Mazzone has yet to work his magic on Orioles

	Erik Bedard still isn't challenging hitters enough with his fastball. AP

By Christopher Harris, Special to SI.com, TalentedMrRoto.com

Pity the genius.

Heavy hangs the head that holds the enormous brainpan. You prove you're great at what you do, and the world expects bigger, better things. Help win 14 consecutive NL East division titles, and you'd better be able to completely rebuild a pitching staff.

That's the position in which pitching coach Leo Mazzone found himself this spring. After leaving the comfortable confines of Atlanta, he lit on Baltimore, to much fanfare, fantasy and otherwise. How many Orioles season previews did you read hyping Baltimore pitchers for '06 strictly because of Mazzone's presence? (I should know: I wrote one of them.) Heck, went the logic, if Leo can salvage a good year out of Jaret Wright, imagine what he can do with Anna Benson's meal ticket! Everyone slated to begin the year in Baltimore's rotation was bumped up several slots on your cheat sheet, worries about closer Chris Ray were allayed, and some even recommended doing the unthinkable: drafting LaTroy Hawkins.

Now we're a quarter of the way into the regular season, and it's time for a referendum on the manic, bench-rocking Oriole pitching coach. Baltimore is currently 20-24, good for a tie for last in the AL East. This time last year, they were 28-16, alone in first place. But lest we judge Leo and the current regime too harshly (he did, after all, inherit largely the same staff that torpedoed Lee Mazzilli's managerhood), remember that from here on in, the O's went 46-72 (.390).

So first, let's look at the overall pitching staff numbers. They ain't pretty. As a team, the Orioles are second-to-last in the major leagues in team ERA, with a hearty 5.55; only the putrid Royals are worse. They have the worst cumulative WHIP in the majors, at 1.64. As of Sunday, they were the only team in baseball to have walked 200 batters. They've given up more hits at home than any team in the bigs, and are in a three-way tie for the worst road WHIP in the known universe: 1.71. Ouch. For the 2005 season, Baltimore's staff stats looked like this: 4.56 ERA (23rd-best in baseball), 1.43 WHIP (also 23rd) and 580 walks allowed (26th). Terrible, yes, but by nearly any measure, Mazzone's troops have been worse in '06. Even if we look exclusively at post-All-Star-Break stats (when the O's were 27-48), they break down like this: 4.74 ERA (23rd), 1.47 WHIP (27th), 288 walks allowed (tied for 29th). So Leo's magic might not be working on the staff as a whole. But let's take a look at some key staff members, and see if he's helping them one-on-one.

Lopez, the Orioles' Opening Day hurler and putative No. 1 starter, has inhaled backwards. He leads the American League in earned runs and hits allowed, hasn't won since April 3, and under adversity seems to let things snowball worse than a Burl Ives voiceover. Always reliant on control more than great stuff, Lopez has gone deeper into counts this year than in previous seasons. His pitches per inning have gone up nearly 10 percent from last year, he's averaging nearly one full walk per nine innings more than he did in '05, and he's allowing 12.26 hits per nine innings, compared to his career average of 9.77. It's hard to know what Mazzone could do for this guy; the team claims Lopez's problems aren't mechanical, and that he simply isn't making good pitches at key moments. Regardless, he's thoroughly un-startable in any fantasy format, and this doesn't reflect well on Mazzone.

Anyone who's ever seen Bedard throw knows his big problems: he works too slowly, and he's a nibbler. His fastball is faster than ever this year, clocking in regularly at 96 mph, and his basket of curves and changes can be deadly. But the book on Bedard is that despite his terrific potential, if you're patient with him, he'll implode. His 17.39 pitches per inning last year ranked 216th among major-league starters, and was actually an improvement over his career 18.16. Bedard was supposed to be a beneficiary of Mazzone's presence, but he's still maddening. There's no excuse for a guy with this kind of left arm to have a WHIP above 1.50. Mazzone simply hasn't done a good job yet of forcing Bedard to challenge hitters, and to speed the heck up.

