Projecting the Baltimore Orioles 25-Man Playoff Roster

The Baltimore Orioles are American League East division champions and have been so for a while now. They culminated spectacular pitching in the season’s second-half with power hitting to form a force to be reckoned with in the 2014 postseason.

However, with just a few games left to the regular season, they are still surrounded with plenty of questions, which is a little odd for a team that clinched a division over two weeks before the season’s end. The reason being that they are surrounded with theses questions is because they have seen injuries occur to some big-time players.

The injuries started in the second month of the season when Gold Glove catcher Matt Wieters went down. He received Tommy John surgery and was obviously ruled out for the year. This was a huge blow for Baltimore considering the hot start Wieters had in the early season. In 26 games before his injury, he hit five home runs, 18 RBIs and hit to an impressive .308 average. Just to put into prospective how good that average was for Wieters, his previous career high was .262.

Young third baseman Manny Machado missed the first two months of the season from an injury he suffered last year, and when he returned, he did not look the same. In the months of June and July, his average hovered around .210. Then August came along. Quickly, he upped his average to as high as .278 and started to look again like the Manny Machado that we know and love. Just as he was starting to get hot, guess what? Yup, he got injured. At first it was diagnosed as just a sprain, but they later figured out that it was more severe and he would miss the remainder of the season.

Next up on the injury list was shortstop J.J. Hardy. He has missed only 19 games this season, but they came in flurries, he would miss two or three games here, and two or three games there, forcing the Orioles to put an unorthodox lineup out there on a number of occasions.

And the most recent player to unravel was power-hitting first baseman Chris Davis. He was suspended 25 games for his second use of adderall. He get penalized with 17 games remaining in the season, which means he will miss the first eight playoff games if the O’s get that far.

With that being said, here is how I think the Orioles will resolve their issues and manage the lineup come playoff time.