But then, a million plus smackers can buy a lot of shrimp, not to mention more than a few tins of Vegemite. Let's just say that Outback Steak House could have used Damian as a spokesperson, shall we? Not since the days of Sid Fernandez, Craig Lefferts, and Terry "the Pear" Mathews have we seen such a bad body out there pitching for the Orioles.

Moss was picked up by the Orioles at the trading deadline, as the second tier of the deal that sent Sidney Ponson to the Giants, and brought Kurt Ainsworth to Baltimore.

As David Wells would say, you don't have to be pretty to pitch well, and that's true. Moss had mechanics that were so fouled up, however, that the Orioles tried just shutting him down to work on the side for a little while in an attempt to straighten himself out. Damian himself admitted that his lack of physical conditioning had created some mechanical problems, as well, and that he intended to work hard in the off-season to return to his initial success level with the Braves.

But he'll have to do it in another uniform, because the pitching-starved Orioles cut him lose rather than offer him arbitration. Was this good riddance to bad rubbish? Looking at Moss' numbers with the Braves, his walk totals certainly don't reflect a 3.42 ERA, but his BR/9 certainly did, so one wonders if Moss won't be able to recapture his form with a solid off-season after straying from the straight and narrow. He's not the first young pitcher whose star fell from the heavens after he thought he had the world by the tail. But perhaps it was premature to just cut him lose, especially on a team so hungry for quality starters. One must assume that there were sufficient things the Orioles saw that they didn't like. Certainly, he's not a hard thrower, and his strikeout totals suggest a guy who is going to have to be on his game all the time, which, in 2003, he was not.

It will be interesting to see what will happen to Damian Moss. For the Orioles, it was a disappointing, if rather painless, experiment.