Orioles Pitching

In reading the thread to select a couple of cards to bolster the Orioles/Browns franchise, I saw no mention of pitching. For a team that had such a dominant staff for so many years, their pitching sucks. Hard to believe Palmer, McNally, Cuellar all have such crappy cards. Am I missing something, or were they just not that great in the grand scheme of things???

Jim Palmer's best card is 1976 and probably would be around 8 million.
McNally already has a top card and Cuellar's best card would be his 1966 season with Houston.

I think what hurts them is Memorial Stadium was a huge pitchers park so Palmer and Cuellar have ballpark #'s on their cards and that hurts their values in ATG.

There is an issue w/ the great Orioles teams of the late-60s / early-70s, but IMO it's with their defense rather than pitching. To the degree that the O's got crappy cards, Gold Glovers Mark Belanger and Dave Johnson should both be rated "1" for range. As an Orioles fan, this has always irked me!

Those teams were somewhat over-rated as a pitching team. Yes, they had great starting pitchers, but that team was great at EVERYTHING. Their strength was hitting and especially DEFENSE. The 1969 Orioles were one of the greatest defensive team ever and several other years (esp. 1973) were close. Check their defensive stats on Baseball-reference.com.

Several years ago, I read an article on Baseball Prospectus by Jay Jaffe - he was discussing all-time great pitchers and commented that Jim Palmer got more help from his defense than any pitcher in the history of major league baseball.

Excellent point. I hate that Richman regularly ignores gold glove awards like with Aparicio, Wills and yes, Davey Johnson. Robinson and Blair were the best fielders in baseball at 3B and CF from '69 -'73. The only weak links in the superb Orioles D were Boog Powell and probably Buford. Those '69 - '71 teams were particularly awesome and so well rounded. Really the only thing they lacked were speedsters and even there they were probably average for the time.

I'm also a long time Orioles fanatic.

In a recent 1947-1984 franchise 365 $80M season I took the Orioles...got all the cards I wanted...Palmer's 1975...Cuellar 1969...McNally 1968...Frank 1966...Boog 1964...Murray and Ripken 1983...
Fantastic bullpen...

They almost lost 100 games...