Mancini. They postpone their 95th loss of the season (and 9600th in franchise history) to another day.

I didn't watch most of the game, preferring a night out with The Duchess instead of the drudgery of a mid-August contest between two teams that had nothing to play for this season. Toronto is 29 games out of first place and focused on the future with young prospects Danny Jansen and Billy McKinney playing and phenom Vlad Guerrero Jr. set to make his debut sometime over the next month or so.

The Orioles are already starting to filter in some of their young players that may be around for the next competitive team as well. Cedric Mullins has made his debut and performed well in his first 16 games. He's taken over centerfield and made a few highlight reel catches already and held his own at the plate with a .305/.379/.402 slash line. He's riding a bit of a high BAbip right now (.348) so I expect his average to come down a little bit before the season is over, but he hasn't been overwhelmed by major league pitching (only 16% strike out rate) and it looks like he can be penciled in as next year's starting centerfielder.

Another young player that has kind of come out of nowhere is Renato Nunez. He's been handed the thirdbase job since the Manny Machado deal and has performed with the best stretch of hitting in his major league career. Over the month of August he's slashing .284/.370/.420 which way more production then the team was getting out of Danny Valencia and Tim Beckham. While his defense isn't going to remind anyone of Brooks Robinson anytime soon, his glovework is about even with Valencia and miles ahead of Beckham.  

Nunez is a nice find in a lost season. Had the Orioles been better he might not have received any playing time. But since they aren't, he was given a chance and has performed well enough to earn a contract for next season. He could be a nice, cheap stop-gap player until Ryan Mountcastle is ready for the big leagues. The Orioles control Nunez through 2024 and he could stick around as a utility infielder even after Mountcastle takes over the hot corner.

It's sometimes easy to forget that Trey Mancini is only in his second full season as a major leaguer. He played so well as a rookie last season that it just seems like he's an established veteran. Yet, he still has a lot of room for improvement. Other than Chris Davis' first half, Mancini's was the most disappointing.  There were times it seemed like he was lost at the plate and scuffling just to make contact. Some of that could be tied to the knee injury he suffered early in the season, but it also looked like he was trying too hard to pick up the slack left by the rest of the struggling offense.

His second half improvement is showing that last season was not a fluke. In the first half of the season he struggled to a .216/.292/.363 line with 12 home runs in 328 at-bats. In the second half he's upped his line to .292/.329/.496 with 7 home runs in only 137 at-bats.

The Orioles are going to be a mess for quite awhile while they try and find the pieces for their next contending team. The next year and a half is going to be spent plugging in players to see if they fit. It looks like, based on a small sample size, that they at least have 2/3 of their outfield taken care of with Mullins and Mancini. Hopefully, as the months wear on, they find a couple of more pieces.

So why a Mark Belanger 1976 Topps? Well, after completing a couple of sets this year (1983 and 2017) I felt it was time to start chasing another one before 2019 drops in January. This set just happens to coincide with the year I was born and it a relatively cheap set to put together as there aren't any major rookie cards that will seriously dent my wallet. The two key rookie cards are Dennis Eckersley and Willie Randolph while Robin Yount and George Brett have second-year cards.  So, it's doable.

One of the main challenges I'm facing is that I don't have a large collection of duplicates to trade from. Having only chased sets from recent years, I've been able to swing a lot of deals with dupes. With the 76 set I started with exactly four duplicates and have already traded them out. That means I'm going to have to hope collectors and traders are willing to part with their dupes in exchange for newer cards.

Also, I'm starting with the fewest cards I've ever started with (89) so I have a long way to go to finish it off. Still, it just takes one card at a time and that first card came in a trade just last week: 

If you have a stash of 1976 you're looking to get rid of, feel free to hit me up in the comments or check out my trading card database profile (Lightningfan7609). Hopefully, it won't take another 40 years to complete this one.