Finally, a success story. Anna's chewtoy has been a very pleasant surprise for the Orioles, despite the fact that before the season started, he's probably the guy you'd have least expected to turn in a good year on the Inner Harbor. For sure, Benson's career numbers are a bit skewed by the fact that he was a power pitcher early in his career (remember, he was the No. 1 overall pick in the '96 draft), before major elbow reconstruction sapped his stuff. He was also back to his injury-prone self in '05, missing all of April and a couple starts in September. Once an extreme groundball pitcher, Benson got away from that tendency after his arm troubles, posting groundball-to-flyball seasons of 0.72, 0.99 and 1.10 in his last three; this year, he sits at 1.26, which is testament to Mazzone's wish that Benson keep the ball heavy and down. This year's less-flashy Benson's equivalents are, for example, Odalis Perez and Paul Byrd: good career WHIP, decent career ERA, will give up home run mistakes but will keep the team in games. It's no coincidence that both Perez and Byrd worked multiple years with Mazzone.

This was the guy who was supposed to benefit most from Mazzone's arrival. The 6-foot-7 righty has the best arm on the staff: the filthiest slider and a nasty, biting fastball. Mercifully, he's on the DL right now with shoulder inflammation. His 1.1-inning, seven-walk performance on April 7 made headlines, but his follow-up -- a five-inning, nine-walk affair (in which he also struck out 10) -- was nearly as ridiculous. In eight starts this season, he walked five or more five times. The place where Cabrera needs the most work is between the ears: he gets mad at his fielders, mad at the hitters, mad at himself, and often gets distracted and either can't find the plate because he's trying to throw so hard, or can't find the grip on his slider, which gets him bombed. It's clear that Mazzone hasn't made many strides with this 24-year-old's head yet, the way he did with, say, Jorge Sosa last year.

Let's throw Leo a little love. Ray has been better than anyone could've expected in his relatively limited appearances. He's 10-for-10 in save opportunities, has walked more batters than is comfortable, but has wowed with a blistering fastball that apparently only David Ortiz can catch up with (Big Papi drilled a two-run dinger off Ray last Wednesday, Ray's first runs allowed in seven appearances). The best thing Mazzone has done here is encourage Ray to trust his stuff and then get out of the way while he does absolutely nothing fancy.

In Summation

Yeah, not so good, Leo. On their face, these numbers point to a staff that's gotten worse under Mazzone, not better, and makes a body wonder whether his success in Atlanta had more to do with Tom Glavine, John Smoltz, Greg Maddux, and Tim Hudson than based on the pitching genius of the mad rocker. Perhaps, though, we fantasy types simply expected too much too soon. Is it reasonable to expect a pitching coach to turn around major-league careers in two months? Let's face it: if these guys had already been Cy Young material, there wouldn't have been a job opening at Camden Yards.

Lopez, Cabrera and Bruce Chen have been disasters, but, for example, it's encouraging to look at Bedard's most recent start against the powerful Red Sox, in which he threw exactly 100 pitches over seven innings (hello, 14.3 P/IP), allowed one earned run while giving up two hits and three walks, while striking out only three. He didn't work any quicker, but neither did he try to make perfect pitches; he seemed to understand, for one of the first times I've seen him work, that the idea is to get outs, not paint corners. If Mazzone could transplant Maddux's brain into Bedard's body, he'd really have something.

Christopher Harris is a fantasy baseball analyst for TalentedMrRoto.com, a site featuring free advice, news, stats and analysis for all fantasy sports. The site has been nominated for 34 Fantasy Sports Writing Awards, winning five, the most in FSWA history. Ask Christopher your fantasy baseball questions at mailto:Harris@TalentedMrRoto.com.

Top Photo Galleries SI's Pictures of the Week College Superfans NBA Surprise Fantasy Studs Worst NBA Teams NFL Fantasy Studs Week 13

Most Popular Stories Tebow, McCoy, Suh, Ingram, Gerhart to New York Source: Danica reaches deal to join NASCAR Cincinnati's Kelly says he'll meet with Notre Dame Four newcomers join AP Top 25 Clausen, Tate leaving Notre Dame to turn pro